[P2P-F] New release Zeitgeist movie big success

[Eric Hunting]

I downloaded and watched this movie last week. I found it far superior to the earlier movies in that it was less focused on the hackneyed theme of a grand class conspiracy and, instead, focused on characterizing the global economic/cultural situation as a social pathology that, while exploited for the benefit of some, is less conspiracy and more evolutionary. This is more in line with how Fresco himself has characterized this in his writing. The film also made the movement's best attempt yet at specifically defining the nature of a resource based economic system. This was a breakthrough as the concept has never been present well in the Venus Project's own video media and has only ever been offered to the world in various written works. It's still going to be a difficult concept for many because there are few to no historic examples that the public has any collective memory of. And the notion of automating the management of world resources is quite alien to a society quite ignorant of just how automated economics already is today. So the concept is going to remain a hard sell. It seems, though, that, with this film, this Zeitgeist movement has moved beyond a class protest concerned with stimulating fear and anger for sake of public attention to what could be called an economic atheism with a potentially more coherent ideology -and potential for much greater credibility. I see that as significant progress. 

However, as with the past films and as with the Venus Project in general, we're still left with no specific plans of action. No presentation of anything the audience is supposed to actually do about the dysfunctional status quo but embrace the suppressed reality of the situation. We are given an emotional impression of a fanciful near future global mass social uprising resulting from a spontaneous mass epiphany triggered by a 'tipping point' in economic failure and social strife. But nowhere are we told how to functionally prepare for this imagined event. 

As a conclusion to the description of the new economic model we are presented with Fresco's model city of the future as an example of the rational habitat and its superlative lifestyle such a scientific approach to global resource management would produce. But, beautiful as it is, frankly, it's very much a Greek Temple on a Golf Course. A Neo-EPCOT. A scientifically engineered urban megastructure of the classic Modernist sort that exists as a set-piece of architecture, presumably springing from the aether fully formed and inhabited and devoid of the organic evolution that characterizes any real city. It is, on the face of it, implausible because it can only exist and function in its finished full-scale form and would require a kind of nation-scale public works project of the likes -and time frame- of the Great Wall of China to create. If this is a suggestion of an objective, it's not a good one. Where would you start? (this is a problem I understand well from my work on The Millennial Project and the problem of Marshal Savage's similarly anachronistic notion of marine arcologies -which in turn relates to Paulo Soleri's similarly flawed arcologies) Real cities are organic constructs. Emergent phenomenon. They are not planned but rather generated by an attractor formed by the convergence of interests on a geographically strategic location. They grow incrementally and must be functional and habitable at every stage of growth. One of the minor contradictions in the Venus Project vision is the way Fresco's mid-century Big Machine model of technology and architecture contradicts the core paradigms of a Post-Industrial culture and the contemporary trends in technological evolution he is otherwise advocating. The Venus Project needs a more 21st century urban theory to compliment its economic theory. Maybe then it will have a functional model for a habitat it can actually aspire to build now, today, as an example for its new way of life. 

Still, overall this movie seems like real progress for this movement. 

Eric Hunting
erichunting at gmail.com



On Jan 21, 2011, at 4:15 AM, p2p-foundation-request at lists.ourproject.org wrote:

> From: robin <robokow at gmail.com>
> Date: January 21, 2011 4:02:23 AM MST
> To: p2p-foundation at lists.ourproject.org
> Subject: [P2P-F] 
> Reply-To: robino at robokow.net, P2P Foundation mailing list <p2p-foundation at lists.ourproject.org>
> 
> 
> Heya,
> 
> wrote about zeitgeist/venus project on the list before (in a pretty
> biased way) and things are moving forward with the zeitgeist movement.
> I am thinking about a possibly somewhat balanced blog-post, but I am
> not sure yet.
> 
> Haven't seen this new movie yet which as far as I've understood/ heard
> is less superficial than the ones before. Anyone went to see it?
> 
> Robin.