The Zeitgeist Movement

"TZM" redirects here. For the superalloy, see Molybdenum § Alloys.

The Zeitgeist Movement

Abbreviation	TZM
Formation	2008
Type	Advocacy group
Region served	International
Key people	Peter Joseph
Website	www.thezeitgeistmovement.com

The Zeitgeist Movement (TZM) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization incorporated in the state of California. It is also a grassroots social movement organized by regional chapters. It was founded by filmmaker Peter Joseph in 2008. According to its mission statement it is “a sustainability advocacy organization, which conducts community based activism and awareness actions through a network of global/regional chapters, project teams, annual events, media and charity work.” It advocates a transformation of society, specifically its economic system, promoting a post-scarcity type economic approach often termed a “resource-based economy”.

History

The Zeitgeist Movement was originally created in 2008 in partnership with an organization called The Venus Project that was founded by engineer and futurist Jacque Fresco. Fresco is said to have coined the term “resource-based economy”. In 2011, the two groups separated over disagreements in goals and objectives. While started as an all volunteer, informal group, without any legal status, in 2016 the movement formed its 501(c)(3) nonprofit under the same name, allowing for tax-exempt status and tax-deductible donation support. The name “zeitgeist”, meaning the “spirit of the age” was taken from founder Peter Joseph’s Zeitgeist Film Series, which was an inspiration for the organization.

Structure

The movement’s main administration consists of a board of directors based in the United States, while also maintaining a volunteer international chapter structure with groups in numerous countries. As predominantly an educational movement, it conducts annual events, produces video and literary media, and works through teams to conduct research and development projects.

Chapters

As of 2016, the organization reports around 160 chapters worldwide with 400,000 to 500,000 subscribed members worldwide as reported in 2011. Chapters are focused on public awareness actions engaging their local regions. Annual event days such as Zeitgeist Day or the Zeitgeist Media Festival are shared global events which not only have a central event location, chapters usually participate in parallel by holding their own regional events during the same period.

Chapter tiers are currently organized as:

• International Chapters (i.e Germany, Australia, Ukraine)
• Stave/Province Chapters (i.e. Toronto, Vancouver, California, North Carolina)
• Local Town/City Chapters

Events

The group holds two annual events, Zeitgeist Day (or “ZDay”) and the Zeitgeist Media Festival. Zeitgeist Day is its flagship educational forum held in the spring of each year in. There are single main events and there are parallel or sympathetic events. The first ZDay main event took place in Manhattan in 2009 with a sold out crowd of 900 and included a lecture from Peter Joseph and question and answer with Jacque Fresco, with reportedly 70 countries also participating in parallel. Other keynote speakers through the years have included philosopher John McMurtry and independent journalist Abby Martin.

Zeitgeist Day (Main) Events to date:

• 2009: March 15th, New York, NY, USA
• 2010: March 15th, New York City, USA
• 2011: March 13th, London, United Kingdom
• 2012: March 10th, Vancouver, BC, Canada
• 2013: March 29th, Los Angeles, CA, USA
• 2014: March 15th, Toronto, ON, Canada
• 2015: March 14th, Berlin, Germany
• 2016: March 26th, Athens, Greece

Zeitgeist Media Festival is an annual artivist event that started in 2011, held in the fall of each year. Celebrity participation has included actor Rutger Hauer, author Marianne Williamson, TV writer Tim Kring, Billy Gibbons of the band ZZ Top and violin virtuoso Lili Haydn. The first event took place at the Music box in Hollywood, CA. As with ZDay, some local chapters of the movement hold their own events in parallel during the same weekend.

Advocacy

The Zeitgeist Movement advocates a kind of a post-scarcity economy and views a great majority of the world’s social and ecological problems as linked to market economics. The movement links economic inequality, poverty, political corruption, pollution and environmental destruction to the structure of capitalism, seeing its removal as the only solution to true improvement. Its materials propose a new economic system based on a more direct technical approach to resource management and industrial production, absent the use of money and markets. It supports democratic principles through a kind of [participatory economics] and [open source] development, moving away from traditional politics which it views as outdated.

In January 2014, the organization released a book called The Zeitgeist Movement Defined composed of eighteen essays on views of psychology, economics, and scientific theory. It states in the introduction, “TZM's activism is explicitly based on non-violent methods of communication with the core focus on educating the public about the true root sources of many common personal, social and ecological problems today, coupled with the vast problem solving and humanity improving potential science and technology has now enabled, but yet goes unapplied due to barriers inherent in the current, established social system.”

Referring to the nature of the promoted resource-based economy, Travis Donovan of the Huffington Post stated “... the world’s resources would be considered as the equal inheritance of all the world’s peoples, and would be managed as efficiently and carefully as possible through focusing on the technological potential of sustainable development.”

Shane Cohn writing for the VC Reporter defined the movement by reporting: “…the movement’s charter can be summed up as this: Our greatest social problems are the direct results of our economic system. The monetary-based system on which the world operates is a broken and corrupt scheme that promotes obsolescence for the sake of profit. Sustainability and resourcefulness only hinder that idea in a monetary-based economy. If there is not a radical global shift toward a sustainable, tech-driven and, yes, a moneyless society, class division will dramatically increase as the world’s resources are depleted. Humans cannot escape nature’s dictatorship, and without a system that centers on resources as the vital principle, human quality of life will systematically deteriorate.”

According to Kenny Jakubas who reviewed the organization’s self-published book, The Zeitgeist Movement Defined, “In a nutshell, the goal behind the Zeitgeist Movement has to do with changing society’s influences and pressures in an attempt to reveal the best of the human condition. This type of change isn’t easy though. This is why, according to the authors, the book relies so heavily on research-based material, avoiding the more colorful and dramatic language expected from a book that tries to convince readers of something.

Criticism

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.

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."

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."

In Socialist Unity magazine and also Tablet Magazine the film’s 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.

See also

• Post scarcity economy
• Technological utopianism