The Venus Project

[ThinkingDuder]

A bit of a departure from other community design discussed here, but I thought it'd be interesting to bring up.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68Y363-gPX8

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsaSFonaa8Y

Maybe a bit too utopian, but it sounds plausible if enough people decided to try it. Thoughts?

[Justin Boland]

My biggest problem with Jacques Fresco is simply this: who's going to actually build it? Who manufactures the parts?

I always feel like a dick raising objections, too, because what we need at this point more than anything is radically new visions. But the cost of converting even a Western city to Venus Project standards would be staggering -- let alone the expense of installing a futuristic sci-fi infrastructure in the middle of Mumbai. Where do the people go in the meantime? Or do we just build enormous cities in the middle of nowhere and move everyone in?

So yeah, my main quibble is that it looks awesome on paper, but the logistics don't compute.

Unless the aliens build it for us, in which case, right on.

[Korey King]

some quick background:

Jacque Fresco is a Renaissance man, he has some great ideas for the future technologically, socially, language-wise and consciously that you can see in this amazing documentary about redesigning a culture. Named after the city where it is located: The Venus Project. Circular self-erecting automated cities, aircraft, watercraft, underground monorails connecting the cities, water cities (no more aquariums or zoos!) for efficient ocean mining and wonderful living, free and efficient energy systems.

"All the marvels and wonders of technology can amount to nothing unless it elevates humans to their highest potential, this is the aim of the Future by Design."

The scientific method applied to society, so belief and value systems no longer collide, no more indoctrination, no more poverty as there is no basis for it. Every city has a university that studies everything. No more repetitive, filthy, boring, unstimulating jobs, those are for machines, so we can be free and pursue higher possibilities of man. Information is free, the new currency are input and resources.

There are recreation centers and exhibition halls. Easy and quickly built automated homes, in the apartment buildings there are areas for discussion and recreation that will make them more appealing because if you live seperated you will have to come to one of these. The cities are totally self powered, energy will be mostly geo-thermal in the future he says and there is enough energy for thousands of years, and wind and solar energy are all extra.

learn more about jacque fresco, the venus project, and post-scarcity economies:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacque_Fresco
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_Project
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-scarcity_economics

Fresco advocates many changes in society and the world as we know it – a resource-based economy; cybernation; an education system teaching compassion and understanding nature and the unity of all humanity; a global alliance to solve the problems we share; a clean, sustainable environment; and a government based on these principles.

“The monetary system,” he says, “is now an impediment to survival rather than a means of facilitating individual existence and growth. This imaginary tool has outlived its usefulness. It is not money that people need but the access to goods and services.”

The Venus Project concludes that “The earth is abundant with plentiful resources. Our practice of rationing resources through monetary control is irrelevant and counterproductive to our survival.” A resource-based economic system utilizes existing resources rather than money and provides an equitable method of distribution in the most humane and efficient manner for the entire population. All resources are available to everyone without the use of money, credits, barter, or any other form of exchange.

Goods and services are available through distribution centers similar to the public library system, where goods and resources would be available to all. There would be 3-D, flat-screen televised imaging capabilities in each home where orders are placed for a desired item; the item is then automatically delivered directly to a person's home.

it should be noted that jacque himself stated that there is no such thing as a utopia as humans will continually evolve, invent, and change, and that the Venus Project isn't perfect, but it is a whole lot better.

and I agree. problem with it, is that today it would require the worldwide adoption of resource based economies, while the monetary system gets a quick kick in the ass out the door. existing power structures will fight tooth and nail to see that this never happens.

it's also reliant on the harvesting of geothermal power sources (far beyond hot water in mines, as is common for geothermal today) -- while geothermal is abundant as hell, again the existing structures have every interest in the world to keep this area from developing to the point where electric power is as common around the world as running water is in a large city.

also requires robotic automation of all industrial labor -- mining, manufacturing, distribution, the whole deal.
so, feasibility of projects like this (at least near term) are pretty much zero. damn shame, but reality.

[Korey King]

the above has been my stance pretty much since I'd heard about the venus project, but having a chance to rethink it just now -- we may be at a point where the collective worldwide shit (read: economy) is on its final spins down the pot -- and with enough publicity, education, and propaganda around the world the people may accept, even demand, societies similar to this.

as an aside I'll be in NYC 3/15 to see jacque, roxanne and the z-day gang -- I'm expecting just another venus project rundown/awareness rally, but who knows what they've got planned.

[ThinkingDuder]

Maybe it'd be a good idea to make the transition gradual. One building at a time, per city. If what I read and watched is correct, then one of the proposed apartment complexes could hold hundreds (if not thousands) of more people than our current ones. So build one (or more) of those first to hold the people and free up all of the space that contains houses, old fashioned apartment complexes, hotels, etc. According to Fresco, every monetary system would be obsolete by this time, so money wouldn't be an issue (Although I have a hard time believing that certain corrupt individuals would want to give up their selfish ways for the good of mankind). You just need to find a plot of land to begin with so you don't have to knock a useful building down right away. Then you begin to implement the building of the rest of the Venus Project.

Again, this would be a hypothetical, considering there will be some people who decide that they don't want a part of this project. For them it'd be survival of the fittest, unfortunately.

[Justin Boland]

Korey, do you know how Jacques got linked up with the Zeitgeist team?

[Korey King]

I'd imagine peter went to see them and asked them to film/present/attend/etc. goals are similar.

[53880]

Too much philosophy, and not enough point "a" to point "b". If you want to reach for ceiling, solve the problem of how to reach it. I think his ideas are wonderful, but they're presently inapplicable and inaccessible. Zeitgeist really went for it, and we should commend them. Rather than putting our eggs in one basket (as cryptogon.com muses), let's start building the blocks to get there. Ladies and gentlemen, this forum is such a block.

Pulling off a Venus Project requires massive amounts of capital that I'm assuming is unavailable to anyone reading this forum, or watching Zeitgeist.

[Justin Boland]

Jacque Fresco just got a shout-out in the New York Times coverage of the Z-Day event:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/17/nyreg ... .html?_r=1



They’ve Seen the Future and Dislike the Present

By ALAN FEUER
Published: March 16, 2009

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.”