So we saw that Zeitgeist 3 the other day, because people keep going on about it… and to be fair, I was a bit suspicious about the whole thing because there’s a fairly major overlap between Zeitgeist 1 and the things that conspiracy cranks keep going on about… but I had an evening with nothing-doing, so I watched it.
Fair enough. Currency. It’s a problem. It takes a long time to sink in, just how much of a problem it is – years… but eventually, it does kindof sink in and you realise that the whole thing is one giant scam. It’s a ponzi scheme where banks rob money from the future in the shape of inflation. It’s not a tax, it’s fraud, pure and simple, and precipitating from that are meta-frauds.
So anyway, Z3 is pretty good at pointing out the problems – which are becoming untenable. On the solutions though, they do what geeks always do when they want to “fix” the way society is run…
… THEY DESIGN A FUTURE CITY!
This does not work.
Z3 goes on about someone or other not understanding Systems-Design. Z3 does not understand systems-design. They’ve designed a city that is essentially a single-cell. Cities aren’t single cells… and those that have been designed from the top down as single cells have failed (and yes, it has been tried). This idea that you can solve systems-problems by combining 1930s fascist architecture with 1970s Sci-Fi totally fails to recognise that a city is not a single cell, but a collection of cells – which at the smallest coherent level, are (not buildings, but) individual people.
Z3 have not designed an ecosystem, they’ve designed a terrarium. It won’t work, and outside (increasingly unlikely to happen) experiments in Dubai or China, it’s not going to happen.
Here are two videos that I’ve embedded before… but they’re worth looking at again
and photos of an art-expo from the Eden Project… which is not connected to this in any way whatsoever. Looks cool though. Looks like Silent Running or Logan’s Run or something.
This is Logan’s Run
It’s got Jenny Agutter in it, which instantly makes it brilliant.
On Addiction
And The Void Mooned Back...
The Spirit Of The World
A Machine to Steal Souls
More Anti Digital
Thync
Robotic Sensory Loops and Whatnot
Cartestian Robot Roundup.
Post-Scarcity Link-Dump
Servo Bender
At first I found this ideology appealing. Then i did some research and i found out that most of the information in zeitgeist is bullshit.
http://conspiracies.skepticproject.com/articles/zeitgeist/
But i still liked the basic concept of project Venus. What’s wrong with trying to make a better world with the help of reson and technology. Well, it turnes out that this “high modernist” aproach has been tried before with pretty bad results. A great book on this topic is this:
http://www.amazon.com/Seeing-Like-State-Institution-University/dp/0300078153
Yea – “making the world a better place” in this case appears to involve a category-error on a dimensional scale, ie: attempting to impose a mono-cellular design on top of a multi-cellular ecosystem. It’s been tried in various guises in the past 100 years, and I can’t think of a single instance where it’s worked.
That kind of top-down, monolythic architecture is utterly at odds with… well, good systems-design. What sealed the deal was the way a “mainframe” computer at the center of the city controls anything. I mean it’s like they don’t even understand computers terribly well.
Interesting skeptic link btw – more interesting than the film itself I think.