Davis Aurini - The Venus Project

Jan. 3, 2013 - Davis Aurini

27:18

The Venus Project

My novel: http://www.amazon.com/Walk-These-Broken-Roads-Volume/dp/1480121827 My blog: http://www.StaresAtTheWorld.com My Twitter: http://twitter.com/Aurini Glorious Hat! http://www.commieobama.com/pages/hat_info.html

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	The Venus Project.
	If you haven't heard of it before, you've probably heard of the Zeitgeist movie or the Zeitgeist movement.
	These are it and the Venus Project are these ideas that have caught a lot of momentum.
	Originally, it started with some 9-11 conspiracies that they've since backed off from, but what they maintain is a very apt criticism of the current banking system, and a sort of post-scarcity techno-utopia promise.
	This is a video I've been wanting to do for a while, honestly, because the Zeitgeist people, the Venus Project people, they really drive me nuts, because they're so right about some things, and just so utterly, well, you can't even say that they're wrong, necessarily, but just so ephemeral, non-specific.
	Which is why it's so hard to criticize them, because they haven't actually said anything to criticize.
	So I think the proper route to go about criticizing them, in that case, is to discuss the intellectual development of the movement, of its founder, Jacques Fresco.
	And then explain the movement a little bit more and explain what's wrong with all of it.
	That's the best way to go about this.
	Now, Jacques Fresco is a self-taught engineer, which is not a mark of criticism.
	That's not sarcasm.
	He actually is a very accomplished structural engineer, I believe, is what he calls himself specifically.
	Very intelligent man.
	And yet there's this joke that you go up to a mathematician, a scientist, and an engineer.
	You hand them a little round red rubber ball and he asked them what the volume of it is.
	Well, the mathematician will measure the diameter, multiply it by, believe it's pi r cubed, and he'll come up with the volume.
	The physicist will dump the red ball into a beaker of water and see how much water is displaced.
	The engineer?
	Well, he'll just reach up on the shelf for his big book of little red balls, look up the serial number, and tell you the specific volume.
	And the feminist will tell you that saying that every single ball has to have the same relationship between diameter and circumference is oppressive.
	The point of this joke is that engineers, and I love engineers, most of my family are engineers, really admire what they do, but they have a certain blindness to the way they look at the world.
	So much of what they do is looking up facts and figures in little red books, that they have...
	There's this huge mass of information that the engineering field has developed over the years.
	How much force is the wind going to exert on a building based upon how tall it is and how strong do you need to make the girders for that?
	You know, what's the at what temperature will this type of rubber not be an effective tire on the road?
	At what speeds?
	At what rate does the temperature build up going at a different speed on different types of material?
	Etc.
	They have tons of information that they've accrued over the years.
	But this leads them to seeing information as being something absolute.
	That if they can't build something, it's because they just lack the information.
	And the information is out there black and white.
	It just needs to be found.
	There's no debate over these facts.
	They live in a world of very, very trustworthy facts.
	As opposed to the world of the historian or the artist or the soldier, where it's a very factual world, but you can never find out the actual facts.
	You're always guessing.
	Whereas the engineer always knows definitely what's going on.
	And so that's one of the big things I see with Jacques Fresco.
	He's a very, very intelligent man and seems to be an accomplished engineer as well.
	But he has such a naivete when it comes to human nature or economics or any of these things.
	Now the inception of kind of his political thinking began during the Great Depression.
	Now, of course, we're all good Austrians.
	We know that the measures used to try and save people from the Great Depression just wound up extenuating a two-year depression into a ten-year depression.
	And that it wasn't World War II that solved the Great Depression.
	It was the fact that governments were so broke they had to stop messing with the economy at the end of World War II.
	And then a recovery happened.
	Now, we all know this.
	But imagine yourself if you could go back to 1929, you're the president, you're Hoover, or you're Hoover's right-hand man, everything is going fine, the economy's booming, and all of a sudden, bam!
	Wall Street crash, as well as a Dust Bowl in the Central Americas.
	All of this stuff happens instantaneously.
