11 ms·

Jacque Fresco has died

137 points by sajid 9y ago

enterx 9y ago
RIP Fresco.
rodolphoarruda 9y ago
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.
- staticelf 9y ago
  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.
  - xenu101 9y ago
    People are interested, they're just not interested in working towards it or giving up things for it. Fresco paints a gloomy picture of the now and the future, but the facts are that "on average", humans are living better lives than they ever have. This progress has not yet stopped. Hence, Fresco predicts we need to wait for the next "bust".
    - staticelf 9y ago
      That assumes that there will be people remembering the venus project or even have the resources to fight for it at the correct time. Also, it assumes that humanity will survive the climate changes that are due. I think we have taught ourselves that we rather suffer and keep things as they are rather than actually improving them in a radical way like in trying out new economic models.
      - xenu101 9y ago
        He believed himself that the chances are slim. We may well be headed for the next dark ages. I doubt we're going extinct though, unless we're literally turning this planet into Venus (put somewhat intended).
        BuckRogers 9y ago
        The Venus Project has inspired me to extend on their ideas in certain ways, but commit myself to the idea in general. If I ever have vast sums of money like Bill Gates, I'll use it to start something small-scale where people can live outside of current nation-states and demonstrate to the world how life can be if they choose. I think it's just a matter of this, demonstration. It won't attract everyone, there's a lot of very confused people in a lot of nations who think their way of life can't be topped (especially the US). The likelihood of 1 person like me who agrees with Fresco's vision netting billions of dollars to begin is higher than a bunch of people on their iPhones suddenly agreeing to the idea in an awakening. It can happen, without a nuclear holocaust "awakening" too. Just need the Elon Musk of the Venus Project to start small. Jacque did a lot of hard work to get the idea out there.
    - JackFr 9y ago
      It's not just "on average", people are materially better off today than at any other period in history, at all levels. The poorest people today are better off than the poorest people at any previous era.
      - xkarga00 9y ago
        That's the problem, we are only _materially_ better. It is sad we still cannot figure that out.
        BuckRogers 9y ago
        Yup you nailed it. In many ways like work-life balance, times are worse than the middle ages. Also material betterment doesn't scale, we can't focus on material betterment for all because until we figure out fusion and get our own Dyson Sphere going, we have finite resources.
        cholantesh 9y ago
        >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.
        goodJobWalrus 9y ago
        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.
        ue_ 9y ago
        Although I don't think it's very wise to say we should try to reach for the ideal of the hunter-gatherer society, but it's undeniable that the combination of (i) overproduction and (ii) machinery being used for short-term profit rather than meaning people have to work less is causing a lot of time used working when it could, in a society not driven by profit, be used for various kinds of fulfillment and sharpening one's intellectual faculties. As Oscar Wilde put it: Now and then, in the course of the century, a great man of science, like Darwin; a great poet, like Keats; a fine critical spirit, like M. Renan; a supreme artist, like Flaubert, has been able to isolate himself, to keep himself out of reach of the clamorous claims of others, to stand ‘under the shelter of the wall,’ as Plato puts it, and so to realise the perfection of what was in him, to his own incomparable gain, and to the incomparable and lasting gain of the whole world. These, however, are exceptions. The majority of people spoil their lives by an unhealthy and exaggerated altruism – are forced, indeed, so to spoil them. They find themselves surrounded by hideous poverty, by hideous ugliness, by hideous starvation.
  - barrkel 9y ago
    We're built for a hedonic treadmill; our striving, and unhappiness with a steady stable state, increases our probability of genetic propagation at the cost of our neighbours. It's baked in at a low level, and if we don't figure something out, it'll be the doom of us all.
  - taw55 9y ago
    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).
  - atlih 9y ago
    And then came Zuckerbergs Harvard commencement address. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BmYv8XGl-YU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BmYv8XGl-YU Basically poor Jacque was 40 years ahead of his time.
- erik14th 9y ago
  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 happening.
  - david927 9y ago
    Ideas often don't neatly, slowly segue into other ideas. The Ptolemaic model didn't migrate a step at a time to the Newtonian model. If progress has taught us anything is that we often spend too much time arguing at the leaf level when what is needed is to back a branch or two toward the trunk and make a change there. Moving out of Monarchy and Feudalism to Democracy was a sea change that overthrew everything before it. We managed it and are much happier because of it. While I don't agree with Fresco's vision entirely, it's not because fundamental changes aren't feasible or even, possibly, necessary.
  - ilaksh 9y ago
    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.
- stupidhn 9y ago
  >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.
wavefunction 9y ago
>>Robert Murphy, an associate scholar at the Mises Institute, which promotes the teaching of Austrian economics, wrote in 2010 that idealists like Mr. Fresco were “wrong to blame our current dysfunctional world on capitalism or money per se.” Instead, Mr. Murphy wrote, if property rights were respected by all, “humanity would become fantastically wealthy.” I read this sort of claim by the 'serious and sober' and realize they're even more gassed up than the 'idealists.'
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  Austrian Economics is an ideology; if one is dividing the world into "serious and sober" and "idealists", Austrian-school adherents are emphatically the latter rather than the form.
  - wavefunction 9y ago
    I'm commenting more that one idealistic notion is presented as academic and a settled fact while the other is presented as, well, idealist. I suppose the notion of 'all humans respecting property rights' sounds just as fantastical to me as the utopias promised by other philosophies.
- afsina 9y ago
  I think this is the relevant piece: https://mises.org/library/venus-needs-some-austrians https://mises.org/library/venus-needs-some-austrians I think Murphy is quite right.
  - xenu101 9y ago
    I quote: "What I am arguing, then, is that in a truly free world, where we all respected each other's property, the rise in living standards would be analogous to our hypothetical boy who moves from the streets of Calcutta to the suburbs of Maine. In that fantastic world, giving someone a "free" heart surgery might be as cheap as giving someone a piece of gum in our current society." His whole article is a huge non-sequitur and I'm deeply concerned that these "Austrians" are regarded as "experts" whereas someone like Fresco is considered a Don Quixote.
partycoder 9y ago
