Hacker Cinema
Future by Design
2006 · Film · documentary · 86 min
Directed by William Gazecki
Future by Design shares the life and far-reaching vision of Jacque Fresco, considered by many to be a modern day Da Vinci. Peer to Einstein and Buckminster Fuller, Jacque is a self-taught futurist who describes himself most often as a "generalist" or multi-disciplinarian -- a student of many inter-related fields.
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2 comments on Hacker News
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.thevenusproject.com/multimedia/future-by-design-2006-official-full-movie/
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.
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