RBE progress, after 20 years
And as said in my last article, it's time to end the year, and the decade, with an informal status report on all the RBE movements and groups that have existed so far, and what they have, or have not, acomplished.
Let's start with the granddaddy of them all, The Venus Project.
Nothing new, nothing interesting.
To be fair, they did manage to get a fundraiser completed, which is always surprising to hear.
Said fundraiser is to "Transcribe the remaining unreleased 747 lectures of Jacque Fresco and systematically categorize and organize them for easier discovery of knowledge. We can then e-publish books from Jacque Fresco on important topics relevant to our global problems."
As always, I'm 99% sure those lectures will be available via en-detail payment, since they have to milk their followers's money somehow, now that they've exhausted selling the rest of their materials at a high mark-up value.
The second thing they are funding it with it are "scholarships and grants for scholars to perform literature reviews and publish research papers pertinent to The Venus Project"
In other words, literally paying people to write studies that support their claims.
That...isn't how science works, unless you think the papers funded by Big Oil/Tobacco/other nasty industries saying their products are harmless and awesome are legitimate.
But this entire strategy relies on agressive, sustained growth, which The Venus Project absolutely lacks.
To prove that, half a year ago, i said, with Internet stats to show it, that they are growing increasingly obscure on the Internet, and their membership is shrinking.
And this desperation is seen in what they've been doing online.
With the end of the year coming super fast, they've apparently dropped the "Center for Resource Management" page from resourcebasedeconomy.org, which detailed their progress and deadlines, while also deleting their progress meter from thevenusproject.com.
Fortunately, due to archive.org, and screenshots from when the site was up, we know they've already passed their deadline for stage 1, and they have not advanced in any way their Center for Resource Management project in the past half year.
Well, what about their Internet presence?
Well in September, i said "It consistently is in the 200,000th-300,000th place, by popularity".
Now, on average, it places somewhere in the 500,000th+ place, and the stats are even worse:
-1,9->1,5 daily pageviews;
-2:59->2:47 average view time;
-59,7%->62,9% bounce rate;
-37%->15% search engine traffic;
As for geographic distribution, The Venus Project has become so obscure, Alexa no longer lists it.
Fortunately, Google trends can partially help with that.
Apparently, by far the most popular region in recent is Mexico.
Overwhelmingly so, which raised some eyebrows for me.
But looking over the related search items, i realized why.
It seems the Venus Project is something like a program the Mexican department of education is doing to train it's teaching staff.
So yeah, TVP is slowly drifting away into obscurity, and it's even it's name is being associated with everything from teacher reorganization programs, to domestic violence prevention, to cryptocurrency frameworks, to anime.
As a funny sidenote, one of the biggest search terms associated with the Venus Project is "cult".
Can't say i disagree.
But don't fret, because that means the main centers of Venus Project support are in the countries on the places after Mexico.
Which means the former Russian Empire/USSR.
A former member of the Venus Project has confirmed that is the case, and that they are all united and driven under 1 Russian-speaking group...or not.
According to her, due to Roxanne Meadows wanting to channel everything to their organization and their site in order to strictly control what they say, partly due to their own extra-centralizing tendencies, and partly due to the Zeitgeist schism making them want to snuff out dissident movements, they:
a)made every former national Venus Project and Venus Project Activism group change it's name into TVP Support, in order to make everything related to the TVP brand.
Problem is, in a lot of languages, TVP doesn't work as an acronym for The Venus Project, which has generated a lot of confusion.
b)The Venus Project hasn't given a rat's ass about the Russian-speaking group, even though it's the biggest one, and they have requested support from "HQ" multiple times, especially to stomp out fake pages and groups that use the Venus Project name.
In response to that, and some other interpersonal drama of a guy called Stan, who "was a part of the RST for a while, then went psycho and tried to take over the group and dominate
the team", they threw a hissy-hit, and took away their "verified" checkbox next to the group's name.
The combination of both 2 things led to an explosion of copycats, groups masquerading as them, swindlers requesting money, and also making people work for them for free in "Venus Project demonstration centers" around Moscow, with bathtubs in trees and other weird stuff.
Fun thing is, it was such a clusterfuck, that even today, they aren't sure who is a legit TVP Russia member, and who is a scammer.
And it's not just limited to Eastern Europe.
To quote their own internal chats:
"Of course the RST(Russian-speaking Team) is not the only team that seems to feel it should be able to operate according to its own parameters. The Israeli and Greek teams also refuse to work with TVP Support. The Greek team has already been removed from the "official" list of TVP Support teams."
