The venus project -- Moneyless society

[hppd]

The venus project is a society where everything is free and abundant for everyone. They try to solve thee worlds problems through technology, I really think it can work out. And if it does it would be fucking great!. I'm really tired ight now but I will finish the rest of the thread tommorow. Below is a video that explains what it is about.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KphWsnhZ4Ag

Do you think it will fail or succeed and why?

http://www.thevenusproject.com/

[lucid]

An attractive, and really stupid idea. I'll tell you why:

where everything is free and abundant for everyone.

This kind of thinking is extremely childish and ignorant concept, and the fact that people can't grasp it is why society is in the inevitable shitty position it's in now.

[hppd]

Haha lucid, have you even watched the thing?

Greed and money is the reason why society is in this shitty position. Think about it everything is there already for us, money is an illusion.

Give me some arguments instead of just saying it's childish. I look forward to disproving them

[proxx]

Anytime anywhere.
Pure love.

[lucid]

Ok fine. I'll start small because I'm tired. No, I did not watch the thing all the way through. Inspiring piano music and images of space aside, this is no better then the many other futile human fantasies about still keeping everything without facing any consequences. Hence the word childish. However, I did read their "mission statement" if you will.

To better understand the meaning of a resource-based economy consider this: if all the money in the world were destroyed, as long as topsoil, factories, and other resources were left intact, we could build anything we choose to build and fulfill any human need. It is not money that people need; rather, it is free access to the necessities of life. In a resource-based economy , money would be irrelevant. All that would be required are the resources and the manufacturing and distribution of the products.

A noble thought. An attractive thought. A shortsighted thought. I thought I would have explained myself pretty thoroughly in a rather long conversation I had with some new member in the Religious Ideas section, but the thought has occurred to me that no one actually read it. Can't say I blame em. Regardless, I don't understand where people get off thinking that all we have to do is get rid of money and/or religion and/or government and all the worlds problems will be solved. Don't get me wrong, I agree with part of the above statement. Money just gets in the way of what humans really need is free access to necessities of life. However, I hadn't realized that mass polluting our atmosphere with our gigantic factories producing cars and fucking Axe body spray was one of life's necessities. The author's careful crafting of the statement when he says "topsoil, factories.....", would be laughable if it wasn't so sad. He slips topsoil and factories in the same sentence so that the only you hear when these two words are mashed together is "future!" When really it's just another insane capitalist's way of trying to justify converting every last resource on the planet into a bunch of products. Is that all you see when you look around? Things ready to be turned into junk?

Let's just say that the above is even possible. Do you really believe that all we have to do is just drop money and continue on manufacturing products and everything will be better? Earth does have resources. Maybe once it had abundant resources but as I've said before us humans our doing our very fucking best to change that. All the products that you see come from somewhere. Humans devour and destroy everything in their path in order to consume resources. Trees, water, animals, oil, food, air, blah blah blah, and we will do anything and everything we can to consume every last little bit of it. This silly idea that all we have to do is just change our way of thinking is quite a fairytale way of thinking. I'm sure Disney would applaud their efforts but I still stick to my statement.

Childish.

[frog]

I agree with lucid, this idea is great; but the vision is imcomplete(practically). Once money doesn't rule us and there is no class distinction a lot of our problems as a society will vanish. Question is how do we get from point A to B?

I love the idea, but there's no practical solution for getting there.

It's like we need to hit Marxism, automate everything we need with robots and maintain our ethics enough as not to let socialist ideals poison the free will of other humans. If you read ET contact stories, there always comes a point when the ET is telling the Earth human what life on their planet is like. They automate everything as far as production and they share their resources for the benefit of the collective in almost all cases. There has to be sacrifice.

Capitalism emphasizes completely the opposite and socialism is counter-productive to the evolution of a race because it garners free-will. Let's try to find the in-between.

[hppd]

Ok fine. I'll start small because I'm tired. No, I did not watch the thing all the way through. Inspiring piano music and images of space aside, this is no better then the many other futile human fantasies about still keeping everything without facing any consequences. Hence the word childish. However, I did read their "mission statement" if you will.
A noble thought. An attractive thought. A shortsighted thought...

