24 ms·

The Venus Project

63 points by nynx 5y ago

yissp 5y ago
The Technocracy movement had a somewhat similar ethos, and gained a decent following in the '30s, but obviously nothing really came of it https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technocracy_movement https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technocracy_movement
JoeAltmaier 5y ago
The flummery language makes me wary. So many words to say so little. Long unnecessary words chosen to sound smart. Run.
- zopa 5y ago
  Plus a certain lack of self-awareness: > Language has evolved over centuries through ages of scarcity, superstition, and social insufficiency, and often contains ambiguity and uncertainty when important issues are at stake. (From https://www.thevenusproject.com/resource-based-economy/human-factors/ https://www.thevenusproject.com/resource-based-economy/human...)
travisporter 5y ago
Host error cloudflare
bregma 5y ago
A centrally-planned economy has been tried many times previously. From each according to their ability, to each according to their need, all that stuff. I guess this time it will end well?
- dsego 5y ago
  All capitalist companies are centrally-planned hierarchical structures and run on quarterly plans.
- tenuousemphasis 5y ago
  How is capitalism working out for the world?
  - mnsc 5y ago
    Please don't respond to snark with more snark.
  - ggambetta 5y ago
    Infinitely better than communism ever did?
  - Hayvok 5y ago
    It’s been awesome in general. Fueled the greatest expansion of economic output, standard of living, health, population increase, personal freedoms, etc. since we first rolled a wheel. But I tire of having to praise capitalism. Capitalism does not need my defending. Let’s see proof of another working system that hasn’t resulted in famines, gulags, brutal repression, and people trying to escape to - wait for it - a capitalist society.
    - imtringued 5y ago
      Well, the Venus Project should scrap their ideas and just adopt Freiwirtschaft.
  - zopa 5y ago
    I'm open to considering alternatives. But if the proposal is some form of central planning, I think the burden is on the proponents to actually have a plan. Pointing out problems isn't the same as having a solution.
  - geomark 5y ago
    If the history books haven't been completely falsified, it would seem that it has raised hundreds of millions of people out of abject poverty.
    - laumars 5y ago
- phreeza 5y ago
  It needs a certain change of perspective, but big companies are in effect large centrally planned economies that are thriving, many several times the size of a small country.
  - foobiekr 5y ago
    The amount of waste and craziness, inequity, and straight out maliciousness that I've personally witnessed at the upper and upper-middle layers of large companies is reminiscent of most resource-extraction-oriented small countries (banana republics). They are not efficient or pleasant. There's a reason small companies outperform them and are a threat to them and why they focus so hard on regulatory capture to prevent competition.
    - phreeza 5y ago
      I'm not saying they are all great places, I'm just saying they are an existence proof for large scale centrally planned economic entities that don't collapse like many centrally planned national economies, suggesting that central planning was maybe not the deciding factor.
      - foobiekr 5y ago
        Based on the changes to the set of large companies over time, they do in fact collapse and generally very few even last 30-40 years let alone hundreds.
        phreeza 5y ago
        Good point, but some like GE or petroleum companies seem to have lasted quite long already.
    - freemint 5y ago
      > The amount of waste and craziness, inequity, and straight out maliciousness that I've personally witnessed at the upper and upper-middle layers of large companies interestingly places that are not controlled by democratic means, i wonder if these places were electable and up for challenge by everyone in the company if those behaviors you associate with non-democratic states would become less.
- kukx 5y ago
  If anyone is in doubt that's the purpose of this endeavor here's a related fragment: "- Realizing the declaration of the world’s resources as being the common heritage of all people. - Replacing money-based nationalistic economies with a resource-based world economy."
  - NikolaeVarius 5y ago
    That doesn't make any sense. Are we going back to bartering with shiny rocks and physical goods?
    - kragen 5y ago
      It might make more sense if you read the site rather than random fragments quoted from it out of context. Fresco's idea of a "resource-based economy" is kind of vague to me but is definitely not a plan to move to a barter economy; instead it seems to be some kind of centrally-planned economy to mathematically optimize productivity using operations-research algorithms with democratically-decided production priorities.
  - birriel 5y ago
    There's never been an economy that wasn't resource-based. Money is just the medium by which prices and price movements are allowed to allocate those (scarce) resources in a market economy, and so far it has proven to be the most efficient way to achieve that.
    - imtringued 5y ago
      Money is flawed but it doesn't have to be abolished. There are some good and old ideas like the IMF SDR. There is also the option to get to negative real interest rates to ensure people spend or invest their money. Saving money without a corresponding debtor is the same as delaying the economy. During a recession everyone is delaying the economy.
- SuoDuanDao 5y ago
  Building the cult-of-personality around an AI that takes human inputs Mturk-style does seem likelier to work than building it around a single human. But at that point, how different is it from the system we have now?..
- scns 5y ago
  Even though i'm no fan, i think that capitalism is a matches better with our genes. Competition for resources and mates seems to be what drives us. Criminals and scientists alike exert the highest effort till they hit 30 years of age. The old status pyramid does not care, if we wish it away. But i still think better forms of living are possible. Instead of a tribal us vs them, be it neighbour / sports team / city / state / skin colour / political affiliation / whatever... I think a more inclusive, communal style of living is possible. Would lower the rate of depression caused by loneliness / alienation too i think.
  - stronglikedan 5y ago
    > Even though i'm no fan, i think that capitalism is a matches better with our genes. Capitalism can be great for all. Unfortunately, in the US at least, we only have crony capitalism.
    - malermeister 5y ago