Ok, so The Venus Project is an organizational clusterfuck, and is already massively behind their own schedule.
What about it's former "activism arm", the Zeitgeist movement?
Well, they have been trying to build their own platform, called Zeitgeist.earth, for a year and a half now.
They progressed somewhat, but then, their only web developer screwed them over, and ran away with the code.
Things still are inching away(at about 80%, or so they say), but it's almost frozen, partially as a result as a November fight over admin rights, people feeling they are ignored, accusations of not doing enough, of putting their personal interests and passions ahead of the movement, and other wonderful office politics drama.
Seems they couldn't "arrive" at decisions on how to move this project forward.
But wait, that's irrelevant, because, supposedly, the movement is "decentralized" and "holocratic"?
Remember the chapters they had in every country?
Well, after 12 years, most of them have died, and we are left with the following situation:
Active: Argentina, Brazil, Italy, Mongolia, Portugal, Russia, Taiwan, UK
Existing: Australia, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania,
Ukraine
Comatose: Austria, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Iceland, Japan, Latvia, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Paraguay, Philippines, Poland, Slovakia, Sweden(semi),
Dead: Algeria, Belgium, China, Costa Rica, Ecuador, France, Greece, Guatemala, India, Ireland, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Mexico, Morocco, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, Switzerland
Just to be clear, as a general rule, "Active" means a sizable active community, "Existing" means usually just some lone ranger type member posting, "Comatose" means 1-2 months between posts, and "Dead" is self-explanatory.
Greece was interesting, since instead of the usual death by inactivity, they officially self-dissolved in a common declaration in which they accuse the movement of incompetence, lack of vision, and excessive centralization around Peter Joseph.
In short there are way more dead chapters than alive ones, and plenty of the active ones are unhealthy.
It seems they are unofficially abandoning the chapter structure, instead doing everything on their Discord, which, at the moment, has 84 active members(stats may fluctuate, but from I've seen, regular members only number a couple of hundreds, with the active posters being a mere handful, such as Juuso)
Their Internet presence has also suffered.
What about it's aloof leader, Peter Joseph?
Eh, he's busy bitching at people on Twitter, getting angry and accusing everyone of being hypocrites that don't do anything useful(how ironic), and once every couple of months, having an even bigger meltdown than usual, deleting all his tweets, and vowing he is abandoning social for good(or atleast until his movie is complete), since society is too stupid for him.
Then he realizes almost nobody cares about him, and unceremoniously comes back online, and tries to pick fights with everyone from Neil Tyson, Elon Musk, and even getting extremely butthurt at a Mister Rogers quote.
Also, his personal follower count on all platforms has plateaued hard, as shown by A former member's blog post, while the movement's is decreasing.
But hey, he's finally completed his movie, after 5 years, or something like that.
And it's gonna be screened, for cash, according to a waiting list, in a Los Angeles theater.
Because nothing shows how bad consumerism, capitalism, non-digitization, and artificial scarcity is, than inviting your closest fanboys for a limited edition physical premiere of a 3-hour YouTube snoozefest.
So, in conclusion, the Zeitgeist Movement is mostly stuck in a rut.
Maybe some of their affiliated movements can help?
Looking over the Venus Project sites overview section on their wiki, passing over the www.tvpactivism.com site, which is dead, http://www.thevenusprojectdesign.org/, which has now been taken over by a Chinese bot, and Jacque Fresco's Twitter account, which has been inactive for half a year, and only reanimated to promote their fundraising campaign, an empty IRC channel, we reach the
"Organizations working with The Venus Project
".
It seems there are 2 of them:
Pangea of Greece, and Futuragora of Portugal
Futuragora, seems to have developed some software to help with disaster relief, and a couple of other things(the site is in Portuguese, and i can't get what happened fully)
Pangea, well it's done nothing, and their social media pages are just them distributing TVP posts.
But hey, given that activism is very limited, maybe they can get more done as a political force, and help that way?
Enter the Money Free Party, there to gauge the electoral will of the RBE crowd.
So what is their political performance?
Well, they claimed branches in the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, United States, Sri Lanka, Portugal, South Africa, India, Italy, Ghana, Brazil, Argentina, Netherlands, Belgium and Romania. All of them are dead now.
In the UK and New Zealand, they even founded official parties, and launched some candidates.
None of them won anything, in fact, they usually came in dead last, and the parties dissolved themselves.
