[P2P-F] New release Zeitgeist movie big success

[Eric Hunting]

I generally agree with you but would offer some suggestions as to possible reasons for the state of things with the Venus Project. As I've gathered in following his work myself, Fresco considers himself chiefly a designer and inventor and has long had this notion that the role of the designer/inventor is no more than to design and invent while implementation is someone else's department. But he's never had partners that could assume that implementation role. As brilliant as he is, most of his inventions have never gotten past concept stages because he's never been willing to get his own hands dirty in implementation and business development when no one else would. And this same thinking is reflected in the history of the Venus Project. For most of the, possibly, 50 years Fresco has been cultivating the Venus Project, he's been evangelizing its concepts through his designs. In other words, he has been trying to sell its concepts to a general public that is not sophisticated enough to comprehend them directly by using an idyllic visual image of the future that contrasts the squalor of contemporary life and cultivates a desire for a higher standard of living only this new cultural paradigm can deliver. The basic idea here is to cultivate collective desire through the appeal of a design such that people will be compelled to pick up the tools -intellectual and physical- to make it real. This is exactly the strategy you would expect from an industrial designer. That's how they normally sell ideas. But can you actually sell a whole society on a whole new cultural paradigm using pictures of its possible artifacts and visual impressions of its lifestyle? That's basically what the Venus Project has been trying to do for decades -before Zeitgeist. (which is now more directly trying to sell the theory, in the context of an explanation for why everything now sucks, because the middle-class zeitgeist itself has changed. They were very comfortable and complacent when Fresco started. Now they are under threat worldwide and looking for answers) 

I think you can usefully communicate many things this way, but it's got limits. It can only be part of a larger strategy that seems to have eluded Fresco for much of his life. We certainly live in a visual culture and you can communicate a great deal about the nature of a culture through architecture and industrial design. Though a lot of contemporary designers seem oblivious to this, any given design is a reflection of production technology, economic paradigms, and common community aesthetics, which in turn are reflections of culture. You don't have to be an anthropologist to get this. Humans have an innate ability to reverse engineer things, relative to their inherent understanding of physics and materials, by looking at, touching, and using them. This is how we perceive the value of many goods -and which corporations often try to trick through aspects of design to create a false perception of value. So we can, potentially, come to understand certain aspects of a proposed new culture through the nature of speculative designs of artifacts suggested to be products of it. This is the purpose of futurist visualization. 

When I've tried to find artists/illustrators to collaborate with -and this is often the point where I scare the hell out of them...- I will say to them that, in the real world, there are very specific reasons why anything looks the way it it does. And when you're doing futurist or technical visualization, as opposed to just SciFi, you are very deliberately trying to showcase those reasons through design because its those things that communicate the plausibility of the ideas you're trying to get across. For instance, if you understand that the overriding logistical limitation of manufacturing on orbit is that you can't precision-fabricate anything that can't fit through a pressure hatch of some kind, well, suddenly 90% of all the spacecraft and space stations you've ever seen portrayed in the media look like nonsense! 

So we see in Fresco's design work an attempt to communicate through it an impression of how his imagined future culture works. How it makes things and the aspects of design that reflect its culture's values. (there is no chrome, fishtails, and Swarovski crystals in the Fresco future) Unfortunately, his understanding of technology and design theory seems to have gotten stuck somewhere in the late 1960s or early 1970s, making some of his designs both stylistically anachronistic and also contradictory to how to we commonly envision many current and near-future 21st century production technologies to work. His concepts for things like space structures and nanotechnology in particular remain way off the mark and his greatest anachronism is Big Machine fabrication. My guess is that, due to an assumption that he was very far ahead of the curve to begin with and because at that point he started being more concerned with cultural theory, he hasn't kept up with the industrial and technological trends so his general design theory has not evolved -or, as with many architects, he just assumed he had achieved some kind of perfection and just never reviewed it later. 

But there's a more critical missing piece here; functional example. It's quite logical for the Venus Project to be very concerned with building a research city. That's the next step. Our society is so disillusioned, so hard-boiled, that we're now compulsively skeptical about any notion of the future that isn't dystopian. The best production value visuals can't make a strong argument for the future when, culturally, we just don't believe in the future anymore. (every spin-off of Star Trek ended in total war. Every other recent SciFi TV series has been about war. Every current SciFi computer game is a war game. Says a lot about what the culture thinks of the future) So, like flat earthers, we need to be led by the hand one way around the globe and then the other before we can get it. And the logical approach to that is to try to compete with the dominant cultural paradigms where it counts; a direct competition in demonstrable standard of living and quality of life based on actual working systems. This really may call for a Colonial Williamsburg of Tomorrow. Unfortunately, Fresco has left his followers with no functional plans for how to do this -because, again, implementation was someone else's department. His model city cannot be bootstrapped. Its monolithic design doesn't account for it to be built in the absence of the new systems it embodies, and there just aren't enough guilt-ridden trillionaires in the world. It's a catch-22 by design. They are going to have to move beyond Fresco to figure out how to do this. It's like building the first RepRap. You can't actually do it literally. You have to start with a 'RepStrap' built using other tools. Then that builds true RepRaps as its children. That's where we all are, strategically, in the larger general Post-Industrial/P2P cultural movement. The future can only be developed in-situ. But the Venus Project movement may not yet be attracting people with the wherewithal for that since, as you pointed out, it's picking up a lot of young people with more aspiration than knowledge and skills and who get frustrated when there are no plans at-hand to build anything specific right now. I would agree that Fresco and the Venus project have been operating in a vacuum to some degree, which may have a lot to do with coming out of the US where this field of study has been, sort of, underground since the 70s and where you do have to account for the Great American Reality Distortion Field. I'm hoping this movie is some sign of change in all this, but we'll see. 

Eric Hunting
erichunting at gmail.com


> From: Karl Robillard <krobillard at san.rr.com>
> Date: February 6, 2011 2:43:34 AM MST
> To: P2P Foundation mailing list <p2p-foundation at lists.ourproject.org>
> Subject: Re: [P2P-F] New release Zeitgeist movie big success
> Reply-To: P2P Foundation mailing list <p2p-foundation at lists.ourproject.org>
> 
> 
> On Saturday, February 05, 2011 12:07:43 pm Eric Hunting wrote:
>> Still, overall this movie seems like real progress for this movement.
> 
> 
> I've watched this movement for a couple years now.  It has no legs because 
> they are entirely committed to the specific goal of building a research city.
> 
> Mr. Fresco repeatedly makes the point that the Venus Project is about changing 
> culture more than building cities, but he then goes and places his designs 
> front and center in all of their media.  During a talk in Slovenia 
> (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TwVs2nlUb0) Jacque told his audience to go 
> solicit corporations for the means to build his city.  I have never once heard 
> him make reference to any of the existing commons movements, and Peter Merola 
> only talks about them dismissively.
> 
> There are a lot of younger males attracted to the movement.  When they find the 
> leadership unreceptive to thier ideas, they start their own organizations 
> (http://rbose.org/, http://rbefoundation.com/, 
> http://www.atlasinitiativegroup.org/) where they flounder about looking for 
> direction.
> 
> It would be great if we could organize to build some of these cool arcologies, 
> but I suspect this will only be possible after a few generations of people 
> have lived immersed in an open, P2P world.
> 
> 
> -Karl