Jacque Fresco and The Venus Project

I don't remember where I first came across Jacque Fresco, founder of The Venus Project, but I have watched much of his material on YouTube. I've also written about it here before. Jacque is now 93 or 94 years old, but still fascinating to listen to. In a live Q&A, the ideas come tumbling out of his mouth in a connected - but not especially organised - way. Frustratingly for questioners, his answers do not always relate terribly well to the question, which isn't helped by the fact that he's rather deaf, and his partner Roxanne Meadows summarises and relays the questions to him.

I went to hear him speak today at the City University at Northampton Square. We saw a video (designing the future), heard a talk. I didn't hear anything new (I've seen a lot on YouTube) but I thought I'd hear him in vivo before nature inevitably takes its course.

Jacque's core idea is a bit communist in the best sense - the fraternity (and I should say sorority - though Jacque is not terribly PC) of all, but he denies that it's politically communist and is equally scathing of all politicians who he would say simply talk about /promise things, without being able to do anything about them. Jacque's premise is that engineers and technicians are the only effective improvers of our society.

The most appealing aspect of Jacque's grand design is co-operation, in contrast to competition, but as competition is usually if no always for the pseudo-resource we call money, his model requires us to abolish money. This is superficially appealing, but raises the question of how we allocate scarce resources without money to place a market value on them. Jacques argues that there is in fact abundance of life's necessities - or at leat there could be if we we co-operated and if we didn't squander vast resources on war - a high level expression of destructive competition.

Without money, people stop making / doing things to get money and make / do things for the general good of humanity. Those who suggest money is the solemotivator are easily dismissed in that people do act philanthropically (and less than they might if they didn't have to do a 9-5 turn to earn a crust).

Jacques profligately produces designs of futuristic (6o's style futuristic) buildings and transport. The futurist element of his work is prominent and he embraces sustainability, whilst rather radically arguing that the automated building of standardised, modular cities is less energy intensive that the more obvious 'green' approach of reparing and restoring what we already have. It is difficult to judge whether Jacque's futuristic designs are far fetched and whether the aesthetic aspect is necessary for the functionality he seeks to achieve.

Those of us who share Jacque's vision of the future high-tech, sustainable, money-less, labour free world are called upon to spread the message. The BIG problem is how we would make the transition from as-is to this better society. Jacque and Roxanne regret that only a crisis is likely to provoke such a radical change, and that an incremental, conservative transition is unlikely to come about. Either way, I don't think many of us will live to see it.

Financial crisis

Join with me in calling this a financial crisis and not an economic crisis. The economy isn't only about money. Look out of the window - everything is still there. The earth's natural resources are still there. The financial system is basically a gambling game - and it's that game that's gone wrong. What's this got to do with sustainability? Well, we all have to take part in this game. We have to go to work and earn money to buy products and services to keep other people in work so that they can buy products and services, and so on. And it's no good making durable products, because that would put people out of work and they will no longer be playing the game, so we have to make products that won't last ("planned obsolescence") to keep the cycle of consumption going.

People aren't starving in this world because there isn't enough food. They just haven't got the money to buy it. Having plenty of something is not good for the monetary system. If there's enough food for everyone then there's no "market" for it. To have a "market" you have to have people trying to outbid each other for scarce resources. Polluting (say) the water supply is good in this set-up as it helps make safe water more scarce and therefore it can have a market value.

This is completely nuts. If we can raise enough food for everyone, surely we have a moral duty to? Surely we have to preserve and conserve the abundant, but not unlimited, resources of the planet?