Their website is also dead, their national organization social media pages are dead, and the only thing remaining is a Facebook and Twitter feed, where they used to make some hashtag filled posts with some motivational quotes or some news articles, but they stopped doing that, and now just repost stuff from the Venus Project and the Zeitgeist Movement.
Let's try some independent RBE and RBE-like organizations, projects and members, then?
Disclaimer: The vast majority of these are taken from Auravana Project's "Similar Organizations" documents, and others i've taken by searching Facebook for "RBE". Some aren't even true organizations, but mostly one man projects trying to put a spin to the RBE idea.
ASIMPAC - "a society transition proposal stemming from a corporative community to tackle the global challenges that the present system is unfit to address".
Announced their official launch a year and a half ago, and that's the last anyone has heard of them.
Auravana Project-made by some guy with a love of architecture. Roxanne Meadows used the DMCA to take down one of his video for copyright infringement(yet again, ironic). Has written some guides a couple of years ago, on how his open-source and open-access society should function, but at the moment, it's as far as it's gone.
Atleast his material is free and open-source.
BUILD A HYBRID RBE COMMUNITY NOW-Yes, the title is in all caps.
A facebook group theorycrafting about building RBE cities.
The overwhelming majority of the posts are made by a guy called Michael E. V. Knight, who's a big fan of Ubuntu Contributionism, while the members are 90% fans of One Community Global. The related Facebook groups are New Age craziness. Weird stratification.
The Brazil Project-an idea to implement a resource-based economy in beautiful Brazil.
Or, to quote them "an initiative that arose from the opportunity offered in the state of Ceará, the donation of land with an area of more than 300 hectares, to build, to promote and elucidate the ideas of a resource-based economy (RBE) under the guidance of The Venus project to offer to the world population.
Copiosis-a system which attempts to quantify all the societal done by individual members, according to an algorithm, in exchange for a sort of virtual currency.
But not surprisingly, they are very thin on how the algorithm works, or how checking will be done.
Economia Basada Enrecursos (EBR)-a Spanish RBE site.
Had a brief in activity in 2014, and became defunct within 5 months.
Their Facebook page still posts anti-capitalist pictures in Spanish.
Free World Charter-the creation of a former Irish musician who became an author that, after attempting to go around the world without using money, made a site called The Free World Charter in which he expresses his idea for an moneyless 'open access economy'. Had a fringe following at one point.
Nowadays, his site is offline, and his Facebook page is just him sharing inspirational quotes and articles about charity.
Forward Movement-a Facebook page made by a guy who sympathizes with TVP and TZM's ideas, but realizes they are purposely vague on how it would come to pass.
So he figured out that a Marxist worker's revolution is the catalyst for an RBE, so he propagates communist propaganda.
In All Seriousness-TZM's official podcast. 4 episodes recorded in 2017 and early 2018, then died.
Kadagaya-an eco-commune in the Amazon forest, founded by some Europeans that grew tired of western consumerism, and decided to live with all things in common in the rainforest, using the principles of Fresco's RBE as a basis, except the one about central control via cybernetics, due to them being at the moment more low-tech, and too simple.
Surprisingly, i have nothing bad to say about them.
While i don't believe they will go anywhere, in fact, due to their small size, they will probably become defunct within the next decade, they don't present themselves as saviours, they grow their own food, build and research their own solutions, and open-source whatever might be useful to others.
If they dropped the Resource-Based dogma, they could develop more easily.
Koto Coop-an idea for a cooperative, founded 2 years ago by one of the most important and visible members of the Zeitgeist movement.
So far, it's only there as a bookmark, on the principle that maybe someday, the founder of it will get to it.
In other words, never.
Moving Forward RBE Learning Network (Facebook group)-another pro-RBE page. On a good day he gets 6-7 likes.
One Community Global-a sustainable living group that wishes to make open-source, eco-friendly buildings components, up to and including a duplicable city center, for a more sustainable, close-night and environmentally conscious civilization.
Though never tested, it's obvious they've done their work, and have provided CAD files, spreadsheets dealing with monetary and resource costs of their buildings, electricity and water, for everything they have done, in multiple variants.
In fact, the only connection they have to the RBE concept is a page on their website that presents it as a possible solution, but they don't care under what economic form their solutions will be applied.
One Planet Project-A team of the Zeitgeist Movement, who's job is "Global collaboration on spreading awareness of TZM around the world".
Their only remnant is a page that posts...wait for it...pop-sci articles.