      I would argue that any form of capitalism devolves into "crony capitalism" sooner or later. It's an inherent feature of the system. As people or groups acquire more resources through their capitalist success, the obvious next step for them is to distort the system to their advantage through regulatory capture. A "free market" can only be sustained until someone gets rich enough to bribe themselves into an unfair advantage.
      - stronglikedan 5y ago
        It's still the best system we've ever had (without the crony part). I'm all for making it better, or even replacing it, just not with something that has been tried before. Especially something that's been tried and failed many times, at the cost of millions of lives.
        malermeister 5y ago
        I'd argue something better was there in the form of Socialist Yugoslavia - an economically successful country, with social freedoms and freedom of movement (only passport that was able to freely travel both blocks during the cold war!), greater economic self-determination than today's capitalist systems (all companies were worker-run coops, competing in the marketplace with leadership elected by workers). Unfortunately, ethnic strife and nationalism brought it to an end. I also think that line of reasoning ignores the opportunity cost of not trying - it's easy for us to condemn other systems for killing people when we are not part of the millions in the global south being killed by capitalism _right now_. Try telling a person living in the Congo, ravaged by warlords fighting for resources to sell on the marketplace, how capitalism is "the best system we've ever had" and see how they feel about it.
- freemint 5y ago
  Provided we learn from the past it will be better than last time and unlike market mechanisms which are able only to guarantee that a point of the pareto front can reached under exploitation planned economies allows selection of where on the pareto front people want to land. This should happen democratically. - many actors in our economy run a small (or big) private cenrtrally-planned economy [1] - as all those centrally planned economies were in non democratic states it's not obvious if the flaw is central planning or being non-democratic. I find it reasonable that more democracy would help as east Germany which at least had a fake parties and regular elections did better than it's eastern comrades - computer are a lot faster and algorithms for mixed-integer linear programming (or similar modeling frameworks) have matured - databases or similar immutable storage technologies make corruption a lot harder - central planning in combination with free trade could remove inefficiencies in the current economic system inside the country [1] The People’s Republic of Walmart Note: I am not particularly convinced by the venus projects
- droptablemain 5y ago
  The Soviet Union consistently had the highest GDP growth in the 20th century with a centrally planned economy. Russia transformed from a backwoods feudal mudpit into a global superpower. Some aspects of China's economy today are still centrally planned, and they continue to have excellent growth. I'm not saying every aspect of the economy should be planned; but the opposite -- giving complete lead to the anarchy of production -- has proven to be disastrous for average working people.
  - _dain_ 5y ago
    Ten million corpses here, ten million corpses there, pretty soon we'll be making _real_ progress!
    - southerntofu 5y ago
      Which brand of industrial capitalism are you advertising here? /s
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - freemint 5y ago
    I think any effort to demonstrate the viability of planned economies based on past non-democratic planned economies is doomed to fail as people won't easily accept a dictatorship. Any future implementation will need to trade with the non planned world (as trade is the best deterrent from being attacked by other democracies) and it needs to be democratic both in the workplace and in governance of the state.
    - vagrantJin 5y ago
      > won't easily accept a dictatorship. What would they do in case they were in a ditatorship? I'm of the opinion that democracy in governance is something akin to a farce. Without money, it falls apart.
      - 5y ago
- southerntofu 5y ago
  Central planning was indeed common in the 20th century (and previously), however "to each according to their needs" (an old anarchist principle) was rarely applied, as most of the world lived under capitalist rule. Most notably, USSR and China were "never" (at least not for more than a few months) communist utopias, but rather State-capitalist economies. I believe an egalitarian society is fundamentally incompatible both with central planning and with private property. Some level of coordination/cooperation is required, but central planning means a higher authority gets to decide who needs what which sounds just like capitalism all over again. Or, as some USSR critics have put it in the past, "we're all equal, but some are more equal than others". On the topic of (lack of) Communism in Russia, you can read Emma Goldman from 1935: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/emma-goldman-there-is-no-communism-in-russia https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/emma-goldman-there-i...
minihat 5y ago
The mission statement gives me some psychohistory vibes >The Venus Project is a non-profit organization that presents a new socio-economic model utilizing science and technology toward social betterment to achieve a sustainable civilization of abundance for all, without exception. But sadly, nothing of substance to be found upon digging deeper. I came expecting science, but what I found was a t-shirt and book sale.
- 7thaccount 5y ago
  If you're interested in psychohistory, there is a field called "cliomancy" where scholars attempt to actually treat history as a somewhat hard science and look for correlating trends and stuff. I'm massively oversimplifying of course. I think Peter Turchin is the most well known author in the field.
  - Rerarom 5y ago
    Cliodynamics actually
    - 7thaccount 5y ago
      Haha. Thank you. Not sure how I goofed that one up.
kragen 5y ago
