[P2P-F] New release Zeitgeist movie big success

[Michel Bauwens]

very valuable Eric, I'm publishing this on the 10th, together with the
critique by Andreas Exner,

Michel

On Sun, Feb 6, 2011 at 3:07 AM, Eric Hunting <erichunting at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.orgwrote:
>
> > 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.
>
>
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