Who are ‘The Borg’?

‘The Borg’ is a name given to the large corporate groups who operate the networked non-adventurous radio services. Why are they called ‘The Borg’?

‘The Borg’ are a species from the Star Trek universe. They travel around the universe finding worlds, such as Earth, and attacking and ‘assimilating’ the species inhabiting the worlds, such as ‘humans’. They take with them some of the technology or resources, and disregard the rest. Each of the species becomes absorbed into the ‘collective’, and individuals are plugged into a ‘commonality’ that forces them to become a ‘drone’ with no personality or character, just carrying out the bidding of the ‘common good’. There is no room for individuality. “Resistance is futile” when the Borg have decided to ‘assimilate’ a species, and they become even stronger once they have ‘assimilated’ them and any new technology or resources they didn’t already have.

With the Borg there is no ‘creativity’, and no room for experimentation or individuality.

I hope this adequately explains why the radio groups that come along vacuuming-up small individual radio stations, stripping them of any individuality, taking away any technology that may prove useful and ‘plugging them in’ to a common networked format, are referred to as ‘the Borg’. The parallels are frightening, very very sad, and resistance is futile.

PS History will show (via any web archive facility) that the first and regular use of the word ‘Borg’ to describe large radio groups was by … ME!  These days everybody calls them the Borg, but it all started back in those days when Christopher England just said that!