Perhaps a better source than the text and images on the website, sadly, is the 02006 documentary about the Venus Project: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1IXWnS6vwk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1IXWnS6vwk https://www.thevenusproject.com/multimedia/future-by-design-2006-official-full-movie/ https://www.thevenusproject.com/multimedia/future-by-design-... Worth noting that Peter Joseph founded the Zeitgeist Movement as a sort of evangelical wing of the Venus Project, but then it got excommunicated some years later — the Venus Project folks didn't like the direction it was going. In a sense Jacque Fresco was one of the last of a group of believers in progress who sought to design a better future for humanity from first principles, along with Paolo Soleri, Buckminster Fuller, Joseph Stalin, Walt Disney, Mao Zedong, Juan Perón, Falco, and Franklin Roosevelt. The failures of that movement have included some of the greatest tragedies in the history of humanity, arguably including the advent of nuclear warfare, but its successes have also been quite notable, including space travel, the elimination of polio and smallpox, and the modern welfare state. I'm not convinced that strong, centralized states that can carry out such plans are a net good (and Fresco apparently had plans to sort of eliminate them, although I haven't been able to find the details), but if we are going have such a state in place — the status quo in developed countries — it would be better for it to carry out judiciously chosen plans for improving the general welfare than for it to spend its strength on limiting access to borax, toluene, and copyrighted information.
- freemint 5y ago
  Calling ones discipline "sociocyberneering" is a bit much. I also find it interesting how much of Fresco's designs is designed inside an suburban context. Interestingly also hyperloop like concepts: https://youtu.be/I1IXWnS6vwk?t=2376 https://youtu.be/I1IXWnS6vwk?t=2376 And so much individual transport I find it interesting that in this youtube video only old people are interested in the future he proposes.
  - kragen 5y ago
    Remember Fresco grew up in a time when socially accepted people invented words like "cybernetics", "Dymaxion", "omnitriangulated", "magnetron", "transistor", "Comintern", and "sociobiology". Today it's socially acceptable to go around inventing acronyms, but probably in 80 years people will sneer at anyone who insists on naming their inventions things like "UAVs" and "SHORAD". This may have something to do with why mostly only old people were interested: people are mostly guided by what is fashionable, so when someone is working on an angle that was fashionable forty years earlier, mostly only people who grew up when it was fashionable will pay attention.
anovikov 5y ago
Communism 2.0... what can possibly go wrong? I can still remember the sugar and sausage queues...
- UncleEntity 5y ago
  The Algorithm has determined that sugar and sausage are at odds with a good and wholesome society so has shifted the production resources to the new Soma Pharmaceuticals production facility, thank you for your support in these new and exciting times.
- erulabs 5y ago
  You know, that comment at first seems hyperbolic, and then: > As we outgrow the need for professions such as lawyers, bankers, insurance agents, marketing and advertising personnel, salespersons, and stockbrokers, a considerable amount of waste of human ingenuity will be eliminated. Considerable amounts of energy would also be saved by eliminating the duplication of competitive products such as tools, eating utensils, pots, pans and vacuum cleaners. Only a few of the highest quality products would be needed to serve the entire population instead of hundreds of different manufacturing plants with paperwork and personnel turning out similar products. Ah yes, the waste of jobs we don't see the point in and bottom shelf products we don't buy. It's rarely that an admonishment like "ah, so just communism, eh?" is actually technically correct. The waste argument is my favorite because it is the polar opposite of the entrepreneur's argument: instead of making something people like, their aim is to aim something that will do and eliminate all other competition: efficiency! That communists do not see that ultimately -they- are the most brutal capitalists is an irony so rich and deep i'm practically bourgeoisie for tasting it. The history of the VW Beetle is very similar. Why make loads of cars? So wasteful! The people should make just one, great car! Ah, the giant megafactory we were promised was built to make our VWs is making tanks? Shucks, so much for power and capital! Decentralization isn't efficient, it's resilient.
hannasanarion 5y ago
You can tell that it's not utopian because of all the definitely constructable and not at all unrealistic or impractical architectural renders made of a definitely extant white material of infinite strength and malleability.
- freemint 5y ago
  Oww, come one. Plastic-cement composite materials are strong enough. However impractical they are.
  - taberiand 5y ago
    Solve climate change one plastic-cement centrally-planned megastructure at a time, what could go wrong?
    - imtringued 5y ago
      It will end up like many recycled products. Originally designed to reduce waste but then the product itself becomes popular enough that there isn't enough waste material and newly extracted raw materials are used instead.
beaconstudios 5y ago
this reminds me of two other hypothetical projects: Fully Automated Luxury Communism, and The Australia Project from Manna (https://marshallbrain.com/manna1 https://marshallbrain.com/manna1). This is the (I would think, obvious) utopian ideal of a post-scarcity or late-scarcity economy. The hard part is actually making it possible, ie routing through the potential futures to get to this destination. You have all of Earth's accumulated sociopolitical baggage as a headwind, plus the challenge of designing and implementing a global adaptive logistical system. I'm not saying it's impossible, but the fantasy is the easy part.
- SuoDuanDao 5y ago
  Great point. I've been thinking about this in terms of the declaration 'economic growth is decoupling from resource use'. I'm sure that what's meant by that is that portions of the economy are entering a late-scarcity stage; music and books certainly don't feel scarce right now. But the statement that an economy like that is 'growing' seems to imply something untrue about the things that still are scarce. I'm not super up on Star Trek lore, but to my understanding the setting takes place in a post-scarcity universe, where the only thing that is still scarce is latinum. Latinum isn't good for much except that it can't be replicated, so some traditions from the scarcity era use it as a medium of exchange, even though everything useful can be produced without any latinum. When a cup of earl grey is replicated, does the value of the remaining latinum go up or down compared to the (now slightly larger) economy? It seems like there's a fundamental problem with the structure of our thought around these questions. We can imagine scarcity and it's absence, but we seem cognitively unprepared for a situation where some things are valuable and scarce and others are valuable but not scarce.
