The Zeitgeist Movement – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Zeitgeist Movement was established in 2008 by Peter Joseph and advocates a transformation of society and its economic system to a non monetary system based on resource allocation and environmentalism.

Originally, the ideas were based on a societal model by Jacque Fresco a social engineer with The Venus Project.[1][2] In the Venus project machines control government and industry and safeguard resources using artificially intelligent earthwide autonomic sensor system super-brain connected to all human knowledge.[3]

The Zeitgeist Movement was formed in 2008[4] by Peter Joseph shortly after the late 2008 release of Zeitgeist: Addendum, the second film in the 'Zeitgeist' film series.[5][1] In its first year the group described itself as "the activist arm of The Venus Project.[6] In April 2011, the two groups partnership ended in an apparent power struggle, with Joseph commenting, Without [The Zeitgeist Movement], [The Venus Project] doesnt exist it has nothing but ideas and has no viable method to bring it to light."[1] Jacques Fresco in an interview said that although the Zeitgeist movement wanted to act as the 'activist arm' of Venus project, Peter Joseph never clarified what that would entail. In addition Fresco's ideas of how to change society were not followed, leading to Fresco dropping participation in the Zeitgeist Movement.[7]

VC Reporter's Shane Cohn summarized the movement's charter as: "Our greatest social problems are the direct results of our economic system".[5]

Samuel Gilonis describes the movements opinions as wanting to replace all private property with for what Joseph refers to as "strategic access" as well as replacing democracy with a form of technocracy whereby the ruling class would comprise technical experts in control of their relevant domains.[8]

The group is critical of market capitalism describing it as structurally corrupt and inefficient in the use of resources. According to The Daily Telegraph, the group dismisses historic religious concepts as misleading and embraces a version of sustainable ecological concepts and scientific administration of society.[9][10][11][12][13][14]

In January 2014, the group published a book, The Zeitgeist Movement Defined: Realizing A New Train Of Thought, composed of eighteen essays on psychology, economics, and scientific theory written by the 'TZM Lecture Team' and edited by Ben McLeish, Matt Berkowitz, and Peter Joseph.[15]

The group holds two annual events: Z-Day (or Zeitgeist Day), an "educational forum"[16] held in March and an artivist event called Zeitgeist Media Festival.[3] The second Z-Day took place in Manhattan in 2009 and included lectures by Peter Joseph and Jacque Fresco. The organisers said that local chapters also held sister events on the same day.[16] The Zeitgeist Media Festival was first held in 2011. Its 3rd annual event took place on August 4, 2013 at the Avalon Hollywood nightclub in Los Angeles, California.[17][3]

An article in the Journal of Contemporary Religion describes the movement as an example of a "conspirituality," a synthesis of New Age spirituality and conspiracy theory.[18]

Michelle Goldberg of Tablet Magazine called the movement "the world's first Internet-based apocalyptic cult, with members who parrot the party line with cheerful, rote fidelity." In her opinion, the movement is "devoted to a kind of sci-fi planetary communism", and the 2007 documentary that "sparked" the movement was "steeped in far-right, isolationist, and covertly anti-Semitic conspiracy theories."[19]

Alan Feuer of The New York Times said the movement was like "a utopian presentation of a money-free and computer-driven vision of the future, a wholesale reimagination of civilization, as if Karl Marx and Carl Sagan had hired John Lennon from his Imagine days to do no less than redesign the underlying structures of planetary life."[16]

In Socialist Unity magazine and also Tablet Magazine the films relationship to anti-Semitic texts is claimed and it is claimed that those theories are made to look left-wing or liberal. A relationship between the film and a book called The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, along with the films use of other anti-Semitic tropes is claimed.[20][21]

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The Zeitgeist Movement - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia