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 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