  - Ieghaehia9 5y ago
    > I'm not super up on Star Trek lore, but to my understanding the setting takes place in a post-scarcity universe, where the only thing that is still scarce is latinum. Perhaps it's some material where replicators always add some noise to the atomic structure when replicating; and then the "value" is just how close it's to a perfect structure, by whatever measure of perfection. Then you'd have replicator farms just replicating them over and over until something of acceptable quality pops out - like a physical PoW. It makes for a fun theory at least! And the post-scarcity societies can go "whatever would you want that for?"
SkeuomorphicBee 5y ago
Their flagship project (that campus they are calling "center for resource management") seems like an amalgamation of all that is wrong with last century urbanism, it seems like the 1950s idea of an utopia. They ignored all that we now know about building on a human scale, walkability, mixed-use, and close connection; and instead went with a cross between a North-American detached-suburb, a golf course, and a 1950s car-centric planned city. They seem to be the type of person that thinks Brasilia is an example to be followed.
hypertele-Xii 5y ago
I volunteered years ago. Wrote a technical proposal for achieving their mission goals. The only response or discussion was that they would get "the experts" in to solve these problems laters, instead we should only focus on promotion and advertizing. Considering I am an expert in the subject I wrote on, I found it very condescending and lost all interest (and indeed, belief) in the Venus Project (totally not just communist futurism). Also they make you sign an NDA. So you can't talk about the better world you're supposedly building.
- panick21 5y ago
  Haha, that amazing. It always seem that they just had ideas and when anybody asked on actually how anything would work it was always 'some experts will make some software'. I always asked where the open source was where that software was being developed but apparently nothing actually existed.
PaulHoule 5y ago
It looks like Epcot Center.
i4004 5y ago
Oh, the venus project. A decade ago, back in 2009, I tried to get involved with this with a group of friends. We had formed our own branch, so we reached out to them as a means of cooperation. We were threatened with legal action. We opted to be transparent and call them, and we got an extremely rude and unprofessional individual on the other side of the line who continued to be uncooperative and threatened more legal action. Well, that was the end of any cooperation. It was for the best though, I was more naive back then and it was good to learn how two-faced an organization can be.
ilaksh 5y ago
My own hope is that the large and growing global group of technocrats and related ideologies will incorporate some understanding of decentralized technologies and a general appreciation for the robustness of networks. The thing about decentralization technologies that people don't realize is that they are actually are best approach for creating global holistic systems, but in a scalable, fair, and evolvable way. Using distributed technological solutions, it should be possible have comprehensive accounting and planning without an actual centralized point of failure and authoritarianism. For example, one or more peer-based databases aggregating global resource use data would provide powerful and relatively objective insights for planners. I think rather than eliminating money, we need to upgrade it to be a high tech systems that integrates more information.
- junon 5y ago
  > My own hope is that the large and growing global group of technocrats and related ideologies will incorporate some understanding of decentralized technologies and a general appreciation for the robustness of networks. Everyone has an appreciation for robust networks, I don't really see how that relates. Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp all went down for several hours the other day and almost everyone on Earth knew about it and was impacted in some way, even indirectly. > The thing about decentralization technologies that people don't realize is that they are actually are best approach for creating global holistic systems, but in a scalable, fair, and evolvable way. On paper. In practice, there are still ways to control such systems as we've seen with Etherium, and there are other issues that come into play - such as massive electrical requirements, and the fact that if the system were to fail catastrophically (in the case where we rely on it entirely), we're left with nothing. > Using distributed technological solutions, it should be possible have comprehensive accounting and planning without an actual centralized point of failure and authoritarianism. For example, one or more peer-based databases aggregating global resource use data would provide powerful and relatively objective insights for planners. So many words to say "decentralized currencies exist". This doesn't really say anything. > I think rather than eliminating money, we need to upgrade it to be a high tech systems that integrates more information. Ah yes, more information. Let's track everyone's purchases down to the very cent and publicly broadcast them on a ledger, force everyone to use it, and then reap the rewards when someone is able to control it.
junon 5y ago
This looks like vaporware and a fever dream from someone who watched iRobot a few too many times. There's nothing of substance on the page, no real "goal", no real demonstration of competency. Just some pretty pictures of a high tech utopia and some airy words about a better future, with no plan on how to get there.
bryal 5y ago
Sounds like the Zeitgeist movement. Just some Americans re-inventing socialism yet again (more specifically the branch of socialism sometimes referred to as Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism), but not reading any of the existing theory, thus resulting in this square wheel scenario.
- LinuxBender 5y ago
  In fact this site and the idea was promoted heavily in the original release of the Zeitgeist movie by Peter Joseph back in 2007 and 2010. It's too bad really because the first parts of that movie minus the weird psychological intro was actually quite interesting. It was a very divisive and curious set of topics covered that caused different factions to try to debunk each other. They are still at it to this day. You can find pieces of it on youtube but now that it is a well funded movie they keep pulling it. The debates from all the people he angered are still up though. It really upset many religious communities.

