Zeitgeist: Moving Forward

The third film in the series. Its claim is that poverty, war and environmental destruction are not the work of bad people but the necessary outcomes of a system built on money. It moves from the biological and social conditioning of human behaviour, through the structural problems of a market economy, to the order it proposes instead. Peter Joseph writes, directs and narrates. The proposed order is called a resource based economy and comes from Jacque Fresco's Venus Project; Fresco speaks at length in the film. The idea, roughly: replace money and the price mechanism with technical calculation of resources and automated distribution. The distribution was part of the position. The film was put online free and screened simultaneously in thousands of places worldwide, with no commercial distributor involved. Reviews were largely negative. Critics wrote that its claims in economics and neuroscience are presented without sources, that it reduces complex problems to a single cause, and that it constructs a technological utopia. Who it is for: viewers curious about alternative economic argument and about the internet documentary culture of the 2000s. Who it is not for: anyone who wants the film's data checkable. Most claims arrive without sources and no opposing view appears.