Mr. Joseph had been lecturing on the unsustainable nature of the money-based economy — on cyclical consumption, planned obsolescence, corporate malfeasance and piles of poisonous waste.
“It’s time that we wake up,” he intoned, speaking solemnly through a wireless clip-on mike. “The doomsday scenario, the big contraction, might be happening right now. The system of monetary exchange is — in the face of advancing technology — completely obsolete.”
Z-Day events were taking place from New England to New Zealand, but this was the big one: the marquee happening with the marquee names.
There, in the crowd, was Jacque Fresco, an industrial designer and the engineering guru of what people unironically called “the movement.” Mr. Fresco, an elfin 93-year-old, sat beside his partner, Roxanne Meadows, smiling self-effacingly.
Though they were never actually shown — as most in attendance had seen them several times — Mr. Peter Joseph’s two films, Zeitgeist, the Movie and Zeitgeist: Addendum, were the subtext of the evening: online documentaries that have been watched, he says, by 50 million people around the world.