RBE10K-a project to build an independent 10000 strong community and build a resource-based city.
Made their own wiki and stuff.
No one was seriously interested, and said wiki shortly thereafter got swarmed by spambots, which had to manually get purged.
Nowadays, the wiki hasn't been updated in years, and it's now just one dude sharing pop-sci articles on Facebook.
RBE Technology-"The intent of technology postings on this page is to show technological concepts capable of solving human problems that are possible right now."
Tl;dr: It's a pop-sci page.
Paradism-a project of the Raelians, a weird cult-ish religion involving aliens, UFOs, immortality through cloning, masturbation, swinging, and topless protesting.
They made Jacque Fresco a saint in their religion, and wish to implement something super similar.
But looking over their site and social media, they just post some pop-sci articles.
Tetra Project-another project attempting to kickstart all those wonderful solutions to mankind's woes.
Recently had it's five year anniversary, which they kicked off with a sale of merchandise.
Accomplishments so far?
Some some rough drawings and sketches.
TZM Education-Education courses promoting post-scarcity. Bog standard RBE propaganda, has been offline since 2015.
TZM Global Radio-The Zeitgeist Movement's internet radio. Links are dead, site is down, iTunes address is unrecognized.
TROM-the former TVP Magazine, which broke from the Venus Project after Roxanne Meadows suspected she wasn't getting her full share of the magazine's cash(it'll always be hilarious how people that preach about money being bad and unneeded, intellectual property being a scam, and politics being primitive, end up fighting over money, copyrights and control over their audience).
After they completely broke off, sending all of their published material back to Miss Meadows, so she can release it for free(something we are still waiting for, after all these years), he once again became independent, and explored the real cause of all the suffering in the world, which he concludes is trade(aka division of labour).
Made him make lists of FOSS Software he considers "Trade Free"(no monetary costs, data collection, or donation links), and even made an Arch Linux distro called Tromjaro, which only has preinstalled software which is "trade free".
Apparently it's decent, as a distro.
Ubuntu Contributionism/Ubuntu Planet-The brainchild of a South African politician, writer and explorer called Michael Tellinger.
Kinda similar to an RBE, and he tried implementing it in some towns, but nothing happened.
Nowadays, the movement is pretty much just Michael Tellinger, reposting everything from his Facebook feed, from expeditions to the wilderness, in search of alien ruins and traces of prehistoric advanced human civilizations, to him reminiscing about his run for office.
V-Radio-The Venus Project's online radio. Functioned intermittently for 6 years, and went off-air in 2015.
ZeitNews and ZeitNews Germany-the Zeitgeist Movement's online newspaper, who's focus was news related to the movement.
Domains got taken over by a Wordpress theme vendor, and a German industrial company.
In conclusion, barring 2-3 projects tangentially related to the RBE philosophy, that are building some specific things that might be useful in the real world, be it a capitalism or non-capitalist one, the entire RBE scene is mostly dominated by rapidly fading, dead or dying movements, cannibalizing each other more and more in order to stay afloat, and their main activity being reposting stuff on social media for between 0 to 20 likes(the Venus Project is the exception, and gets around 50, on average), most of that being "I fucking love science" tier articles, inspirational quotes, and anti-capitalist rants, that is, when they are not begging for money.
Bibliography: https://www.thevenusproject.com/become-a-volunteer/sociocyberneering-education-project/
https://www.bigworldsmallsasha.com/2019/09/13/why-i-left-the-venus-project/
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1cIkdI7qBQzif7z3yFKKNuYNyw7gKADrzoyPq__Adjhg/edit
https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=&sl=auto&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fzeitgeistmovement.gr%2F
http://www.auravana.com/conflict-resolution.html
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1eVM165G06fFBi3RO0cJQIXXnUa_k_tM2D4234nD4Yg0/edit#gid=0
Let's start with the granddaddy of them all, The Venus Project.
Nothing new, nothing interesting.
To be fair, they did manage to get a fundraiser completed, which is always surprising to hear.
Said fundraiser is to "Transcribe the remaining unreleased 747 lectures of Jacque Fresco and systematically categorize and organize them for easier discovery of knowledge. We can then e-publish books from Jacque Fresco on important topics relevant to our global problems."
As always, I'm 99% sure those lectures will be available via en-detail payment, since they have to milk their followers's money somehow, now that they've exhausted selling the rest of their materials at a high mark-up value.
The second thing they are funding it with it are "scholarships and grants for scholars to perform literature reviews and publish research papers pertinent to The Venus Project"
In other words, literally paying people to write studies that support their claims.