63 points by nynx 5y ago

The Technocracy movement had a somewhat similar ethos, and gained a decent following in the '30s, but obviously nothing really came of it https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technocracy_movement https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technocracy_movement

JoeAltmaier 5y ago

The flummery language makes me wary. So many words to say so little. Long unnecessary words chosen to sound smart. Run.

zopa 5y ago
Plus a certain lack of self-awareness: > Language has evolved over centuries through ages of scarcity, superstition, and social insufficiency, and often contains ambiguity and uncertainty when important issues are at stake. (From https://www.thevenusproject.com/resource-based-economy/human-factors/ https://www.thevenusproject.com/resource-based-economy/human...)

travisporter 5y ago

Host error cloudflare

bregma 5y ago

A centrally-planned economy has been tried many times previously. From each according to their ability, to each according to their need, all that stuff. I guess this time it will end well?

dsego 5y ago
All capitalist companies are centrally-planned hierarchical structures and run on quarterly plans.
tenuousemphasis 5y ago
How is capitalism working out for the world?
- mnsc 5y ago
  Please don't respond to snark with more snark.
- ggambetta 5y ago
  Infinitely better than communism ever did?
- Hayvok 5y ago
  It’s been awesome in general. Fueled the greatest expansion of economic output, standard of living, health, population increase, personal freedoms, etc. since we first rolled a wheel. But I tire of having to praise capitalism. Capitalism does not need my defending. Let’s see proof of another working system that hasn’t resulted in famines, gulags, brutal repression, and people trying to escape to - wait for it - a capitalist society.
  - imtringued 5y ago
    Well, the Venus Project should scrap their ideas and just adopt Freiwirtschaft.
- zopa 5y ago
  I'm open to considering alternatives. But if the proposal is some form of central planning, I think the burden is on the proponents to actually have a plan. Pointing out problems isn't the same as having a solution.
- geomark 5y ago
  If the history books haven't been completely falsified, it would seem that it has raised hundreds of millions of people out of abject poverty.
  - laumars 5y ago
phreeza 5y ago
It needs a certain change of perspective, but big companies are in effect large centrally planned economies that are thriving, many several times the size of a small country.
- foobiekr 5y ago
  The amount of waste and craziness, inequity, and straight out maliciousness that I've personally witnessed at the upper and upper-middle layers of large companies is reminiscent of most resource-extraction-oriented small countries (banana republics). They are not efficient or pleasant. There's a reason small companies outperform them and are a threat to them and why they focus so hard on regulatory capture to prevent competition.
  - phreeza 5y ago
    I'm not saying they are all great places, I'm just saying they are an existence proof for large scale centrally planned economic entities that don't collapse like many centrally planned national economies, suggesting that central planning was maybe not the deciding factor.
    - foobiekr 5y ago
      Based on the changes to the set of large companies over time, they do in fact collapse and generally very few even last 30-40 years let alone hundreds.
      - phreeza 5y ago
        Good point, but some like GE or petroleum companies seem to have lasted quite long already.
  - freemint 5y ago
    > The amount of waste and craziness, inequity, and straight out maliciousness that I've personally witnessed at the upper and upper-middle layers of large companies interestingly places that are not controlled by democratic means, i wonder if these places were electable and up for challenge by everyone in the company if those behaviors you associate with non-democratic states would become less.
kukx 5y ago
If anyone is in doubt that's the purpose of this endeavor here's a related fragment: "- Realizing the declaration of the world’s resources as being the common heritage of all people. - Replacing money-based nationalistic economies with a resource-based world economy."
- NikolaeVarius 5y ago
  That doesn't make any sense. Are we going back to bartering with shiny rocks and physical goods?
  - kragen 5y ago
    It might make more sense if you read the site rather than random fragments quoted from it out of context. Fresco's idea of a "resource-based economy" is kind of vague to me but is definitely not a plan to move to a barter economy; instead it seems to be some kind of centrally-planned economy to mathematically optimize productivity using operations-research algorithms with democratically-decided production priorities.
- birriel 5y ago
  There's never been an economy that wasn't resource-based. Money is just the medium by which prices and price movements are allowed to allocate those (scarce) resources in a market economy, and so far it has proven to be the most efficient way to achieve that.
  - imtringued 5y ago
    Money is flawed but it doesn't have to be abolished. There are some good and old ideas like the IMF SDR. There is also the option to get to negative real interest rates to ensure people spend or invest their money. Saving money without a corresponding debtor is the same as delaying the economy. During a recession everyone is delaying the economy.
SuoDuanDao 5y ago
Building the cult-of-personality around an AI that takes human inputs Mturk-style does seem likelier to work than building it around a single human. But at that point, how different is it from the system we have now?..
scns 5y ago
