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Jacque Fresco has died

nytimes.com

91–100 of 113 posts

Re: Jacque Fresco has died

#91

I remember when I watched the Zeitgeist documentaries and had my first contact with this 'resource based" society. Weeks later I had dinner with a friend who was a director in a Spanish consulting firm specialized in the banking sector. I tried to impress him with what I had seen in the documentary. In the end, it was like having an atheist trying to convince the pope about his convictions.

>In the end, it was like having an atheist trying to convince the pope about his convictions.

I think a better analogy might be "reading a single article on the internet, then projecting yourself as an expert".

I fully expect that the Pope could debate your average atheist into submission.

Re: Jacque Fresco has died

#92
post #81

This guy basically reinvented communism and gave it a fancy name and apparently city designs. What's so special about this, honestly? I'm all for more people supporting socialism (even under a weird name), but I never understood the point...

>What's so special about this, honestly?

Most people's experience with Mr. Fresco likely came from the Zeitgeist films, which were sort of a phenomenon and many people's first experience with the "vast, global conspiracy" (right as the world economy imploded in 2008). I count myself as one of those people.

Re: Jacque Fresco has died

#93
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The poorest today and the poorest in this era are often slaves and often starving. That hasn't changed. If you're referring to the poorest in your particular nation state, consider they're probably not the poorest in the world, which we're all using in some way.

No - I am explicitly considering the world. There are fewer people (as a percentage) starving and in bondage than in any prior era. I don't think I have an overly rosy picture of the present. Rather I think your picture of the past is too romantic.

>There are fewer people (as a percentage) starving

There are more people (in real numbers) starving than ever before. Looking at this in terms of percentages is misleading

Re: Jacque Fresco has died

#94
post #76
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's worth noting that Fresco wasn't a Marxist, and the Venus Project has tried to distance itself from the Marxists. It's also worth noting that a Communist society as Marx envisioned it takes great advantage of automation anyway, but rather than being used to cut costs in the short term, it's used so that people have to work less on the whole, leaving more time for intellectual fulfillment. And please let's not pre…

> the Venus Project has tried to distance itself from the Marxists It has sure tried, but it can't, because it's Marxist at it's core, and it therefore shares it's same inherent problems. It can't calculate properly properly for one, and whether the heads of those systems are politicians or programmers, the failure points are the same. > please let's not pretend that Marxian economists are economically illiterate Mar…

> Marxism from a logical perspective, will fail because it can't calculate.

That's very wrong. You don't need a Sears catalog to sum the costs of production/acquisition all the way to the start of the value chain. You may need input to predict the demand for a given product but that, again, supposes a market.

> The direct result of which has been a drastic drop in living standards to starvation.

You seem to ignore the effects of embargos and arms races. The US can finance its colossal military expenditure by issuing long-term titles while the Soviet Union couldn't, but that won't last forever.

Re: Jacque Fresco has died

#95
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No - I am explicitly considering the world. There are fewer people (as a percentage) starving and in bondage than in any prior era. I don't think I have an overly rosy picture of the present. Rather I think your picture of the past is too romantic.

>There are fewer people (as a percentage) starving There are more people (in real numbers) starving than ever before. Looking at this in terms of percentages is misleading

>Looking at this in terms of percentages is misleading

Um, per capita is the important metric.

If there are 2 million people on your planet and 1 million of them are starving, then in a few generations there 100 million people and 2 million of them are starving you have drastically reduced the rate of starvation. Malthusian predictions of the past have said that the rate of starvation/bad things happening would increase as the population increased. It has not.

Re: Jacque Fresco has died

#96
post #81

This guy basically reinvented communism and gave it a fancy name and apparently city designs. What's so special about this, honestly? I'm all for more people supporting socialism (even under a weird name), but I never understood the point...

What a dumb uninformed thing to say. Fresco described communism as people unwilling to put further thoughts in "their" idea.

Reminds you of someone you know?

Re: Jacque Fresco has died

#97

I remember when I watched the Zeitgeist documentaries and had my first contact with this 'resource based" society. Weeks later I had dinner with a friend who was a director in a Spanish consulting firm specialized in the banking sector. I tried to impress him with what I had seen in the documentary. In the end, it was like having an atheist trying to convince the pope about his convictions.