	Overnight, this golden economy just goes down the crapper, and people are starving.
	What are you going to do?
	If you actually think about being in a position of power like that, even though, you know, we can play armchair quarterback, the ends of the earth, and certainly, as much as I admire Hoover, he made a lot of mistakes.
	But...
	But who could have done better at the time?
	We hadn't run into something like this before.
	It's the beginning of the technological society where we're all very divorced from the land.
	We rely upon the economy to be stable just to eat.
	Unlike, you know, 500 years ago, you could just grow your own food.
	It would suck, but you could survive.
	So, Jacques Fresco is a young man hit hard by this Great Depression.
	And, of course, everywhere it seems like nobody's doing anything.
	The rich are still rich and they're eating, even though they're far poorer than they used to be, and their businesses are being manipulated and controlled by the government.
	But It's understandable that you'd think that somebody should do something, that the king should open up his granary, even though granaries don't exist like that anymore.
	And this is when you start getting involved with the Communist Party.
	So early on, you can see this.
	Now, it's a low-level, naive sort of Marxism.
	It's not the suicidal, life-hating sort of Marxism that you see coming out of the White House nowadays.
	It's the low-level, well, I could do a better job of running things.
	You know, we just need a central authority in charge.
	So that's his start on economic thought.
	And from what I've seen, he never really went further than that.
	Then he gets older, starts traveling around, mostly to tropical places.
	What is it with warm climates and encouraging idiocy and laziness and pretentiousness?
	California, Florida, I don't know what it is.
	The heat rots the brain, maybe.
	Maybe Plato was right about the brain is there to cool the blood and it just can't do the right job in those climates.
	Anyway, so he winds up going to Hawaii.
	And he credits meeting the native Hawaiians as his introduction, what convinced him of cultural relativism.
	Good God.
	You're just going to love when the liberals celebrate the noble savage, when they celebrate the shaman.
	Look at the treatment of the Native American character on Star Trek Voyager, Chikote.
	See, they praise this mystical civilization.
	Ooh, they're in touch with the land, but there's always an edge of condescension to it.
	If they're so in touch with the land and wise, but they're incompetent and they need the white man to support their culture.
	It's this admiration and hatred at the same time.
	And this comment of his saying that he was inspired by the native Hawaiians.
	Alright, Hawaii, prior to the unprovoked American invasion, was a perfectly typical civilization for that population level.
	Now, I'm not an expert on Hawaii in particular, but given the population in the tens of thousands of people living there, it looked exactly like every other civilization with that number of people and those resources available to them.
	So they, of course, they had marriage.
	Every society has had marriage.
	They had a monarchy that was a bit of a theocracy, although I believe the priests and the king were somewhat separated.
	They had division of labor, a bit of a caste system.
	They looked like any other civilization.
	Now, certainly mimetics affects things in many ways.
	You're going to have the same type of practice practiced in many different ways in different areas.
	There's a lot of different ways that you can have prostitution, for example.
	In the Muslim world, it's a short-term one-night marriage or something like that.
	You know, you're going to have various levels of acceptance of transgenderism.
	Sometimes the transgenderism, the cross-dressing will replace the prostitution, an outlet for unmarried males.
	But civilizations tend to look the same.
	And of course, you know, the genetic material going into the people is going to affect it as well.
	But overall, we're all just different breeds of the same species.
	Humans is gonna human.
	So, this comment of his that they taught him about cultural relativism is just so pig ignorant.
	Listen, Hawaii is awesome.
	Go Hawaii.
	But they're not any more unique than anything else on the planet.
	There's nothing particularly special about Hawaiians.
	Population level and resources heavily affect things.
	Japan.
	They managed to stay feudal for 200 years longer than they should have by shutting off the outside world.
	Except it wasn't the spread of ideas that they were preventing, because Christianity had already taken root in Japan.
	It was already spreading a little bit, even though it was persecuted.
	What they did by shutting the country down for 200 years was shut down the trade networks, was shut down the population base.
	So you have the rest of the world with European explorers connecting with other civilizations and putting them into big trade networks, and each one of those civilizations starts modernizing to a varying degree.