Even though i'm no fan, i think that capitalism is a matches better with our genes. Competition for resources and mates seems to be what drives us. Criminals and scientists alike exert the highest effort till they hit 30 years of age. The old status pyramid does not care, if we wish it away. But i still think better forms of living are possible. Instead of a tribal us vs them, be it neighbour / sports team / city / state / skin colour / political affiliation / whatever... I think a more inclusive, communal style of living is possible. Would lower the rate of depression caused by loneliness / alienation too i think.
- stronglikedan 5y ago
  > Even though i'm no fan, i think that capitalism is a matches better with our genes. Capitalism can be great for all. Unfortunately, in the US at least, we only have crony capitalism.
  - malermeister 5y ago
    I would argue that any form of capitalism devolves into "crony capitalism" sooner or later. It's an inherent feature of the system. As people or groups acquire more resources through their capitalist success, the obvious next step for them is to distort the system to their advantage through regulatory capture. A "free market" can only be sustained until someone gets rich enough to bribe themselves into an unfair advantage.
    - stronglikedan 5y ago
      It's still the best system we've ever had (without the crony part). I'm all for making it better, or even replacing it, just not with something that has been tried before. Especially something that's been tried and failed many times, at the cost of millions of lives.
      - malermeister 5y ago
        I'd argue something better was there in the form of Socialist Yugoslavia - an economically successful country, with social freedoms and freedom of movement (only passport that was able to freely travel both blocks during the cold war!), greater economic self-determination than today's capitalist systems (all companies were worker-run coops, competing in the marketplace with leadership elected by workers). Unfortunately, ethnic strife and nationalism brought it to an end. I also think that line of reasoning ignores the opportunity cost of not trying - it's easy for us to condemn other systems for killing people when we are not part of the millions in the global south being killed by capitalism _right now_. Try telling a person living in the Congo, ravaged by warlords fighting for resources to sell on the marketplace, how capitalism is "the best system we've ever had" and see how they feel about it.
freemint 5y ago
Provided we learn from the past it will be better than last time and unlike market mechanisms which are able only to guarantee that a point of the pareto front can reached under exploitation planned economies allows selection of where on the pareto front people want to land. This should happen democratically. - many actors in our economy run a small (or big) private cenrtrally-planned economy [1] - as all those centrally planned economies were in non democratic states it's not obvious if the flaw is central planning or being non-democratic. I find it reasonable that more democracy would help as east Germany which at least had a fake parties and regular elections did better than it's eastern comrades - computer are a lot faster and algorithms for mixed-integer linear programming (or similar modeling frameworks) have matured - databases or similar immutable storage technologies make corruption a lot harder - central planning in combination with free trade could remove inefficiencies in the current economic system inside the country [1] The People’s Republic of Walmart Note: I am not particularly convinced by the venus projects
droptablemain 5y ago
The Soviet Union consistently had the highest GDP growth in the 20th century with a centrally planned economy. Russia transformed from a backwoods feudal mudpit into a global superpower. Some aspects of China's economy today are still centrally planned, and they continue to have excellent growth. I'm not saying every aspect of the economy should be planned; but the opposite -- giving complete lead to the anarchy of production -- has proven to be disastrous for average working people.
- _dain_ 5y ago
  Ten million corpses here, ten million corpses there, pretty soon we'll be making _real_ progress!
  - southerntofu 5y ago
    Which brand of industrial capitalism are you advertising here? /s
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- freemint 5y ago
  I think any effort to demonstrate the viability of planned economies based on past non-democratic planned economies is doomed to fail as people won't easily accept a dictatorship. Any future implementation will need to trade with the non planned world (as trade is the best deterrent from being attacked by other democracies) and it needs to be democratic both in the workplace and in governance of the state.
  - vagrantJin 5y ago
    > won't easily accept a dictatorship. What would they do in case they were in a ditatorship? I'm of the opinion that democracy in governance is something akin to a farce. Without money, it falls apart.
    - 5y ago
southerntofu 5y ago
Central planning was indeed common in the 20th century (and previously), however "to each according to their needs" (an old anarchist principle) was rarely applied, as most of the world lived under capitalist rule. Most notably, USSR and China were "never" (at least not for more than a few months) communist utopias, but rather State-capitalist economies. I believe an egalitarian society is fundamentally incompatible both with central planning and with private property. Some level of coordination/cooperation is required, but central planning means a higher authority gets to decide who needs what which sounds just like capitalism all over again. Or, as some USSR critics have put it in the past, "we're all equal, but some are more equal than others". On the topic of (lack of) Communism in Russia, you can read Emma Goldman from 1935: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/emma-goldman-there-is-no-communism-in-russia https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/emma-goldman-there-i...