That...isn't how science works, unless you think the papers funded by Big Oil/Tobacco/other nasty industries saying their products are harmless and awesome are legitimate.
Though, for the sake of impartiality, due to a defection from one of TVP's staff, and confirmed by one of their newsletters, we know it's tied to a longer-term objective.
Training more people in the "Sociocyberneering Education Project" course, to be sure they have people that have memorized their script, and can present the Venus Project teachings in an orthodox fashion.
Which, ironically, makes their new modus operandi extremely similar to the Jehovah's Witnesses.
Well, to be fair to the Watchtower Society, atleast the JW engage in actual charity, besides wanting new members and donations, and all their publications are available online, for free.
Training more people in the "Sociocyberneering Education Project" course, to be sure they have people that have memorized their script, and can present the Venus Project teachings in an orthodox fashion.
Which, ironically, makes their new modus operandi extremely similar to the Jehovah's Witnesses.
Well, to be fair to the Watchtower Society, atleast the JW engage in actual charity, besides wanting new members and donations, and all their publications are available online, for free.
But this entire strategy relies on agressive, sustained growth, which The Venus Project absolutely lacks.
To prove that, half a year ago, i said, with Internet stats to show it, that they are growing increasingly obscure on the Internet, and their membership is shrinking.
And this desperation is seen in what they've been doing online.
With the end of the year coming super fast, they've apparently dropped the "Center for Resource Management" page from resourcebasedeconomy.org, which detailed their progress and deadlines, while also deleting their progress meter from thevenusproject.com.
Fortunately, due to archive.org, and screenshots from when the site was up, we know they've already passed their deadline for stage 1, and they have not advanced in any way their Center for Resource Management project in the past half year.
 |
| Technology and the scientific method is a wonderful tool for weeding out charlatans and false claims, as Fresco used to say |
Well in September, i said "It consistently is in the 200,000th-300,000th place, by popularity".
Now, on average, it places somewhere in the 500,000th+ place, and the stats are even worse:
-1,9->1,5 daily pageviews;
-2:59->2:47 average view time;
-59,7%->62,9% bounce rate;
-37%->15% search engine traffic;
As for geographic distribution, The Venus Project has become so obscure, Alexa no longer lists it.
Fortunately, Google trends can partially help with that.
 |
| Excuse the non-English UI. Firefox bug |
Apparently, by far the most popular region in recent is Mexico.
Overwhelmingly so, which raised some eyebrows for me.
But looking over the related search items, i realized why.
It seems the Venus Project is something like a program the Mexican department of education is doing to train it's teaching staff.
So yeah, TVP is slowly drifting away into obscurity, and it's even it's name is being associated with everything from teacher reorganization programs, to domestic violence prevention, to cryptocurrency frameworks, to anime.
As a funny sidenote, one of the biggest search terms associated with the Venus Project is "cult".
Can't say i disagree.
But don't fret, because that means the main centers of Venus Project support are in the countries on the places after Mexico.
Which means the former Russian Empire/USSR.
A former member of the Venus Project has confirmed that is the case, and that they are all united and driven under 1 Russian-speaking group...or not.
According to her, due to Roxanne Meadows wanting to channel everything to their organization and their site in order to strictly control what they say, partly due to their own extra-centralizing tendencies, and partly due to the Zeitgeist schism making them want to snuff out dissident movements, they:
a)made every former national Venus Project and Venus Project Activism group change it's name into TVP Support, in order to make everything related to the TVP brand.
Problem is, in a lot of languages, TVP doesn't work as an acronym for The Venus Project, which has generated a lot of confusion.
b)The Venus Project hasn't given a rat's ass about the Russian-speaking group, even though it's the biggest one, and they have requested support from "HQ" multiple times, especially to stomp out fake pages and groups that use the Venus Project name.
In response to that, and some other interpersonal drama of a guy called Stan, who "was a part of the RST for a while, then went psycho and tried to take over the group and dominate
the team", they threw a hissy-hit, and took away their "verified" checkbox next to the group's name.
The combination of both 2 things led to an explosion of copycats, groups masquerading as them, swindlers requesting money, and also making people work for them for free in "Venus Project demonstration centers" around Moscow, with bathtubs in trees and other weird stuff.
Fun thing is, it was such a clusterfuck, that even today, they aren't sure who is a legit TVP Russia member, and who is a scammer.
And it's not just limited to Eastern Europe.