While Mr. Fresco idea seems very reasonable, I think his mistake is attributing altruistic traits to everyone. Not everyone is altruistic. If there's a computer system governing everything, there will be a strong incentive to build bias into it, or use for mass surveillance or even tyranny. Then, there are aspects in which radial cities would not be good: - Epidemiology: you have everyone in this nice dome sharing objects. But one of them has a serious infectious disease. Now the entire population is at risk. - Defense: An adversarial force including but not limited to extremists would just target the center dome, a place accessible by everyone. You could argue that everyone would have what they need because of this egalitarian system, and there would be no violence. But take a look at communist countries and see what happens in practice. However, it is true though that we are very inefficient and wasteful in terms of how resources are used.
- staticelf 9y ago
  Would be worth a try though, wouldn't it? The main idea is also to reduce manual labour as fast as possible so more people can afford to be altruistic.
  - sebastianconcpt 9y ago
    Mao and Lenin thought it was super worthy of trying, the material outcome wasn't as cool as the imaginary vision.
    - staticelf 9y ago
      I don't really think it's the same as communism though.
  - RoyTyrell 9y ago
    Until we're living in a post-scarcity world with Star Trek replicators, and the ability to produce significantly more nearly 100% clean energy than could ever be consumed, everywhere on the planet where humans typically live I don't see how it's possible. Those would be the most basic limiting factors I can think of off the top of my head, and there are probably significantly more.
davexunit 9y ago
The world could use a few more Jacque Frescos.
swalsh 9y ago
I think as a whole his vision is little too "non organic". I don't think society can be planned to the degree he wished. However disassembled there were some solid ideas, many of which are becoming realities today. He represents one of my favorite parts of the 50's and 60's. Which struck me as a time where people imagined that it was totally possible to just upend society, and rebuild it in a better way. The level of optimism where if you can accomplish only 20% of the vision, you've done something significant.
- worldsayshi 9y ago
  Yeah, the planning part seems to be the major culprit when designing "alternative economical systems". Anyone who would want to propose a serious "alternative to the capitalist system" - which is kind of what it boils down to - would have to figure out how to out-compete the planning efficiency of capitalism. My personal favorite would be something in the way of a Wiki-like consensus engine with "many-eyeballs" checks and balances. All planning is public, all planning can be corrected by anyone. Sabotage can be avoided by there effectively being significantly more 'reviewers' than editors or through some other mean of making sabotage harder than correction. It works for Wikipedia, why not for societal planning?
- cLeEOGPw 9y ago
  He was absolutely out of touch. At no point he ever considered the basic human, as an animal species, instincts, tendencies, mechanisms and other mechanics surrounding human societies. His idea of society is an equivalent of designing an everlasting engine with assumptions like friction, radiation, air resistance and evaporation doesn't exist. He discarded reality, created his own reality in his own mind and pushed an idea as worthy of some kind of significance. The only thing that this man taught me is how far you can get just by being super persuasive.
- Shorel 9y ago
  I wish we knew how the Inca empire worked. By the few remaining accounts we have, it worked just as Fresco described. But too many details were destroyed by the Spaniards.
sebastianconcpt 9y ago
RIP Fresco. I really like him and his work. But I never understood why he was convinced about the Resource Based Economy. Shouldn't a RBE have the exact same problems as any Central Planned economy? Wasn't this refuted in 1920 by Mises? https://mises.org/sites/default/files/Economic%20Calculation%20in%20the%20Socialist%20Commonwealth_Vol_2_3.pdf https://mises.org/sites/default/files/Economic%20Calculation...
- bionsuba 9y ago
  I've had the misfortune of listening to Fresco on a podcast, and he came right out and stated that 1. Humans don't have a capacity for reason 2. If reason existed it couldn't lead to any truth 3. That people only find scientific discoveries via chance So I wouldn't expect him to be dissuaded by a rational argument. He also believes in the blank slate theory, so not exactly up to date in the science world.
  - btg_1987 9y ago
    1) Overall, yes. 2) Citation needed. 3) Correct, they react to stimuli. I agree with you on the blank slate theory and that Fresco was not up to date on this. Genetics has an impact on skull formation, brain tissue, etc.
    - bionsuba 9y ago
      >Overall, yes So the creatures who invented the conceptual framework of reason and logic have no way to use reason and logic. Got it. >Citation needed Here's one example of his opinions on reason: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQcYZpY9JI0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQcYZpY9JI0 >Correct, they react to stimuli. If humans didn't have a capacity for reason, then observing stimuli wouldn't mean anything and we wouldn't be able to transform observation to concepts. His example was people accidentally making a camera obscura by having a hole in the wall. Without reason, you 1. Wouldn't be able to conclude that it was even the hole in the wall causing the effect 2. Would be equally likely to attribute the image to the act of a divine power And his failings on blank slate theory are not on the genetics side of things, but on human behavior. Much like the conception of the new socialist man, his thinking relies on behaviorism.
bikamonki 9y ago
Marginal unit cost of production moving closer to zero, the sharing economy, AI replacing human labor, descentralized crypto-currencies, universal minimun income, autonomous transportation, clean energy, space travel. Fresco was right on the mark. RIP wise man.
btg_1987 9y ago
I remember speaking with Jacque in Miami at one of his lectures. He was a very honest and sincere man (but not to the point of trying to demean you to get his point across). He will be missed. Roxanne Meadows penned a lovely open letter concerning this: https://www.thevenusproject.com/ https://www.thevenusproject.com/ Their vision and ideology is an interesting one, but may take a few hundred years before viable for implementation. Too many growing pains still involved in earth culture.
igor_filippov 9y ago
I've met his followers in Berlin once, "naive" - the best word I can find to describe them. In the end, they struggled to answer the core question: "Why would anyone take seriously a man, who can't prove his idea in a lean way?". Please, build a city where everyone is happy and everything is handled by the machines, show the rest of the world you're right! Reminds me of wantrepreneurs who can't scrape together 10k to build an MVP for their startup idea. If you can't find money to build a prototype, then no sane investor should trust you.
- worldsayshi 9y ago
  > If you can't find money to build a prototype, then no sane investor should trust you. Sounds like a circular argument to me? I would agree with the notion that the ideas seem naïve. But how could grandiose ideas not be that?
  - igor_filippov 9y ago
    No, just put aside some money before quitting your day job and you're fine. Again, if you can't manage to fund development of your MVP, then maybe entrepreneurship isn't for you. I guess the same applies to the "Venus Project".