minihat 5y ago

The mission statement gives me some psychohistory vibes >The Venus Project is a non-profit organization that presents a new socio-economic model utilizing science and technology toward social betterment to achieve a sustainable civilization of abundance for all, without exception. But sadly, nothing of substance to be found upon digging deeper. I came expecting science, but what I found was a t-shirt and book sale.

7thaccount 5y ago
If you're interested in psychohistory, there is a field called "cliomancy" where scholars attempt to actually treat history as a somewhat hard science and look for correlating trends and stuff. I'm massively oversimplifying of course. I think Peter Turchin is the most well known author in the field.
- Rerarom 5y ago
  Cliodynamics actually
  - 7thaccount 5y ago
    Haha. Thank you. Not sure how I goofed that one up.

kragen 5y ago

Perhaps a better source than the text and images on the website, sadly, is the 02006 documentary about the Venus Project: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1IXWnS6vwk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1IXWnS6vwk https://www.thevenusproject.com/multimedia/future-by-design-2006-official-full-movie/ https://www.thevenusproject.com/multimedia/future-by-design-... Worth noting that Peter Joseph founded the Zeitgeist Movement as a sort of evangelical wing of the Venus Project, but then it got excommunicated some years later — the Venus Project folks didn't like the direction it was going. In a sense Jacque Fresco was one of the last of a group of believers in progress who sought to design a better future for humanity from first principles, along with Paolo Soleri, Buckminster Fuller, Joseph Stalin, Walt Disney, Mao Zedong, Juan Perón, Falco, and Franklin Roosevelt. The failures of that movement have included some of the greatest tragedies in the history of humanity, arguably including the advent of nuclear warfare, but its successes have also been quite notable, including space travel, the elimination of polio and smallpox, and the modern welfare state. I'm not convinced that strong, centralized states that can carry out such plans are a net good (and Fresco apparently had plans to sort of eliminate them, although I haven't been able to find the details), but if we are going have such a state in place — the status quo in developed countries — it would be better for it to carry out judiciously chosen plans for improving the general welfare than for it to spend its strength on limiting access to borax, toluene, and copyrighted information.

freemint 5y ago
Calling ones discipline "sociocyberneering" is a bit much. I also find it interesting how much of Fresco's designs is designed inside an suburban context. Interestingly also hyperloop like concepts: https://youtu.be/I1IXWnS6vwk?t=2376 https://youtu.be/I1IXWnS6vwk?t=2376 And so much individual transport I find it interesting that in this youtube video only old people are interested in the future he proposes.
- kragen 5y ago
  Remember Fresco grew up in a time when socially accepted people invented words like "cybernetics", "Dymaxion", "omnitriangulated", "magnetron", "transistor", "Comintern", and "sociobiology". Today it's socially acceptable to go around inventing acronyms, but probably in 80 years people will sneer at anyone who insists on naming their inventions things like "UAVs" and "SHORAD". This may have something to do with why mostly only old people were interested: people are mostly guided by what is fashionable, so when someone is working on an angle that was fashionable forty years earlier, mostly only people who grew up when it was fashionable will pay attention.

anovikov 5y ago

Communism 2.0... what can possibly go wrong? I can still remember the sugar and sausage queues...

UncleEntity 5y ago
The Algorithm has determined that sugar and sausage are at odds with a good and wholesome society so has shifted the production resources to the new Soma Pharmaceuticals production facility, thank you for your support in these new and exciting times.
erulabs 5y ago
You know, that comment at first seems hyperbolic, and then: > As we outgrow the need for professions such as lawyers, bankers, insurance agents, marketing and advertising personnel, salespersons, and stockbrokers, a considerable amount of waste of human ingenuity will be eliminated. Considerable amounts of energy would also be saved by eliminating the duplication of competitive products such as tools, eating utensils, pots, pans and vacuum cleaners. Only a few of the highest quality products would be needed to serve the entire population instead of hundreds of different manufacturing plants with paperwork and personnel turning out similar products. Ah yes, the waste of jobs we don't see the point in and bottom shelf products we don't buy. It's rarely that an admonishment like "ah, so just communism, eh?" is actually technically correct. The waste argument is my favorite because it is the polar opposite of the entrepreneur's argument: instead of making something people like, their aim is to aim something that will do and eliminate all other competition: efficiency! That communists do not see that ultimately -they- are the most brutal capitalists is an irony so rich and deep i'm practically bourgeoisie for tasting it. The history of the VW Beetle is very similar. Why make loads of cars? So wasteful! The people should make just one, great car! Ah, the giant megafactory we were promised was built to make our VWs is making tanks? Shucks, so much for power and capital! Decentralization isn't efficient, it's resilient.

hannasanarion 5y ago

You can tell that it's not utopian because of all the definitely constructable and not at all unrealistic or impractical architectural renders made of a definitely extant white material of infinite strength and malleability.

freemint 5y ago
Oww, come one. Plastic-cement composite materials are strong enough. However impractical they are.
- taberiand 5y ago
  Solve climate change one plastic-cement centrally-planned megastructure at a time, what could go wrong?
  - imtringued 5y ago
    It will end up like many recycled products. Originally designed to reduce waste but then the product itself becomes popular enough that there isn't enough waste material and newly extracted raw materials are used instead.

beaconstudios 5y ago

this reminds me of two other hypothetical projects: Fully Automated Luxury Communism, and The Australia Project from Manna (https://marshallbrain.com/manna1 https://marshallbrain.com/manna1). This is the (I would think, obvious) utopian ideal of a post-scarcity or late-scarcity economy. The hard part is actually making it possible, ie routing through the potential futures to get to this destination. You have all of Earth's accumulated sociopolitical baggage as a headwind, plus the challenge of designing and implementing a global adaptive logistical system. I'm not saying it's impossible, but the fantasy is the easy part.