I was also pretty juiced up and into the venus project for a while until I realized nobody is interested in living in such a world. Then I gave up.

The problem with the Venus project is that it basically looks at human individuals as robotic entities that will behave and function if only put in the right environment and subject to the right inputs. It's all horribly modernist/constructivist.

The architecture proposed has no individualism about it, this is like a cartoon version of collectivism where there is no opportunity for self-actualization.

I wouldn't want to live in that world, but even if I did I'm sure it would quickly morph into something else entirely.

The resource idea is nice at first glance, but it only considers needs and not wants. The Soviet Union had the issue where production was always lagging behind trends and demands, China started growing when they cut loose entrepreneurial forces (though those are still heavily guided at macro scale, much like seen in postwar developed countries during the Keynesian era).

Re: Jacque Fresco has died

#98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>In many ways like work-life balance, times are worse than the middle ages. Is this actually established? It's my understanding that the work-leisure dichotomy didn't really exist in medieval Europe. Also, considering how much of the fruit of your labour ended up supporting local and distant aristocracy, I can't imagine mental health being particularly high for a lot of people.

Anthropologists seem to agree* that hunter-gatherers (our ancestors, but also ones living in modern times) worked a little less than 8 hours a day. * For source, I've seen Yuval Noah Harari and Peter Gray writing about it.

I might be wrong, but I think agricultural societies had very long working days at harvest time but relatively short ones on average. During the transition of feudalism to industrialism working hours rose significantly (as did productivity, but kept churning due to new class relationships).

Re: Jacque Fresco has died

#99
While I really thought that Venus Project ideas was interesting but a little bit naive, there is something going on with cryptocurrencies. They can save us from eternal deflation of our money as the Zeitgeist documental expose. That means that our central banking system (in every country) would have troubles trying to produce more money over thin air (causing inflation). An inversion of control could happen here. Who knows.

Re: Jacque Fresco has died

#100

I remember when I watched the Zeitgeist documentaries and had my first contact with this 'resource based" society. Weeks later I had dinner with a friend who was a director in a Spanish consulting firm specialized in the banking sector. I tried to impress him with what I had seen in the documentary. In the end, it was like having an atheist trying to convince the pope about his convictions.

As much as I like Fresco's vision, it sounds to me like saying: "hey, you know all that code we wrote for Society 1.0 in the last couple thousand years? let's throw all that out and write Society 2.0 from scratch" and he acknowledge that when he says the actual system would have to collapse for his ideas to take place. His spec is beautiful but without backwards compat and no smooth transition route, I can't see it h…

I always thought Fresco has quite a lot of great ideas, but after a few years, I came to think of his perspective as a bit 1950s-ish in terms of the lack of incorporation of network robustness, decentralization, etc.

I believe we need to take that a lot of that techno-communist stuff to some degree and actually combine it with decentralized perspectives. Because we _are_ currently doing a horrible job of measuring and acting holistically -- and certainly on some level we need to be able to have sort of total measurements of things and limitations in different regions, etc.

And we can use technology to make gathering these holistic measurements, as well as acting cooperatively, more feasible, to the degree it is wise. For example, common information systems or schemas for large-scale public data mining of natural resource usage, or simply fair tax reporting, etc.

But at the same time, I feel that the biggest pitfall of both competitive (capitalist) and cooperative (communist) approaches is over-centralization. Here we can also look to new technologies like block chains, Bitcoin, Ethereum, etc. that enable decentralized large-scale trust/databases.

The problem we have now is that we actually do have a smooth transition to basically what Fresco was envisioning, except he forgot how problematic it can be to have massive governments or corporations or AIs with a centralized monopoly on production. We are headed towards that actually now -- Google for organizing and searching all information, Walmart for distributing goods in stores, Amazon for everything else, youtube for video, Uber for getting around, etc. Because these monopolies are so powerful (I call them 'technopolies') they are basically de facto government entities -- except worse.

So anyway again the way out of this is to decentralize all the things again, using technology so that we can have a common platform, common total measurements, etc., but also do it in a robust way that has room to evolve and is not dependent upon over-powered nodes.

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