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.
Peter Joseph, the director of two online “Zeitgeist” movies, was applauded after criticizing the global system of monetary finance. Before the forum started, Jacque Fresco, 93, the futurist, talked with young admirers in the audience about his Venus Project. 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.”
Published: March 16, 2009
This last year the Movement is grow'n by leaps and bounds. I personally have shared my ideas and da Zeitgeist ideas many times, to many people. I have also seen many, many different reactions from just watching a simple movie. Once you become aware that everything you see on da "tube", in da papers, at your place of worship and from your financial adviser is utter crap, the blinders are off. You see the world in a different light. That spooks some people, and it should, especially if you live in a cocoon of opulence. Those of us that have shed away those illusions and that our society is not a free state, become inward and outward, more free to speculate on what is fact and what is just a media illusion. Let me say most everything, besides local news, air traffic alerts and the odd sporting event are just smoke and mirrors.
The latest foray into bullshit media hype is the "Christmas Bomber". "The Lunatic's Asylum" has probably the best take on this bullshit hype. If for a second you thought that our governments really cared about our safety, wouldn't they even entertain the idea of "profiling" passengers and staff at our airports? Have you ever been to an airport in the last 10 years? Enuff said! Even though I find "The Lunatic's Asylym" a little over the top in racist, and tongue in cheek humour. He/she does have a huge point. Why aren't we "profiling"?
I think maybe it's because there is no threat? Or at lest no massive threat against us as a people or a nation. I'm sure there is a small element out there that wants us to fear doing things we want to do. But no more than our own government's and our own church's. And that's why we have this over the top media blast on the so-called "Christmas Bomber". It's a simple control issue.
So ask yourself. Are you in control of your own thoughts? Or are you controlled by the media, the government's agendas, your finances and the church.? I fear for you it's da latters.
Prove me wrong. Or maybe your afraid to take the blinders off? That's cool too. I understand.
Sa later.
Wally.