To quote their own internal chats:
"Of course the RST(Russian-speaking Team) is not the only team that seems to feel it should be able to operate according to its own parameters. The Israeli and Greek teams also refuse to work with TVP Support. The Greek team has already been removed from the "official" list of TVP Support teams."
Ok, so The Venus Project is an organizational clusterfuck, and is already massively behind their own schedule.
What about it's former "activism arm", the Zeitgeist movement?
Well, they have been trying to build their own platform, called Zeitgeist.earth, for a year and a half now.
They progressed somewhat, but then, their only web developer screwed them over, and ran away with the code.
Things still are inching away(at about 80%, or so they say), but it's almost frozen, partially as a result as a November fight over admin rights, people feeling they are ignored, accusations of not doing enough, of putting their personal interests and passions ahead of the movement, and other wonderful office politics drama.
Seems they couldn't "arrive" at decisions on how to move this project forward.
But wait, that's irrelevant, because, supposedly, the movement is "decentralized" and "holocratic"?
Remember the chapters they had in every country?
Well, after 12 years, most of them have died, and we are left with the following situation:
Active: Argentina, Brazil, Italy, Mongolia, Portugal, Russia, Taiwan, UK
Existing: Australia, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania,
Ukraine
Comatose: Austria, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Iceland, Japan, Latvia, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Paraguay, Philippines, Poland, Slovakia, Sweden(semi),
Dead: Algeria, Belgium, China, Costa Rica, Ecuador, France, Greece, Guatemala, India, Ireland, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Mexico, Morocco, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, Switzerland
Just to be clear, as a general rule, "Active" means a sizable active community, "Existing" means usually just some lone ranger type member posting, "Comatose" means 1-2 months between posts, and "Dead" is self-explanatory.
Greece was interesting, since instead of the usual death by inactivity, they officially self-dissolved in a common declaration in which they accuse the movement of incompetence, lack of vision, and excessive centralization around Peter Joseph.
In short there are way more dead chapters than alive ones, and plenty of the active ones are unhealthy.
It seems they are unofficially abandoning the chapter structure, instead doing everything on their Discord, which, at the moment, has 84 active members(stats may fluctuate, but from I've seen, regular members only number a couple of hundreds, with the active posters being a mere handful, such as Juuso)
Their Internet presence has also suffered.
 |
| That moment when you make the Venus Project look popular, by being close to the 2 millionth most visited page |
 |
| Yet again, being so obscure, a minor rise in interest in small and medium-sized countries can completely eclipse everything |
What about it's aloof leader, Peter Joseph?
Eh, he's busy bitching at people on Twitter, getting angry and accusing everyone of being hypocrites that don't do anything useful(how ironic), and once every couple of months, having an even bigger meltdown than usual, deleting all his tweets, and vowing he is abandoning social for good(or atleast until his movie is complete), since society is too stupid for him.
Then he realizes almost nobody cares about him, and unceremoniously comes back online, and tries to pick fights with everyone from Neil Tyson, Elon Musk, and even getting extremely butthurt at a Mister Rogers quote.
 |
| No, i wasn't joking |
Also, his personal follower count on all platforms has plateaued hard, as shown by A former member's blog post, while the movement's is decreasing.
But hey, he's finally completed his movie, after 5 years, or something like that.
And it's gonna be screened, for cash, according to a waiting list, in a Los Angeles theater.
Because nothing shows how bad consumerism, capitalism, non-digitization, and artificial scarcity is, than inviting your closest fanboys for a limited edition physical premiere of a 3-hour YouTube snoozefest.
So, in conclusion, the Zeitgeist Movement is mostly stuck in a rut.
Maybe some of their affiliated movements can help?
Looking over the Venus Project sites overview section on their wiki, passing over the www.tvpactivism.com site, which is dead, http://www.thevenusprojectdesign.org/, which has now been taken over by a Chinese bot, and Jacque Fresco's Twitter account, which has been inactive for half a year, and only reanimated to promote their fundraising campaign, an empty IRC channel, we reach the
"Organizations working with The Venus Project
".It seems there are 2 of them:
Pangea of Greece, and Futuragora of Portugal
Futuragora, seems to have developed some software to help with disaster relief, and a couple of other things(the site is in Portuguese, and i can't get what happened fully)
Pangea, well it's done nothing, and their social media pages are just them distributing TVP posts.
But hey, given that activism is very limited, maybe they can get more done as a political force, and help that way?