    - worldsayshi 9y ago
      In other words, if you're not rich entrepreneurship is not for you. edit: Sure I realize that you can start with something smaller and fund able by smaller means. But how long until you can fund what you really want to create?
      - igor_filippov 9y ago
        If you can't make money, entrepreneurship is not for you.
        worldsayshi 9y ago
jhbadger 9y ago
He always reminded me of fellow utopian Paolo Soleri (who died in 2013) -- even though their ideas were impractical (at least in the short term), we really need dreamers like them to make people question whether current society is really as good as we can hope for.
- erikpukinskis 9y ago
  Paulo Soleri was indeed a gem. I visited Arcosanti years ago... A group of friends rented some rooms in the complex and took the tour. Interesting bunch of older artsy types in a typical intentional community: compelling, but seemingly dying. Then we realized there was a whole other "city" of young people living in the "temporary" construction housing down the hill. These were young people eager to move the vision forward, but were generally stifled because Soleri himself (or his supporters who were older and "full citizens" of Arcosanti) didn't want to deviate from The Plan. I think this is what kills most of these intentional communities... They create a class structure where the in group has privileges the out group doesn't, which leads to inevitable ideological calcification, which leads to inevitable decline. The solution, in my mind, is to build on the idea that every person is a potential contributor, but for health issues, and that we live in a time of plenty. This changes "no that won't work young one" and "no get out of here bad man" to "how can we marshal the resources to do that too?" and "let's get you some health care services".
uranian 9y ago
This is a true loss for the world. Although his revolutionary ideas were IMHO by times a little over the edge, he envisioned and fought for a world without poverty and war, where earth's resources are not being depleted by hunger for money and power; A resource based economy. Thank you Jaques Fresco for opening my eyes to this and RIP.
barrkel 9y ago
"if property rights were respected by all, “humanity would become fantastically wealthy.”" This comment by Robert Murphy is a weird non sequitur apropos of not much in the article. If property rights are respected by all, some small fraction of humanity will indeed become fantastically wealthy, but the vast majority would be on the tail end of a very thinly tailed distribution as humans become worthless for production - leading to quite a bit of aggregate unhappiness.
- EGreg 9y ago
  When anarcho capitalists make the jump from the non-aggression principle (NAP) to property rights, they invariably switch from using deontological arguments to consequentialist arguments like everyone else: "Look communism failed, capitalism produces more wealth" "Well if everyone has everything they need, who's going to work?" It sounds like the music industry asking who's going to record songs if copyright isn't strictly enforced.
  - Jabanga 9y ago
    I'm not an anarcho-capitalist, but I am a fierce proponent of private property rights, and I regularly make deontological arguments for them. My central argument is that self-ownership (the right to our person) implies a right to appropriate natural resources, since our bodies are constituted of natural resources that at some point we appropriated. That same principle should extend to non-biological appropriation, since there's no reason to give a different moral treatment based on how the natural resources were appropriated. Thus, our property is an extension of our self, which axiomatically we consider people to have an absolute right to. What it ultimately comes down to is that the value you add to natural resources morally belongs to you. When you turn 100 lb of food into a brain, that produces Mozart's symphonies, you are converting matter into a higher value form, and you should be entitled to that value. Similarly when you convert a dead tree into a canoe, you should be entitled to that canoe, minus whatever value you're depriving society of by depriving them of the log. This is just and this is fair, and appropriately, it aligns with consequentialism.
- Jabanga 9y ago
wawka13 9y ago
The truly big loss for the whole world. RIP, Fresco. Also, if someone needs an essay or paper about him - fill free to visit it at https://handmadewritings.com https://handmadewritings.com
- kovek 9y ago
  What does this handmadewritings website have to do with Jacque Fresco his Venus Project?
  - dredmorbius 9y ago
    Hint: It doesn't, it's spam.
boona 9y ago
You mean someone who understands the complexities of the markets and the financial system wasn't convinced by Marxism with robots? I can't imagine why.
- Findeton 9y ago
  But it has a new flavour! Planned economy is cool again! (apparently).
- rbanffy 9y ago
  Maybe he meant someone who is deeply indoctrinated into a set of core assumptions cannot be convinced those assumptions can be changed.
  - cholantesh 9y ago
    Why not consider the possibility that Fresco's core assumptions and arguments are flawed? Both can be true.
- dang 9y ago
  Please don't post snarky swipes here. If you have a substantive point to make, please make it thoughtfully; otherwise please don't comment until you do. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14423470 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14423470 and marked it off-topic.
  - boona 9y ago
    First, a comment that promotes Marxism or Nazism or any of heinous ideologies should be met with a certain harshness. We tried that in the 20th century, and considering the 100+ million dead people (most of it due to Marxism), I think it's fair to say that that was a bad turn in human history. Second, considering that the comment I was replying to contained snark i.e. "atheist trying to convince the pope about his convictions", I'm not sure why you focused on mine. In the future, please be consistent with your application of warnings. You wouldn't want to members to believe that you're ideologically driven rather than promoting open intellectual discussion.
boona 9y ago
I think society values good intention way too much. This man fought his entire life for what amounts to Marxism with robots. His intentions may have been good, his heart in the right place, but his ideas were bad, and if implemented, they would be disastrous. If we judge him by his intentions, he was a good man. If we judge him by what he wished upon the world, he was a horrible human being. Though we should keep good intentions in mind, I strongly believe that we should also judge the outcome of what people are proposing.
- cryodesign 9y ago
  Can you explain how his ideas would be disastrous?
  - boona 9y ago
    I'm having that discussion elsewhere in the comments. Here is my comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=14425382 https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=14425382.
EGreg 9y ago
Far more interesting (to me) than a specific Venus project concept art was Jacques Fresco interviews and stories about his life. I once sent them to Noam Chomsky to listen as a fellow elderly guy and child of the Depression from a different perspective. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7e9IdujGy0U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7e9IdujGy0U
ue_ 9y ago
