October 24th, 2009 by admin

Great meeting with the Edinburgh branch of Zeitgeist Movement UK today and catching up about planned events in 2009 and 2010 and give an update on the progress of Future For Sale. There are now over 15,000 registered UK members out of a total of 353,000 world wide members (and growing) on the global Zeitgeist Movement website. Founded by Peter Joseph (creator of the Zeitgeist films) in conjunction with The Venus Project, the movement’s goal is “to revise our world society in accord with present day knowledge on all levels, not only creating awareness of social and technological possibilities many have been conditioned to think impossible or against “human nature”, but also to provide a means to overcome those elements in society which perpetuate these outdated systems. ” The movement is non-hierarchical and organised through de-centralised national and regional chapters. ”We are not here to lead, but to organize and educate. “

We look forward to working with Zeitgeist Movement members in the promotion and distribution of Future For Sale and to test screenings before finalising our cut.

If you haven’t already, please sign up to our mailing list on the right to hear more details about Copenhagen and other forthcoming test screenings.

February 3rd, 2009 by admin

Things are moving on quickly. Currently testing our own donations button. While indiegogo will only process USD, and take a fee, most of our expenses will be in GBP, so we’re gladly accepting direct donations via paypal on futureblog.net. More information on the Donate to the Film page. We’ve also uploaded a 1 min teaser trailer via vimeo and added a email subscription feature. Hoping to add other features soon. Let us know if you have any suggestions.

January 27th, 2009 by admin

New Year, New Sleeve, thanks to an upgrade to wordpress 2.7. We’re currently starting to assemble edit Future For Sale, while still raising financing. We’ve created a fundraising page on indiegogo.com, if you would like to contribute to the next stage of the project. We’re still fleshing out the profile and the perks, so please contact us if anything is unclear.

When we started to develop this film in  2007, we didn’t know the extent of the financial collapse which was going to happen around the world, although for anyone following the news you knew something big was brewing.

We’re working hard to complete the film this year, so please watch this space.

Sonja

April 2nd, 2008 by admin

It is hard to picture a total social and environmental breakdown and it’s easy and comfortable to dismiss these kinds of predictions. But on the 13 of June 2007 it was ‘made official’: the Crash of the U.S. Economy had begun. In a column titled “The Takeover Boom, About to Go Bust” in The Washington Post, one of the foremost house organs of the U.S. monetary elite, economic writers Steven Pearlstein and Robert Samuelson writes:

“It is impossible to predict when the magic moment will be reached and everyone finally realizes that the prices being paid for these companies, and the debt taken on to support the acquisitions, are unsustainable. When that happens, it won’t be pretty”.

Escalating international tension, crisis, war…

At the same time researchers at NASA and Columbia University determined that man-made greenhouse gases have brought the earth’s climate precariously close to a major “Tipping Point” that would have dangerous and far-reaching consequences for the Global Biosphere and its human inhabitants.

Similar reports are being published all over the world…

This increasing dystopian outlook of the future and the need to be rescued seems to concern the public more and more, making way for documentaries such as Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth and TV series such as Tim Kring’s Heroes.

There is one problem with documentaries such as The Inconvenient Truth: they don’t offer any real solutions, and deep down we all know that to save the cheerleader is never going to be enough to save the world.

While some of the “younger generation” have become activists in the anti-globalisation movement, the vast majority has been called the MTV generation – fluent in popular culture but largely a-political. But perhaps the personal focus, the obsession with style and surface doesn’t mean that people have stopped caring, maybe it was just a shift of language, but a transformation of sorts? Does popular culture hold the key to our beliefs and attitudes, and can it even unlock people’s consciousness, if packaged seductively? If people have lost faith in politicians and traditional political filmmaking, what do they believe in?

Future For Sale will try to focus on solutions already available but at a first glance might appear as science fiction. Futurists have always had a close connection to this genre since it is a way to plant ideas into the public consciousness. But it is rare to see new films depicting a better future, currently a pessimistic view of the future seems to be more popular. Perhaps filmmakers also have to take the responsibility to be a part of this search?

Many “futurists” have changed the focus of their work, however. If futurism is a movement, then one can argue that its tone has largely changed from ideology to business. Two of the main goals set up by the European Futurists Conference Lucerne, for example, are directly related to support European businesses, and to create an understanding of the future of business, politics and society – in that order.