I respect your opinion, we still have a looot of barriers to overcome. But that doesn't mean we wont get there. I agree that the views of project venus are quite utopian but it's just a proto type. We might have something like it in the not so distant future. Even though I think we should all get closer to nature and live like a symbiotic lifeform instead of a parasite 

One thing I know for shure is that how things are running now wont get us very far. Think about it the capitalistic system is collapsing everywhere people are fighting their governements. The poor are getting poorer, the rich richer. The garbage piles greater and the resources exhausted. Hell a lot of people can't even afford fucking clean water while companies steal their sources of water and sell it to us. This is tottaly unbalanced (I suggest everyone to watch blue gold it's a docu about how big business is capitalizing all water and destroying the nature while doing so).

Think about it, soon there is going to be a time when production skyrockets, employment rates and purchasing power plummets. Everything will crash even the richest banks. Look around you it has already begun. There will have to be a propper replacement.

The two biggest obstacles are:
1. Convincing all the people that we can live without money.
 Most people say that there are always people that are going to try to steal everything. But why would you if you already have acces to everything you want? Or others say that nobody is going to produce/invent new stuff anymore if they don't get any money for it. But that is bullshit because most people that discover/invent something do it out of passion. Hell I would rather invent/research stuff out of passion then doing a lame repetetive 9-5 job. I would contribute a lot mor to that way (It's like linux vs windows ).

Or other people are so manipulated by big business that they believe they need their new phone/car every year or otherwise they wont be happy. If I have to make a cheesy comparison capitalism is like cigarettes. You got something you are happy with it for a short while and afterwards you feel even shittier because you don't have the newest thing (this doesn't count for evryone but a lot of people fall in the trap). II fall for it a lot of times too. Hell I usde to have one goal : getting rich!

In a resource based society they want to save the resources by makeing products that last instead of buying a new smart dumbphone every year/ six months. You have a solid one that lasts for a looong  time. I hate it when that shit breaks exactly after the warranty is invalid.

2. The people in power right now aren't going to give up their power that easily. When everybody stops consuming they are fucked and they lose their power. And that can't happen, imagine that they are in the same class then their "slaves" that they loathe so much.  With great power comes great insanity.

It all starts with love

P.S. English is not my native language as you can see so excuse me for my bad writing..

[proxx]

I feel like splling lines and lines of thougts, yet I cant seem to wrap it together.
But its sad to see people being so small minded and blowing this off so easily.

[lucid]

It all starts with love

Do you mean to say that all we must do is show the insane people in power some love and they will realize the error of their ways?

[Uriah]

I was having trouble trying to explain my thoughts on this project, but i guess this is my main issue with it. Although I like the idea behind the venus project:

If all the nations joined together right now and equally rationed out all the worlds resources, I dont think our problems would be solved. Monetary gain is inherent in any society without an absolute abundance. As long as some people aspire for more they will try to trade and exchange goods and services for mutual profits. As this is inevitable, I think it only makes sense that the government support this through official currency to prevent any obvious issues. I dont think our issues can be solved by a revolution.

Gradual change, possibly. If we use the tools already at our disposal, we can gradually use technology and better ideas to create this abundance, and the need for money would be increasingly less. Of course, for the best possible future, we would also have to keep education and social freedoms up to pace with these technological freedoms. It would be very bad to have for profit corporations running the world with closed ideas and resources, in my opinion, especially as technology becomes more a part of us, the individuals it affects need more access to it. Society must be able to work together as a whole to make difficult decisions and solve hard problems, some day.

Regardless of what happens, I think that as long as innovation and technology goes forward, we would eventually have a great society. The only issue is that things like climate change, social and political problems, lack of education, and etc. might end things for us or put us too far back for recovery before we get there. Which is looking a lot more likely than a utopia right now. Which is why in the meantime we need to start thinking about better ways to create an excellent future and avoid these issues. This is totally solvable right now with internet, the ability to create non profits, and such. We can make changes leading up to what we want without a radical revolution.

I really dont think simply rationing out all resources is the way to do this, though. These things are much more complicated than that. I have an idea on how to solve this problem, but I wont be speaking on it until I have time to work on it.

BTW, the Venus project has been discussed on evilzone a lot, before.

[hppd]

Do you mean to say that all we must do is show the insane people in power some love and they will realize the error of their ways?

[lucid]

Some people actually believe such actions would work. I just had to ask.

[Architect]

Some may think it is idealistic, but 97-year old architect Jacque Fresco is convinced his vision of the future is far better than how we live today.

Wow, so basically it's the Weyland Corporation?