When I was about 14 or 15 my first exposure to different schools of social organisation was Fresco, I found him through the Zeitgeist documentary (which I was foolish enough to believe in conspiracies with). I then looked at the Venus project and various of his videos and interviews on Youtube. He seemed like a great man, and although I think his ideas didn't put much into action, I really admired them. For the past 8 years or so he had passed out of my mind, I barely thought of the Venus Project, and it was surprising and saddening to read this news. RIP Fresco.
cryodesign 9y ago
STAR TREK Gene Roddenberry was inspired by Fresco's ideas. A world where people could focus on personal development and nobody would have to be in this rat race anymore, enabling a higher standard of living for all people. Jacque was a great visionary, inventor and systems thinker - he will be missed. You should watch his documentary Future by Design [0]. He was talking about 3D printed houses, holistic transportation systems, smart cities, etc [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1IXWnS6vwk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1IXWnS6vwk
jokoon 9y ago
Once you realize politicians do an actual hard job running things by using deception, and when you realize money is just a tool we use to measure what goes where with accounting, then you realize we use money because even the best ideas don't work because humans are natural competitors. Money is not about corruption or running numbers, it's about counting sheeps in a complex human society. That's it. Currency is not bad in itself, it's just that the world is so large, and since it's not possible to organize such a large place, we use currency so that things self-regulate. People are already trying to not use money, and have more simple lives, but everyone realizes that we all are feet deep into our sweet comforts and we can't let it go. It's great to have ideas, it's another to execute them. I felt a little more interested by what kind of city Fresco was proposing, and all the architectural details, than the leap of faith into less poverty and less war. By all means, if you have ideas to reduce poverty in any place in the world, and reduce conflict in Syria, I'm sure the UN and most western governments want to hear about what you want to say. It's time to let the ideology go, and work on more fine-detailed, feasible objectives. Local politics or organizing a neighborhood seems much more realistic to me, than building new cities from scratch.
- Elinvention 9y ago
  I think you don't know much about The Venus Project. He did not believe human were competitive by nature. He believed competition is a product of scarcity. And he understood that while visiting the Tuamotu islands, where natives lived very differently than we do. Corruption in a monetary system is exacerbated. It's so easy to pay off someone that it became normal. We do know how to reduce conflict. But we don't want to. Every country has interests to keep one of the factions involved in power. How can the conflict terminate if one country gives weapons to a faction while another bombs them? In 2016 he was awarded by UN for "City Design & Community". And he may receive other awards post mortem. If you look more deeply there is little ideology in Fresco's view.
  - jokoon 9y ago
    > I think you don't know much about The Venus Project. I learned about this project in 2009. It's idealist by nature. It's great, but it doesn't really account for the reality of how politics work. > He believed competition is a product of scarcity. Good luck keeping that nice living standard by removing competition off the table. Corruption is why we win. > But we don't want to. Geopolitics at play, there is so little people can really do about it. Ultimately, people will choose to be able to afford another lollipop to their kid, rather than maybe care about people thousands of kilometers away. We'd rather save 10 cent on the gallon of gas or get marshmallow than let our neighbor have shelter. Husbands will gladly shit in their neighbor's yard just to content their wives. The intricacies are so complex and people don't really have time to really care at all, but ultimately, at the larger scale, we still are competitive because that's how the first world get comfortable. It's crazy how people can eat organic but won't try to be informed about the middle east and how the world is poor. I have respect for his project, but it seems to make abstraction of the politics of what he is proposing. It says "beyond politics". You cannot remove politics from the equation. Politics is how the world works.
ElijahLynn 9y ago
Jacque will be missed. Fantastic communication, patience and ideas. I actually wrote Jacque in once as my vote for president as well as donated to the Venus Project. This should be front page news, good to hear it at least is on HN and NYT. He has said in the past he didn't think our current society would make it to his ideas in his lifetime and that it may take a 100 years or so. He knew he was playing the long game and was laying the ground work for society many years out. A true visionary unbound by the scars of modern civilization. Jacque (and Roxanne) have deeply affected my life and direction. I will continue to strive towards the ideas brought forth by them.
id122015 9y ago
the fire consumes all the fuel that it receives. Although his concepts look nice on paper I dont understand what the solution is to stop people to breed exponentially. And then we are back to the same problem we have now.
- _rpd 9y ago
  > what the solution is to stop people to breed exponentially In developing nations, large families are used as a kind of social security. Developed nations with good social security have population growth rates below replacement (modulo immigration). The best way to curb population growth is through universal education and long term economic well being.
- btg_1987 9y ago
  By understanding the reason why people have many kids to begin with: -To help you when you get old? -Because my religion says so? -My parents had many kids, so that seems natural It all comes down to numbers. What is the ceiling number for the carrying capacity of humans on this planet? Seems like an important question for the next 5 generations of people.
deft 9y ago
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...
- widowlark 9y ago
  I think this is an oversimplification. Its not likely that this planned economy would ever work in the first place, and he readily acknowledges this. However, he got us thinking about cybernetics and automation way before anyone else. Also, he accurately predicted driverless cars and the connection between wireless communication, computing, and avoidance sensors! "We must stop constantly fighting for human rights and equal justice in an unjust system, and start building a society where equal rights are an integral part of the design."
- stupidhn 9y ago
  >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.
- dispo001 9y ago
  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?
widowlark 9y ago
It's interesting to note that Jacque, while definitely a little out there on execution, has been warning us about the effects of automation for 50 years. His proposed solution of a planned economy will not work, but his vision of what the future will look like when we have robotics and automation as the main future forces of economy are spot on. He also envisioned centralized (and distributed) computing and governmental computing systems, something that will have widespread implementation within the next half century.
progrocks9 9y ago
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.

