They’ve Seen the Future and Dislike the Present

By ALAN FEUER

Peter Joseph, the director of two online “Zeitgeist” movies, was applauded after criticizing the global system of monetary finance. James Estrin/The New York Times

Two hours into Z-Day, the educational forum associated with the online movie “Zeitgeist,” Peter Joseph, the film’s director and the evening’s M.C., stepped out from behind his lectern and walked forward earnestly on the stage.

In his goatee and mustache and tieless in a brown suit, Mr. Joseph had been lecturing for nearly 90 minutes on the unsustainable nature of the money-based economy — on cyclical consumption, planned obsolescence, corporate malfeasance and piles of poisonous waste. “It’s time that we wake up,” he intoned, speaking solemnly through a wireless clip-on mike. “The doomsday scenario, the big contraction, might be happening right now. The system of monetary exchange is — in the face of advancing technology — completely obsolete.”

This drew wild applause from the sold-out crowd, a patchwork of perhaps 900 people who paid $10 a head on Sunday night to sit in a packed auditorium at the Borough of Manhattan Community College on Chambers Street near the West Side Highway. Z-Day events were taking place from New England to New Zealand, but this was the big one: the marquee happening with the marquee names.

There, in the crowd, was Jacque Fresco, an industrial designer and the engineering guru of what people unironically called “the movement.” Mr. Fresco, an elfin 93-year-old, sat beside his partner, Roxanne Meadows, smiling self-effacingly.

Mr. Joseph, back on stage, waited patiently as some of the crowd, still cheering, refused to leave their feet.

If the election of Barack Obama was supposed to denote the gradual demise of churlish, corporate governance and usher in a new, sustainable era of visionary change, there was little sign of it at the second annual meeting of the Worldwide Zeitgeist Movement, which, its organizers said, held 450 sister events in 70 countries around the globe.

“The mission of the movement is the application of the scientific method for social change,” Mr. Joseph announced by way of introduction. The evening, which began at 7 with a two-hour critique of monetary economics, became by midnight a utopian presentation of a money-free and computer-driven vision of the future, a wholesale reimagination of civilization, as if Karl Marx and Carl Sagan had hired John Lennon from his “Imagine” days to do no less than redesign the underlying structures of planetary life.

In other words, a not entirely inappropriate response to the zeitgeist itself, which one young man, a philosophy student in a roomy purple blazer, described before the show began as “the world as we know it coming to an end.” As the evening labored on with a Power Point presentation, a panel talk with Mr. Fresco and a spirited question and answer session, some basic themes emerged: modern economics is a fraud; global debt will crush the planet; society itself is dying from the profit motive; and people ought to wise up to the fact that more than legislation — or presidential administrations — needs to change.

Though they were never actually shown — as most in attendance had seen them several times — Mr. Joseph’s two films, “Zeitgeist, the Movie” (released in 2007) and “Zeitgeist: Addendum” (released last fall), were the subtext of the evening: online documentaries that have been watched, he says, by 50 million people around the world.

The former may be most famous for alleging that the attacks of Sept. 11 were an “inside job” perpetrated by a power-hungry government on its witless population, a point of view that Mr. Joseph said he has recently “moved away from.” Indeed, the second film, the focus of the event, was all but empty of such conspiratorial notions, directing its rhetoric and high production values toward posing a replacement for the evils of the banking system and a perilous economy of scarcity and debt.

That’s where Mr. Fresco came in, an author, lecturer and former aircraft engineer at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio who has spent the last six decades working on the Venus Project, a futuristic society where (adjust your seatbelts, now) machines would control government and industry and safeguard the planet’s fragile resources by means of an artificially intelligent “earthwide autonomic sensor system” — a super-brain of sorts connected to, yes, all human knowledge.

If this sounds vaguely like a disaster scenario out of “2001: A Space Odyssey,” Mr. Fresco did not seem worried in the least. Machines are unemotional and unaggressive, unlike human beings, he told the crowd during the question-and-answer phase. “If you took your laptop and smashed it in front of 50 other laptops, trust me, none of them would care.”

The audience — white, black, young, old, baseball caps and business suits alike — received such words like a tonic, and the questions kept coming: What would family life be like in the future? What would happen if the automated system decided that a person had to die? Mr. Fresco and Ms. Meadows are planning the production of a major feature film to bring the Venus Project to a wider, global audience. Before the night began, Mr. Fresco, a small man with a V-neck sweater and a hearing aid, sat signing books and answering questions from a dozen or so college students gathered like acolytes at his feet.

As the evening came to a close, someone finally asked: So what would it take to actually put such a program into action? A grassroots movement, Mr. Joseph said.

“We already have a quarter-million members,” he insisted from the stage. “At the rate things are going, this will be at Madison Square Garden next year.”

A version of this article appeared in print on March 17, 2009, on page A24 of the New York edition.

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Anonymous

Posted: Mar 21 2009, 7:26 PM

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Zeitgeist Movement?

I think their emphasis on using technology to make our decisions is an overkill. With aggressive streamlining of our civil operations I think there is not too much to be gained in this kind of super advanced automation. I also think they had an over prescriptive attitude toward lifestyle choices - they seemed to be hell bent on everyone learning everything technical? In my opinion their outlook was too extreme for a "technocracy utopia" and unnecessarily extreme. You can prescribe a more simple foundation and let evolution take its course. However, I certainly like their emphasis on the craziness of designed obscelecence. You only have to shove that little bit more metal into a product and it can last virtually forever.

The need for a cashless society is also an overkill. With a straight monetary systems you can see that the probelm with money has more to do with our relationships to it, and that has more to do with how we are treated by our parents as children, not money itself. The "Zeitgiest movements'" understanding of mental sickness and human nature is elementary and in some fundamental ways erroneous I believe.

I think my format "new city" is better - at least as a foundation to evolve from.

http://andrewatkin3.googlepages.com/clubeconomies

Anonymous

Posted: Mar 21 2009, 7:32 PM

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...Also to say,

I think their infrastructural principle is conceptually outdated. The design ideas were obviously formed before the idea of full-automation transport (which now exists ready to be installed in new developments) of which drastically reduces the need to centralise a city.

Personally I don't like the 'venus' architecture which is clearly extremely strong and material efficient (lots of curves), but sterile and too 'futuristic' for my taste, but that's just me of course.

Annie

Posted: Apr 03 2010, 4:14 AM

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Anonymous clearly has an opinion before he/she understands the full concept. Like many who misunderstand what the Zeitgeist Movement and the Venus Project are, they get caught up in minute details that can only be worked out once the overlying concept is fully understood. Jacques specifically states that his designs are "conceptual" based upon existing and possible technologies. The details can only be worked out once the concept is built...hence the proposal of an experimental research city (The Venus Project). Further, Jacques also repudiates the idea or notion of Utopia. There is no such thing. We live in a world of perpetual change. There is no end or place to stop. There is only continual motion. I believe if the world woke up tomorrow and decided to move forward with the ideas of the Zeitgeist movement, we would know a civilization like none we have ever seen in history. Let go of the tools you have acquired within the confines of the box created for you in this society. Reach outside your box and grasp the big idea. Once you get it, go to work creating the new tools you need to make the dream a reality. If your dream looks a little different than the pictures Jacques showed you, no one is stopping you from creating your own idea to contribute to the rest of humanity...and that is THE point.

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