Does restricting the visions to a future within the monetary based economy mean that the great visionaries of our time become important tools for the big companies?

Does futurism become pointless if the monetary system is a problem in itself in order to progress? Or can we create a sustainable change within it?

March 31st, 2008 by Maja

Once I met a futurist.

When I was a child I had one wish above all. It was always on top of any wish list, attached to every wish-bone or shooting star: peace on earth between humans, animals and nature. It left me with a burning mission; to make it happen. I collected all my pocket money to ‘buy’ tiny pieces of rain forest to protect it from the big companies who wanted to exploit it. Later I understood that these companies would always have more money and therefore more power than me, that my 50p a week meant nothing in the grand scheme of things.

I started to doubt my ability to change the world and more and more started to live with the same dystopian view of the future that surrounded me in and out of Scotland. To save the world is something you wish for when you are five, not something you work towards a whole lifetime. But then I met someone who had.

Filming my last short film Ottica Zero, I met Jacque Fresco, a 92-year old futurist, architect, inventor and socio-engineer.

Jacque has devoted his entire life to making the world a better place – without putting himself above anyone else or compromising his ideas for commercial interests, personal fame or status. He is a role model I would have loved to have as a child and an inspiration I am glad to have found now.

His ideas also address the two issues that have concerned me the most over the last few years: the first is the ongoing consequences of capitalism, affecting gender politics, world wide inequality, the aspirations and fears of everyday people, to the extreme detriment of our environment; the second is the issue of fundamentalism in a global society. How can we allow tolerance of all religions and value systems without a “clash of civilizations”?

What Jacque presents is a way to address these questions, not providing an ultimate solution in my opinion since I don’t think we can ever conceive of perfection, but a very interesting one that is making far more sense than how we manage our societies today. Jacque’s and his partner Roxanne Meadow’s Venus Project in particular, provides a fantastic metaphor for our collective power, and is a timeless reminder of our potential to change. Jacque has been daring to not only dream about improving the world, but actively inventing solutions to do so – his entire life. He is an uncompromising futurist-idealist of the kind we rarely find within our post-modern skepticism.

He questions why, even when we do have the resources to feed everyone, the technology to create clean energy, and the ability to supply everyone with creative, free and comfortable lives, we choose not to, a question I think we all could do with asking.

Jacque’s view of the future is neither dystopian nor utopian; he calls it a “a practical scientific solution, an unsentimental and non-judgmental collection of facts.”

“It is not enough to point out the short comings of the present day world without offering positive and attainable alternatives.” Jacque Fresco

I believe that Jacque’s ideas now more than ever tap into our desire to create a “fairer,” post-consumer world, where we are beginning to understand that our individual actions have an impact on other people, even if they live far away from us, and that we actually will have to change the way we live to preserve our planet.

March 21st, 2008 by admin

I sometimes hear I belong to a ‘lost generation’, which no longer cares about anything but themselves. But how can we trust our political system when we feel disenfranchised and unable to make a difference; what’s the point in caring for something that no longer belongs to us?

Even though economists recognize the influence of money lobbyists on the political system, and are aware that “the market” cannot in itself take action against global warming and pollution, there is no prevalent search for alternatives or debate about the fundamental workings of our monetary-based economy. The public debate is between the left and right of the same model; how much a government should intervene into “free trade”, a debate that many of my generation have stopped participating in, rejecting it as false democracy.

With the possibilities of modern technology at hand and the wisdom from civilizations that have risen and fallen before our own, is this really the best we can do? Why is there no real debate about alternative ways of managing our resources, where are the ideas for a new economic system?

I think it is time to focus on what solutions we have available since we are already despondently aware of the problems – and that is what Future for Sale is all about, and what I hope we will be discussing in this blog.

mb

March 20th, 2008 by admin

We need to think globally about global matters, and both the economic and environmental crises are global concerns at this point.

Who are we to say an economic transformation will never happen in our lifetime? Many things now commonplace were just as inconceivable 50 or 100 years ago. What ordinary person then could have conceived of “software” or the Internet? And who would have thought green issues would become mainstream one day?

In times of crisis there is both the threat of destruction and the possibility for rapid change, it is ultimately up to us what way it will go.

mb/sh