137 points by sajid 9y ago

RIP Fresco.

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.

staticelf 9y ago
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.
- xenu101 9y ago
  People are interested, they're just not interested in working towards it or giving up things for it. Fresco paints a gloomy picture of the now and the future, but the facts are that "on average", humans are living better lives than they ever have. This progress has not yet stopped. Hence, Fresco predicts we need to wait for the next "bust".
  - staticelf 9y ago
    That assumes that there will be people remembering the venus project or even have the resources to fight for it at the correct time. Also, it assumes that humanity will survive the climate changes that are due. I think we have taught ourselves that we rather suffer and keep things as they are rather than actually improving them in a radical way like in trying out new economic models.
    - xenu101 9y ago
      He believed himself that the chances are slim. We may well be headed for the next dark ages. I doubt we're going extinct though, unless we're literally turning this planet into Venus (put somewhat intended).
      - BuckRogers 9y ago
        The Venus Project has inspired me to extend on their ideas in certain ways, but commit myself to the idea in general. If I ever have vast sums of money like Bill Gates, I'll use it to start something small-scale where people can live outside of current nation-states and demonstrate to the world how life can be if they choose. I think it's just a matter of this, demonstration. It won't attract everyone, there's a lot of very confused people in a lot of nations who think their way of life can't be topped (especially the US). The likelihood of 1 person like me who agrees with Fresco's vision netting billions of dollars to begin is higher than a bunch of people on their iPhones suddenly agreeing to the idea in an awakening. It can happen, without a nuclear holocaust "awakening" too. Just need the Elon Musk of the Venus Project to start small. Jacque did a lot of hard work to get the idea out there.
  - JackFr 9y ago
    It's not just "on average", people are materially better off today than at any other period in history, at all levels. The poorest people today are better off than the poorest people at any previous era.
    - xkarga00 9y ago
      That's the problem, we are only _materially_ better. It is sad we still cannot figure that out.
      - BuckRogers 9y ago
        Yup you nailed it. In many ways like work-life balance, times are worse than the middle ages. Also material betterment doesn't scale, we can't focus on material betterment for all because until we figure out fusion and get our own Dyson Sphere going, we have finite resources.
        cholantesh 9y ago
        >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.
        goodJobWalrus 9y ago
        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.
        ue_ 9y ago
        Although I don't think it's very wise to say we should try to reach for the ideal of the hunter-gatherer society, but it's undeniable that the combination of (i) overproduction and (ii) machinery being used for short-term profit rather than meaning people have to work less is causing a lot of time used working when it could, in a society not driven by profit, be used for various kinds of fulfillment and sharpening one's intellectual faculties. As Oscar Wilde put it: Now and then, in the course of the century, a great man of science, like Darwin; a great poet, like Keats; a fine critical spirit, like M. Renan; a supreme artist, like Flaubert, has been able to isolate himself, to keep himself out of reach of the clamorous claims of others, to stand ‘under the shelter of the wall,’ as Plato puts it, and so to realise the perfection of what was in him, to his own incomparable gain, and to the incomparable and lasting gain of the whole world. These, however, are exceptions. The majority of people spoil their lives by an unhealthy and exaggerated altruism – are forced, indeed, so to spoil them. They find themselves surrounded by hideous poverty, by hideous ugliness, by hideous starvation.
- barrkel 9y ago
  We're built for a hedonic treadmill; our striving, and unhappiness with a steady stable state, increases our probability of genetic propagation at the cost of our neighbours. It's baked in at a low level, and if we don't figure something out, it'll be the doom of us all.
- taw55 9y ago
  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).
- atlih 9y ago
  And then came Zuckerbergs Harvard commencement address. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BmYv8XGl-YU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BmYv8XGl-YU Basically poor Jacque was 40 years ahead of his time.
erik14th 9y ago
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 happening.
- david927 9y ago
  Ideas often don't neatly, slowly segue into other ideas. The Ptolemaic model didn't migrate a step at a time to the Newtonian model. If progress has taught us anything is that we often spend too much time arguing at the leaf level when what is needed is to back a branch or two toward the trunk and make a change there. Moving out of Monarchy and Feudalism to Democracy was a sea change that overthrew everything before it. We managed it and are much happier because of it. While I don't agree with Fresco's vision entirely, it's not because fundamental changes aren't feasible or even, possibly, necessary.
- ilaksh 9y ago
  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.
stupidhn 9y ago
>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.

wavefunction 9y ago

>>Robert Murphy, an associate scholar at the Mises Institute, which promotes the teaching of Austrian economics, wrote in 2010 that idealists like Mr. Fresco were “wrong to blame our current dysfunctional world on capitalism or money per se.” Instead, Mr. Murphy wrote, if property rights were respected by all, “humanity would become fantastically wealthy.” I read this sort of claim by the 'serious and sober' and realize they're even more gassed up than the 'idealists.'

dragonwriter 9y ago
Austrian Economics is an ideology; if one is dividing the world into "serious and sober" and "idealists", Austrian-school adherents are emphatically the latter rather than the form.
- wavefunction 9y ago
  I'm commenting more that one idealistic notion is presented as academic and a settled fact while the other is presented as, well, idealist. I suppose the notion of 'all humans respecting property rights' sounds just as fantastical to me as the utopias promised by other philosophies.
afsina 9y ago
I think this is the relevant piece: https://mises.org/library/venus-needs-some-austrians https://mises.org/library/venus-needs-some-austrians I think Murphy is quite right.
- xenu101 9y ago
  I quote: "What I am arguing, then, is that in a truly free world, where we all respected each other's property, the rise in living standards would be analogous to our hypothetical boy who moves from the streets of Calcutta to the suburbs of Maine. In that fantastic world, giving someone a "free" heart surgery might be as cheap as giving someone a piece of gum in our current society." His whole article is a huge non-sequitur and I'm deeply concerned that these "Austrians" are regarded as "experts" whereas someone like Fresco is considered a Don Quixote.