Enter the Money Free Party, there to gauge the electoral will of the RBE crowd.
So what is their political performance?
Well, they claimed branches in the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, United States, Sri Lanka, Portugal, South Africa, India, Italy, Ghana, Brazil, Argentina, Netherlands, Belgium and Romania. All of them are dead now.
In the UK and New Zealand, they even founded official parties, and launched some candidates.
None of them won anything, in fact, they usually came in dead last, and the parties dissolved themselves.
Their website is also dead, their national organization social media pages are dead, and the only thing remaining is a Facebook and Twitter feed, where they used to make some hashtag filled posts with some motivational quotes or some news articles, but they stopped doing that, and now just repost stuff from the Venus Project and the Zeitgeist Movement.
Let's try some independent RBE and RBE-like organizations, projects and members, then?
Disclaimer: The vast majority of these are taken from Auravana Project's "Similar Organizations" documents, and others i've taken by searching Facebook for "RBE". Some aren't even true organizations, but mostly one man projects trying to put a spin to the RBE idea.
ASIMPAC - "a society transition proposal stemming from a corporative community to tackle the global challenges that the present system is unfit to address".
Announced their official launch a year and a half ago, and that's the last anyone has heard of them.
Auravana Project-made by some guy with a love of architecture. Roxanne Meadows used the DMCA to take down one of his video for copyright infringement(yet again, ironic). Has written some guides a couple of years ago, on how his open-source and open-access society should function, but at the moment, it's as far as it's gone.
Atleast his material is free and open-source.
BUILD A HYBRID RBE COMMUNITY NOW-Yes, the title is in all caps.
A facebook group theorycrafting about building RBE cities.
The overwhelming majority of the posts are made by a guy called Michael E. V. Knight, who's a big fan of Ubuntu Contributionism, while the members are 90% fans of One Community Global. The related Facebook groups are New Age craziness. Weird stratification.
The Brazil Project-an idea to implement a resource-based economy in beautiful Brazil.
Or, to quote them "an initiative that arose from the opportunity offered in the state of Ceará, the donation of land with an area of more than 300 hectares, to build, to promote and elucidate the ideas of a resource-based economy (RBE) under the guidance of The Venus project to offer to the world population.
And justifiably to incorporate the
project as a foundation to receive the donation of the land, as well as
attract and popularize the town. One of the project phases will be to
set up a technology development center for sustainability purposes with
the initial focus on new technologies for setting up and managing the
city."
They've achieved nothing in that direction, and have stopped posting anything in social media since August. We can consider it dead.
They've achieved nothing in that direction, and have stopped posting anything in social media since August. We can consider it dead.
Common Heritage Pledge-a Change.org tier pledge to institute a resource-based economy.
Site has been offline for a year.
Site has been offline for a year.
Copiosis-a system which attempts to quantify all the societal done by individual members, according to an algorithm, in exchange for a sort of virtual currency.
But not surprisingly, they are very thin on how the algorithm works, or how checking will be done.
Economia Basada Enrecursos (EBR)-a Spanish RBE site.
Had a brief in activity in 2014, and became defunct within 5 months.
Their Facebook page still posts anti-capitalist pictures in Spanish.
Free World Charter-the creation of a former Irish musician who became an author that, after attempting to go around the world without using money, made a site called The Free World Charter in which he expresses his idea for an moneyless 'open access economy'. Had a fringe following at one point.
Nowadays, his site is offline, and his Facebook page is just him sharing inspirational quotes and articles about charity.
Forward Movement-a Facebook page made by a guy who sympathizes with TVP and TZM's ideas, but realizes they are purposely vague on how it would come to pass.
So he figured out that a Marxist worker's revolution is the catalyst for an RBE, so he propagates communist propaganda.
Futurist Playground-pretty much The Venus Project with the numbers filled off, where they don't promote a "Resource-based Economy", but "Abundance-Based Community Developments".
It's still literally the same talk-points, and unsurprisingly, they also haven't done anything tangible.
They have a Facebook page that posts pop-sci articles and old soviet futurism.
It's still literally the same talk-points, and unsurprisingly, they also haven't done anything tangible.
They have a Facebook page that posts pop-sci articles and old soviet futurism.
In All Seriousness-TZM's official podcast. 4 episodes recorded in 2017 and early 2018, then died.
Kadagaya-an eco-commune in the Amazon forest, founded by some Europeans that grew tired of western consumerism, and decided to live with all things in common in the rainforest, using the principles of Fresco's RBE as a basis, except the one about central control via cybernetics, due to them being at the moment more low-tech, and too simple.