SuoDuanDao 5y ago
Great point. I've been thinking about this in terms of the declaration 'economic growth is decoupling from resource use'. I'm sure that what's meant by that is that portions of the economy are entering a late-scarcity stage; music and books certainly don't feel scarce right now. But the statement that an economy like that is 'growing' seems to imply something untrue about the things that still are scarce. I'm not super up on Star Trek lore, but to my understanding the setting takes place in a post-scarcity universe, where the only thing that is still scarce is latinum. Latinum isn't good for much except that it can't be replicated, so some traditions from the scarcity era use it as a medium of exchange, even though everything useful can be produced without any latinum. When a cup of earl grey is replicated, does the value of the remaining latinum go up or down compared to the (now slightly larger) economy? It seems like there's a fundamental problem with the structure of our thought around these questions. We can imagine scarcity and it's absence, but we seem cognitively unprepared for a situation where some things are valuable and scarce and others are valuable but not scarce.
- Ieghaehia9 5y ago
  > I'm not super up on Star Trek lore, but to my understanding the setting takes place in a post-scarcity universe, where the only thing that is still scarce is latinum. Perhaps it's some material where replicators always add some noise to the atomic structure when replicating; and then the "value" is just how close it's to a perfect structure, by whatever measure of perfection. Then you'd have replicator farms just replicating them over and over until something of acceptable quality pops out - like a physical PoW. It makes for a fun theory at least! And the post-scarcity societies can go "whatever would you want that for?"

SkeuomorphicBee 5y ago

Their flagship project (that campus they are calling "center for resource management") seems like an amalgamation of all that is wrong with last century urbanism, it seems like the 1950s idea of an utopia. They ignored all that we now know about building on a human scale, walkability, mixed-use, and close connection; and instead went with a cross between a North-American detached-suburb, a golf course, and a 1950s car-centric planned city. They seem to be the type of person that thinks Brasilia is an example to be followed.

hypertele-Xii 5y ago

I volunteered years ago. Wrote a technical proposal for achieving their mission goals. The only response or discussion was that they would get "the experts" in to solve these problems laters, instead we should only focus on promotion and advertizing. Considering I am an expert in the subject I wrote on, I found it very condescending and lost all interest (and indeed, belief) in the Venus Project (totally not just communist futurism). Also they make you sign an NDA. So you can't talk about the better world you're supposedly building.

panick21 5y ago
Haha, that amazing. It always seem that they just had ideas and when anybody asked on actually how anything would work it was always 'some experts will make some software'. I always asked where the open source was where that software was being developed but apparently nothing actually existed.

PaulHoule 5y ago

It looks like Epcot Center.

i4004 5y ago

Oh, the venus project. A decade ago, back in 2009, I tried to get involved with this with a group of friends. We had formed our own branch, so we reached out to them as a means of cooperation. We were threatened with legal action. We opted to be transparent and call them, and we got an extremely rude and unprofessional individual on the other side of the line who continued to be uncooperative and threatened more legal action. Well, that was the end of any cooperation. It was for the best though, I was more naive back then and it was good to learn how two-faced an organization can be.

ilaksh 5y ago

My own hope is that the large and growing global group of technocrats and related ideologies will incorporate some understanding of decentralized technologies and a general appreciation for the robustness of networks. The thing about decentralization technologies that people don't realize is that they are actually are best approach for creating global holistic systems, but in a scalable, fair, and evolvable way. Using distributed technological solutions, it should be possible have comprehensive accounting and planning without an actual centralized point of failure and authoritarianism. For example, one or more peer-based databases aggregating global resource use data would provide powerful and relatively objective insights for planners. I think rather than eliminating money, we need to upgrade it to be a high tech systems that integrates more information.

junon 5y ago
> My own hope is that the large and growing global group of technocrats and related ideologies will incorporate some understanding of decentralized technologies and a general appreciation for the robustness of networks. Everyone has an appreciation for robust networks, I don't really see how that relates. Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp all went down for several hours the other day and almost everyone on Earth knew about it and was impacted in some way, even indirectly. > The thing about decentralization technologies that people don't realize is that they are actually are best approach for creating global holistic systems, but in a scalable, fair, and evolvable way. On paper. In practice, there are still ways to control such systems as we've seen with Etherium, and there are other issues that come into play - such as massive electrical requirements, and the fact that if the system were to fail catastrophically (in the case where we rely on it entirely), we're left with nothing. > Using distributed technological solutions, it should be possible have comprehensive accounting and planning without an actual centralized point of failure and authoritarianism. For example, one or more peer-based databases aggregating global resource use data would provide powerful and relatively objective insights for planners. So many words to say "decentralized currencies exist". This doesn't really say anything. > I think rather than eliminating money, we need to upgrade it to be a high tech systems that integrates more information. Ah yes, more information. Let's track everyone's purchases down to the very cent and publicly broadcast them on a ledger, force everyone to use it, and then reap the rewards when someone is able to control it.

junon 5y ago

This looks like vaporware and a fever dream from someone who watched iRobot a few too many times. There's nothing of substance on the page, no real "goal", no real demonstration of competency. Just some pretty pictures of a high tech utopia and some airy words about a better future, with no plan on how to get there.

bryal 5y ago

Sounds like the Zeitgeist movement. Just some Americans re-inventing socialism yet again (more specifically the branch of socialism sometimes referred to as Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism), but not reading any of the existing theory, thus resulting in this square wheel scenario.

LinuxBender 5y ago
In fact this site and the idea was promoted heavily in the original release of the Zeitgeist movie by Peter Joseph back in 2007 and 2010. It's too bad really because the first parts of that movie minus the weird psychological intro was actually quite interesting. It was a very divisive and curious set of topics covered that caused different factions to try to debunk each other. They are still at it to this day. You can find pieces of it on youtube but now that it is a well funded movie they keep pulling it. The debates from all the people he angered are still up though. It really upset many religious communities.