partycoder 9y ago

While Mr. Fresco idea seems very reasonable, I think his mistake is attributing altruistic traits to everyone. Not everyone is altruistic. If there's a computer system governing everything, there will be a strong incentive to build bias into it, or use for mass surveillance or even tyranny. Then, there are aspects in which radial cities would not be good: - Epidemiology: you have everyone in this nice dome sharing objects. But one of them has a serious infectious disease. Now the entire population is at risk. - Defense: An adversarial force including but not limited to extremists would just target the center dome, a place accessible by everyone. You could argue that everyone would have what they need because of this egalitarian system, and there would be no violence. But take a look at communist countries and see what happens in practice. However, it is true though that we are very inefficient and wasteful in terms of how resources are used.

staticelf 9y ago
Would be worth a try though, wouldn't it? The main idea is also to reduce manual labour as fast as possible so more people can afford to be altruistic.
- sebastianconcpt 9y ago
  Mao and Lenin thought it was super worthy of trying, the material outcome wasn't as cool as the imaginary vision.
  - staticelf 9y ago
    I don't really think it's the same as communism though.
- RoyTyrell 9y ago
  Until we're living in a post-scarcity world with Star Trek replicators, and the ability to produce significantly more nearly 100% clean energy than could ever be consumed, everywhere on the planet where humans typically live I don't see how it's possible. Those would be the most basic limiting factors I can think of off the top of my head, and there are probably significantly more.

davexunit 9y ago

The world could use a few more Jacque Frescos.

swalsh 9y ago

I think as a whole his vision is little too "non organic". I don't think society can be planned to the degree he wished. However disassembled there were some solid ideas, many of which are becoming realities today. He represents one of my favorite parts of the 50's and 60's. Which struck me as a time where people imagined that it was totally possible to just upend society, and rebuild it in a better way. The level of optimism where if you can accomplish only 20% of the vision, you've done something significant.

worldsayshi 9y ago
Yeah, the planning part seems to be the major culprit when designing "alternative economical systems". Anyone who would want to propose a serious "alternative to the capitalist system" - which is kind of what it boils down to - would have to figure out how to out-compete the planning efficiency of capitalism. My personal favorite would be something in the way of a Wiki-like consensus engine with "many-eyeballs" checks and balances. All planning is public, all planning can be corrected by anyone. Sabotage can be avoided by there effectively being significantly more 'reviewers' than editors or through some other mean of making sabotage harder than correction. It works for Wikipedia, why not for societal planning?
cLeEOGPw 9y ago
He was absolutely out of touch. At no point he ever considered the basic human, as an animal species, instincts, tendencies, mechanisms and other mechanics surrounding human societies. His idea of society is an equivalent of designing an everlasting engine with assumptions like friction, radiation, air resistance and evaporation doesn't exist. He discarded reality, created his own reality in his own mind and pushed an idea as worthy of some kind of significance. The only thing that this man taught me is how far you can get just by being super persuasive.
Shorel 9y ago
I wish we knew how the Inca empire worked. By the few remaining accounts we have, it worked just as Fresco described. But too many details were destroyed by the Spaniards.

sebastianconcpt 9y ago

RIP Fresco. I really like him and his work. But I never understood why he was convinced about the Resource Based Economy. Shouldn't a RBE have the exact same problems as any Central Planned economy? Wasn't this refuted in 1920 by Mises? https://mises.org/sites/default/files/Economic%20Calculation%20in%20the%20Socialist%20Commonwealth_Vol_2_3.pdf https://mises.org/sites/default/files/Economic%20Calculation...

bionsuba 9y ago
I've had the misfortune of listening to Fresco on a podcast, and he came right out and stated that 1. Humans don't have a capacity for reason 2. If reason existed it couldn't lead to any truth 3. That people only find scientific discoveries via chance So I wouldn't expect him to be dissuaded by a rational argument. He also believes in the blank slate theory, so not exactly up to date in the science world.
- btg_1987 9y ago
  1) Overall, yes. 2) Citation needed. 3) Correct, they react to stimuli. I agree with you on the blank slate theory and that Fresco was not up to date on this. Genetics has an impact on skull formation, brain tissue, etc.
  - bionsuba 9y ago
    >Overall, yes So the creatures who invented the conceptual framework of reason and logic have no way to use reason and logic. Got it. >Citation needed Here's one example of his opinions on reason: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQcYZpY9JI0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQcYZpY9JI0 >Correct, they react to stimuli. If humans didn't have a capacity for reason, then observing stimuli wouldn't mean anything and we wouldn't be able to transform observation to concepts. His example was people accidentally making a camera obscura by having a hole in the wall. Without reason, you 1. Wouldn't be able to conclude that it was even the hole in the wall causing the effect 2. Would be equally likely to attribute the image to the act of a divine power And his failings on blank slate theory are not on the genetics side of things, but on human behavior. Much like the conception of the new socialist man, his thinking relies on behaviorism.

bikamonki 9y ago

Marginal unit cost of production moving closer to zero, the sharing economy, AI replacing human labor, descentralized crypto-currencies, universal minimun income, autonomous transportation, clean energy, space travel. Fresco was right on the mark. RIP wise man.

btg_1987 9y ago

I remember speaking with Jacque in Miami at one of his lectures. He was a very honest and sincere man (but not to the point of trying to demean you to get his point across). He will be missed. Roxanne Meadows penned a lovely open letter concerning this: https://www.thevenusproject.com/ https://www.thevenusproject.com/ Their vision and ideology is an interesting one, but may take a few hundred years before viable for implementation. Too many growing pains still involved in earth culture.

igor_filippov 9y ago

I've met his followers in Berlin once, "naive" - the best word I can find to describe them. In the end, they struggled to answer the core question: "Why would anyone take seriously a man, who can't prove his idea in a lean way?". Please, build a city where everyone is happy and everything is handled by the machines, show the rest of the world you're right! Reminds me of wantrepreneurs who can't scrape together 10k to build an MVP for their startup idea. If you can't find money to build a prototype, then no sane investor should trust you.