	And it's the population levels that are doing this.
	When you have an access to a billion people, you're going to have a different sort of civilization than if you only have 10,000 people.
	You put 10,000 doctors, lawyers, engineers, scientists, and science fiction writers on an island, and within a couple generations, it's going to look exactly like Hawaii did 200 years ago.
	So this comment about cultural relativism, what relativism, please?
	They have marriage.
	They have the same basic ethical code as everywhere else.
	They have the same sort of polytheistic religion that every 10,000 population community has.
	Just nonsense.
	But see, you can see the engineer coming into his head now.
	Because here he is trying to figure out this problem.
	Problem is: how do you engineer a proper society?
	He lived through the horrors of the Great Depression.
	I mean, here's a guy that couldn't afford to get his proper engineering license because of that, and yet is smart enough to go out and accomplish engineering feats.
	More substantial than many people with engineering licenses.
	I'm sure he did eventually get it, but the point is that you can see his frustration.
	Why is the society not working?
	Why is it broken?
	Why the Great Depression?
	And yet he hasn't found the big book of variables for how people work.
	And so with this background of Marxist influence, he goes to Hawaii and he sees what he wants to see, and he gets convinced that people can be reprogrammed.
	There is a fine line between mimetic engineering and trying to turn people into something we ain't.
	We are not worker ants.
	We are never going to be.
	Mimetics will affect how a society organizes itself.
	There's a reason the Middle East is still stuck in the 1400s.
	But ultimately, people are still people.
	And the Venus Project and its founder just aren't able to acknowledge this.
	Co-founder of the movement is an artist, a portrait painter, apparently.
	And I don't know if you know any artists, but they really tend to live in a world of their own imagining.
	This world of dreams without the concrete reality.
	And so there you have the ideology going into the Venus Project.
	The one hand, the engineer that thinks everything can be a number, that everything could be boiled down to a known fact.
	And the other extreme, the artist, where, to quote Futurama, being a scientist is just imagining things and then making them happen.
	Nowhere do you see the practical, real-world soldier, politician, historian.
	None of that grasp, grasping, grappling with heuristics and assumptions and prejudices and a biased approach to reality.
	So that's the background to it.
	So what exactly is the Venus Project?
	Well, for one thing, it's zero scarcity.
	Now, again, the problem with the Venus Project is they don't know anything about economics.
	Economics, go talk to Aaron Clary.
	He can pick out a few variables and he will make good assumptions and give you an answer that is probably correct.
	Because he is a very, very goddamn good economist.
	He can take limited data, not enough data.
	You never have enough data.
	When you're judging somebody on their credit score, should I lend this person money?
	You never have enough data.
	You're looking at maybe 500 pieces of information when you need 50,000.
	But a good economist can pick out the relevant sources of data, filter out the noise, and come up with a probabilistically correct decision.
	That if he lends money to 100 people, 99 of them are going to pay it back.
	And the Venus Project, no training on economics.
	So, the zero scarcity economy.
	We're already seeing the zero scarcity economy rapidly approaching.
	I have mentioned this before, so I won't go into too much detail, but music.
	The fact is that each and every one of us has more music on our iPod than an audiophile did as recently as 20 years ago in their entire collection.
	Music has basically become zero scarcity.
	And it's if you're going to try and make money as a musician, I'd strongly recommend against it.
	The only guys really making a lot of money are the mass appeal pop sellouts that have the right image and also lucked into it.
	Justin Bieber was from one of those stupid reality shows or something.
	Anybody could have been Justin Bieber.
	Like, there's a million other potential Justin Biebers out there.
	He's the one that got selected, and he'll make a lot of money.
	And all these other equally talented, talented kids will go nowhere.
	Information is fast becoming completely zero scarcity, which is problematic if you're trying to create information, if you're trying to add to the body of knowledge of our species.
	And it's quite possible that energy will become zero scarcity in the near future.
	So all these things spell a certain sort of economic upset.
	And we should have a plan to deal with these things.
