When we arrived at the Vancouver airport for the 2011 World Future Society Conference in July we were waved into the country by a young border clerk who asked us why we were in town.
"World Future Society? Really? Where is that?" He was surprised that he hadn't heard of it, since he was a bit of a futurist himself.
"I'm pretty into that stuff," he told us. "Have you heard of the Venus Project and "Zeitgeist"?"
I had, and although it is a huge, worldwide cadre of mostly young people, there seemed to be virtually no notice of the phenomenon by the surprisingly "mature" cohort of futurists that makes up the World Future Society. (This was my first WFS conference and I must admit that I was disappointed by the oddly retro feel of the event. For example: way too many Power Point presentations and no WiFi in the conference rooms until participants demanded it.)
While there were certainly a few mind-expanding presentations, there seemed to be very little effort on the part of the organization to engage the many young people around the world who are angsting over the future, whether they are pining for the retro-futuristic fantasies of Steampunk or rejecting consumerism, corporatism, nationalism and technology as anarcho-primitivists. Since the somewhat controversial* Zeitgeist Movement seems to be big in Vancouver, it would have been interesting for the WFS to include a presentation examining that.
The Zeitgeist Movement, which claims 500,000 members and 1,000 chapters around the world, was launched by "Zeitgeist: The Movie," a cinematic swirl of conspiracy theory and cultural critique that has grabbed the imagination of a generation. These are the folks who take technological wizardry for granted, and who came of age with 9/11 and permawar and have been flattened by the financial crisis just as they entered the world of work. How's that for a generational Zeitgeist?
"Zeitgeist" creator Peter Joseph has made several films, including the most recent "Zeitgeist: Moving Forward," a 2-hour, 41 minute film that has reportedly had 9,166,000 some views on YouTube and 341 screenings around the world. The films decry capitalism, politics, religion, consumerism, globalism, wars, global warming, surveillance and international finance, and endorse peace, collaboration and and sustainability via the vague but appealing idea of a one-world, technocratic "resource-based economy." Like other chapters, the Vancouver Zeitgeist seems to be very active, but does little more than promote "awareness" of this vision.
(As I have written before, the movement occupies that radical point in the circle of ideologies where Far Left and Far Right come together, and it may even have been part of the unhinged worldview that led Jarad Lee Loughner to shoot Gabby Giffords and others.)
It is easy to see why these notions are so appealling to young people who are anxious about the future and who fear that our present course is not sustainable. Joseph's vision is both grandiose and naive as it blithely sweeps past thousands of years of history, reality and human nature in its call for an automated, computer-controlled "Global Resource Management System" that will fairly, peaceably and sustainably dole out the spoils of the earth to its residents.
It is wishful thinking, of course, in its rejection of all the flawed, frustrating human institutions--such as nations, treaties, politics, business, trade and war--that have served as our defacto "global resource management system" up to now. (And it is not unlike the techno-optimism of the Singularity advocates who seem to believe that enhanced, super-human "intelligence" will allow us to think our way beyond the pesky problems of greed, selfishness and stupidity--not to mention global warming.) But it is also a compelling and essentially hopeful view of the future, and the professional futurists of the WFS may want to think about how they can enlist these angsty, anarchistic, information-overloaded but optimistic Zeitgeisters in a reality-based engagement with the future.
*The Zeitgeisters have been accused of being a conspiratorial, anti-semitic cult. The first film did have many unfortunate echoes of "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion," but is seems safe to say that the vast majority of Zeitgeist supporters are not drawn to it by any overt or covert anti-Semitism.
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