worldsayshi 9y ago
> If you can't find money to build a prototype, then no sane investor should trust you. Sounds like a circular argument to me? I would agree with the notion that the ideas seem naïve. But how could grandiose ideas not be that?
- igor_filippov 9y ago
  No, just put aside some money before quitting your day job and you're fine. Again, if you can't manage to fund development of your MVP, then maybe entrepreneurship isn't for you. I guess the same applies to the "Venus Project".
  - worldsayshi 9y ago
    In other words, if you're not rich entrepreneurship is not for you. edit: Sure I realize that you can start with something smaller and fund able by smaller means. But how long until you can fund what you really want to create?
    - igor_filippov 9y ago
      If you can't make money, entrepreneurship is not for you.
      - worldsayshi 9y ago

jhbadger 9y ago

He always reminded me of fellow utopian Paolo Soleri (who died in 2013) -- even though their ideas were impractical (at least in the short term), we really need dreamers like them to make people question whether current society is really as good as we can hope for.

erikpukinskis 9y ago
Paulo Soleri was indeed a gem. I visited Arcosanti years ago... A group of friends rented some rooms in the complex and took the tour. Interesting bunch of older artsy types in a typical intentional community: compelling, but seemingly dying. Then we realized there was a whole other "city" of young people living in the "temporary" construction housing down the hill. These were young people eager to move the vision forward, but were generally stifled because Soleri himself (or his supporters who were older and "full citizens" of Arcosanti) didn't want to deviate from The Plan. I think this is what kills most of these intentional communities... They create a class structure where the in group has privileges the out group doesn't, which leads to inevitable ideological calcification, which leads to inevitable decline. The solution, in my mind, is to build on the idea that every person is a potential contributor, but for health issues, and that we live in a time of plenty. This changes "no that won't work young one" and "no get out of here bad man" to "how can we marshal the resources to do that too?" and "let's get you some health care services".

uranian 9y ago

This is a true loss for the world. Although his revolutionary ideas were IMHO by times a little over the edge, he envisioned and fought for a world without poverty and war, where earth's resources are not being depleted by hunger for money and power; A resource based economy. Thank you Jaques Fresco for opening my eyes to this and RIP.

barrkel 9y ago

"if property rights were respected by all, “humanity would become fantastically wealthy.”" This comment by Robert Murphy is a weird non sequitur apropos of not much in the article. If property rights are respected by all, some small fraction of humanity will indeed become fantastically wealthy, but the vast majority would be on the tail end of a very thinly tailed distribution as humans become worthless for production - leading to quite a bit of aggregate unhappiness.

EGreg 9y ago
When anarcho capitalists make the jump from the non-aggression principle (NAP) to property rights, they invariably switch from using deontological arguments to consequentialist arguments like everyone else: "Look communism failed, capitalism produces more wealth" "Well if everyone has everything they need, who's going to work?" It sounds like the music industry asking who's going to record songs if copyright isn't strictly enforced.
- Jabanga 9y ago
  I'm not an anarcho-capitalist, but I am a fierce proponent of private property rights, and I regularly make deontological arguments for them. My central argument is that self-ownership (the right to our person) implies a right to appropriate natural resources, since our bodies are constituted of natural resources that at some point we appropriated. That same principle should extend to non-biological appropriation, since there's no reason to give a different moral treatment based on how the natural resources were appropriated. Thus, our property is an extension of our self, which axiomatically we consider people to have an absolute right to. What it ultimately comes down to is that the value you add to natural resources morally belongs to you. When you turn 100 lb of food into a brain, that produces Mozart's symphonies, you are converting matter into a higher value form, and you should be entitled to that value. Similarly when you convert a dead tree into a canoe, you should be entitled to that canoe, minus whatever value you're depriving society of by depriving them of the log. This is just and this is fair, and appropriately, it aligns with consequentialism.
Jabanga 9y ago

wawka13 9y ago

The truly big loss for the whole world. RIP, Fresco. Also, if someone needs an essay or paper about him - fill free to visit it at https://handmadewritings.com https://handmadewritings.com

kovek 9y ago
What does this handmadewritings website have to do with Jacque Fresco his Venus Project?
- dredmorbius 9y ago
  Hint: It doesn't, it's spam.

boona 9y ago

You mean someone who understands the complexities of the markets and the financial system wasn't convinced by Marxism with robots? I can't imagine why.

Findeton 9y ago
But it has a new flavour! Planned economy is cool again! (apparently).
rbanffy 9y ago
Maybe he meant someone who is deeply indoctrinated into a set of core assumptions cannot be convinced those assumptions can be changed.
- cholantesh 9y ago
  Why not consider the possibility that Fresco's core assumptions and arguments are flawed? Both can be true.
dang 9y ago
Please don't post snarky swipes here. If you have a substantive point to make, please make it thoughtfully; otherwise please don't comment until you do. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14423470 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14423470 and marked it off-topic.
- boona 9y ago
  First, a comment that promotes Marxism or Nazism or any of heinous ideologies should be met with a certain harshness. We tried that in the 20th century, and considering the 100+ million dead people (most of it due to Marxism), I think it's fair to say that that was a bad turn in human history. Second, considering that the comment I was replying to contained snark i.e. "atheist trying to convince the pope about his convictions", I'm not sure why you focused on mine. In the future, please be consistent with your application of warnings. You wouldn't want to members to believe that you're ideologically driven rather than promoting open intellectual discussion.

boona 9y ago

I think society values good intention way too much. This man fought his entire life for what amounts to Marxism with robots. His intentions may have been good, his heart in the right place, but his ideas were bad, and if implemented, they would be disastrous. If we judge him by his intentions, he was a good man. If we judge him by what he wished upon the world, he was a horrible human being. Though we should keep good intentions in mind, I strongly believe that we should also judge the outcome of what people are proposing.

cryodesign 9y ago
Can you explain how his ideas would be disastrous?
- boona 9y ago
  I'm having that discussion elsewhere in the comments. Here is my comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=14425382 https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=14425382.