	Mind you, right now, we're too busy creating the greatest depression to even think about the shocks of zero scarcity.
	So best of luck with that.
	But it doesn't mean that the Venus Project is doing a good job.
	So they envision this post-scarcity utopia.
	Now, some of us, and this is all, of course, very 1950s, 1960s science fiction Star Trek universe that they never quite explain how things work on Earth.
	Supposedly it's a paradise.
	Let's not look directly at it.
	So certainly we see in our major cities that a lot of transit has become free.
	Here in Calgary, the train downtown is free.
	If you want to catch for five blocks from one end of downtown to the other, it's free.
	You don't have to buy a ticket.
	And you're probably going to see more and more of that.
	And it might even get to the point where instead of cars, we have automated self-driving taxis that are free.
	They're covered by your taxes.
	Now, when we're talking about future economics and we're going to talk about zero scarcity and we look at ideas like this, we are still being realists.
	We are still being economists.
	We have, you know, there's entire people that civil engineers that focus on how to charge the right amount for a train ticket so that people won't abuse the system, but that less people will drive so they don't have to spend money repairing the roads constantly.
	That's not what the Venus Project is doing.
	They paint this picture of the utopian city where energy is free and information is free and there's automated cars everywhere.
	And like one of those shining silver pictures from the 60s or 70s of how the future would look.
	Always a guy with a giant beard for some reason.
	And that's it.
	That's all they're presenting.
	They don't have an actual plan about how to implement all of this stuff.
	They certainly have no concept of geopolitics.
	And as for normal human conflict, the fact that people are born with different levels of intelligence, of different levels of charisma, that people are all going to be competing for sex, basically, sex and attention and prestige.
	None of this is mentioned in the Venus Project because, of course, Jacques Fresco believes in cultural relativity.
	That we can somehow have this zero scarcity economy with no need for women to get married.
	Why bother?
	Everything's free.
	They don't need a husband to pay for anything.
	So they'll just sleep with the bad boys, which the result is going to be gang warfare between all the men trying to show off who has the biggest dick.
	No mention of that, of course.
	The one thing they do mention, though, that they love to mention, and this drives me straight up the wall, is the resource-based economy.
	You know what a resource-based economy is?
	The gold standard.
	Gold is a resource.
	You don't need a new word for this.
	It's the gold-backed currency, is the resource-based economy.
	And if they'd done any reading of Austrian economics, they'd know this.
	And yet they insist on bringing up this ridiculous new term, resource-based economy.
	Every economy is a resource-based economy.
	The reason that you had to pay for a CD 20 years ago was because a lot of resources went into making it.
	Information isn't something with an on-off switch that's either free or not free.
	Effort goes into making it.
	The question is how much?
	You know, today I'm making this YouTube video with the help of a webcam and myself.
	It does not take a massive amount of investment the way a news station did 20 years ago.
	That's because we're using the resources more efficiently.
	And we're just going to pretend for the moment that we could afford to manufacture computers at these prices in North America without slave labor in the third world.
	The resource-backed economy.
	Now, the way they like to describe it is that we all have infinite energy and we all have free maker machines, so you have the X number of resources and you can do whatever you want with them.
	You can drive your car around, then you're sick of your car, crunch it up, make a new car with the energy that's unlimited.
	And this is fine for a science fiction setting, but this is not a proposal for how to actually run a society.
	There is no substance to it.
	There's a couple of interesting ideas which they did not come up with for the record.
	These are much older ideas.
	But then they just run with them.
	And that's their promise.
	They're empty, airy promise of somehow if we stop using gasoline, because they've got environmentalism in the mix, of course, if we stop using gasoline and switch to solar, we can live in the future and you don't have to work anymore.
	Or something like that.
	So there you have it, folks.
	There's really not that much debunk with it.
	There's so much nonsense and yet there's nothing specific.
	You'll see some very good critiques of the current fiat banking system, particularly with the Federal Reserve, coming out of the guys with the Venus Project.
	And their critiques are excellent, but they don't have a real plan.
	Hope that clarified things for you guys.

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