EGreg 9y ago

Far more interesting (to me) than a specific Venus project concept art was Jacques Fresco interviews and stories about his life. I once sent them to Noam Chomsky to listen as a fellow elderly guy and child of the Depression from a different perspective. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7e9IdujGy0U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7e9IdujGy0U

ue_ 9y ago

When I was about 14 or 15 my first exposure to different schools of social organisation was Fresco, I found him through the Zeitgeist documentary (which I was foolish enough to believe in conspiracies with). I then looked at the Venus project and various of his videos and interviews on Youtube. He seemed like a great man, and although I think his ideas didn't put much into action, I really admired them. For the past 8 years or so he had passed out of my mind, I barely thought of the Venus Project, and it was surprising and saddening to read this news. RIP Fresco.

cryodesign 9y ago

STAR TREK Gene Roddenberry was inspired by Fresco's ideas. A world where people could focus on personal development and nobody would have to be in this rat race anymore, enabling a higher standard of living for all people. Jacque was a great visionary, inventor and systems thinker - he will be missed. You should watch his documentary Future by Design [0]. He was talking about 3D printed houses, holistic transportation systems, smart cities, etc [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1IXWnS6vwk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1IXWnS6vwk

jokoon 9y ago

Once you realize politicians do an actual hard job running things by using deception, and when you realize money is just a tool we use to measure what goes where with accounting, then you realize we use money because even the best ideas don't work because humans are natural competitors. Money is not about corruption or running numbers, it's about counting sheeps in a complex human society. That's it. Currency is not bad in itself, it's just that the world is so large, and since it's not possible to organize such a large place, we use currency so that things self-regulate. People are already trying to not use money, and have more simple lives, but everyone realizes that we all are feet deep into our sweet comforts and we can't let it go. It's great to have ideas, it's another to execute them. I felt a little more interested by what kind of city Fresco was proposing, and all the architectural details, than the leap of faith into less poverty and less war. By all means, if you have ideas to reduce poverty in any place in the world, and reduce conflict in Syria, I'm sure the UN and most western governments want to hear about what you want to say. It's time to let the ideology go, and work on more fine-detailed, feasible objectives. Local politics or organizing a neighborhood seems much more realistic to me, than building new cities from scratch.

Elinvention 9y ago
I think you don't know much about The Venus Project. He did not believe human were competitive by nature. He believed competition is a product of scarcity. And he understood that while visiting the Tuamotu islands, where natives lived very differently than we do. Corruption in a monetary system is exacerbated. It's so easy to pay off someone that it became normal. We do know how to reduce conflict. But we don't want to. Every country has interests to keep one of the factions involved in power. How can the conflict terminate if one country gives weapons to a faction while another bombs them? In 2016 he was awarded by UN for "City Design & Community". And he may receive other awards post mortem. If you look more deeply there is little ideology in Fresco's view.
- jokoon 9y ago
  > I think you don't know much about The Venus Project. I learned about this project in 2009. It's idealist by nature. It's great, but it doesn't really account for the reality of how politics work. > He believed competition is a product of scarcity. Good luck keeping that nice living standard by removing competition off the table. Corruption is why we win. > But we don't want to. Geopolitics at play, there is so little people can really do about it. Ultimately, people will choose to be able to afford another lollipop to their kid, rather than maybe care about people thousands of kilometers away. We'd rather save 10 cent on the gallon of gas or get marshmallow than let our neighbor have shelter. Husbands will gladly shit in their neighbor's yard just to content their wives. The intricacies are so complex and people don't really have time to really care at all, but ultimately, at the larger scale, we still are competitive because that's how the first world get comfortable. It's crazy how people can eat organic but won't try to be informed about the middle east and how the world is poor. I have respect for his project, but it seems to make abstraction of the politics of what he is proposing. It says "beyond politics". You cannot remove politics from the equation. Politics is how the world works.

ElijahLynn 9y ago

Jacque will be missed. Fantastic communication, patience and ideas. I actually wrote Jacque in once as my vote for president as well as donated to the Venus Project. This should be front page news, good to hear it at least is on HN and NYT. He has said in the past he didn't think our current society would make it to his ideas in his lifetime and that it may take a 100 years or so. He knew he was playing the long game and was laying the ground work for society many years out. A true visionary unbound by the scars of modern civilization. Jacque (and Roxanne) have deeply affected my life and direction. I will continue to strive towards the ideas brought forth by them.

id122015 9y ago

the fire consumes all the fuel that it receives. Although his concepts look nice on paper I dont understand what the solution is to stop people to breed exponentially. And then we are back to the same problem we have now.

_rpd 9y ago
> what the solution is to stop people to breed exponentially In developing nations, large families are used as a kind of social security. Developed nations with good social security have population growth rates below replacement (modulo immigration). The best way to curb population growth is through universal education and long term economic well being.
btg_1987 9y ago
By understanding the reason why people have many kids to begin with: -To help you when you get old? -Because my religion says so? -My parents had many kids, so that seems natural It all comes down to numbers. What is the ceiling number for the carrying capacity of humans on this planet? Seems like an important question for the next 5 generations of people.

deft 9y ago

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...

widowlark 9y ago
I think this is an oversimplification. Its not likely that this planned economy would ever work in the first place, and he readily acknowledges this. However, he got us thinking about cybernetics and automation way before anyone else. Also, he accurately predicted driverless cars and the connection between wireless communication, computing, and avoidance sensors! "We must stop constantly fighting for human rights and equal justice in an unjust system, and start building a society where equal rights are an integral part of the design."
stupidhn 9y ago
>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.
dispo001 9y ago
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?

widowlark 9y ago

It's interesting to note that Jacque, while definitely a little out there on execution, has been warning us about the effects of automation for 50 years. His proposed solution of a planned economy will not work, but his vision of what the future will look like when we have robotics and automation as the main future forces of economy are spot on. He also envisioned centralized (and distributed) computing and governmental computing systems, something that will have widespread implementation within the next half century.

progrocks9 9y ago

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.