Surprisingly, i have nothing bad to say about them.
While i don't believe they will go anywhere, in fact, due to their small size, they will probably become defunct within the next decade, they don't present themselves as saviours, they grow their own food, build and research their own solutions, and open-source whatever might be useful to others.
If they dropped the Resource-Based dogma, they could develop more easily.
Koto Coop-an idea for a cooperative, founded 2 years ago by one of the most important and visible members of the Zeitgeist movement.
So far, it's only there as a bookmark, on the principle that maybe someday, the founder of it will get to it.
In other words, never.
Moving Forward RBE Learning Network (Facebook group)-another pro-RBE page. On a good day he gets 6-7 likes.
One Community Global-a sustainable living group that wishes to make open-source, eco-friendly buildings components, up to and including a duplicable city center, for a more sustainable, close-night and environmentally conscious civilization.
Though never tested, it's obvious they've done their work, and have provided CAD files, spreadsheets dealing with monetary and resource costs of their buildings, electricity and water, for everything they have done, in multiple variants.
In fact, the only connection they have to the RBE concept is a page on their website that presents it as a possible solution, but they don't care under what economic form their solutions will be applied.
One Planet Project-A team of the Zeitgeist Movement, who's job is "Global collaboration on spreading awareness of TZM around the world".
Their only remnant is a page that posts...wait for it...pop-sci articles.
RBE10K-a project to build an independent 10000 strong community and build a resource-based city.
Made their own wiki and stuff.
No one was seriously interested, and said wiki shortly thereafter got swarmed by spambots, which had to manually get purged.
Nowadays, the wiki hasn't been updated in years, and it's now just one dude sharing pop-sci articles on Facebook.
RBE Technology-"The intent of technology postings on this page is to show technological concepts capable of solving human problems that are possible right now."
Tl;dr: It's a pop-sci page.
Paradism-a project of the Raelians, a weird cult-ish religion involving aliens, UFOs, immortality through cloning, masturbation, swinging, and topless protesting.
They made Jacque Fresco a saint in their religion, and wish to implement something super similar.
But looking over their site and social media, they just post some pop-sci articles.
Tetra Project-another project attempting to kickstart all those wonderful solutions to mankind's woes.
Recently had it's five year anniversary, which they kicked off with a sale of merchandise.
Accomplishments so far?
Some some rough drawings and sketches.
TZM Education-Education courses promoting post-scarcity. Bog standard RBE propaganda, has been offline since 2015.
TZM Global Radio-The Zeitgeist Movement's internet radio. Links are dead, site is down, iTunes address is unrecognized.
TROM-the former TVP Magazine, which broke from the Venus Project after Roxanne Meadows suspected she wasn't getting her full share of the magazine's cash(it'll always be hilarious how people that preach about money being bad and unneeded, intellectual property being a scam, and politics being primitive, end up fighting over money, copyrights and control over their audience).
After they completely broke off, sending all of their published material back to Miss Meadows, so she can release it for free(something we are still waiting for, after all these years), he once again became independent, and explored the real cause of all the suffering in the world, which he concludes is trade(aka division of labour).
Made him make lists of FOSS Software he considers "Trade Free"(no monetary costs, data collection, or donation links), and even made an Arch Linux distro called Tromjaro, which only has preinstalled software which is "trade free".
Apparently it's decent, as a distro.
Ubuntu Contributionism/Ubuntu Planet-The brainchild of a South African politician, writer and explorer called Michael Tellinger.
Kinda similar to an RBE, and he tried implementing it in some towns, but nothing happened.
Nowadays, the movement is pretty much just Michael Tellinger, reposting everything from his Facebook feed, from expeditions to the wilderness, in search of alien ruins and traces of prehistoric advanced human civilizations, to him reminiscing about his run for office.
V-Radio-The Venus Project's online radio. Functioned intermittently for 6 years, and went off-air in 2015.
ZeitNews and ZeitNews Germany-the Zeitgeist Movement's online newspaper, who's focus was news related to the movement.
Domains got taken over by a Wordpress theme vendor, and a German industrial company.
In conclusion, barring 2-3 projects tangentially related to the RBE philosophy, that are building some specific things that might be useful in the real world, be it a capitalism or non-capitalist one, the entire RBE scene is mostly dominated by rapidly fading, dead or dying movements, cannibalizing each other more and more in order to stay afloat, and their main activity being reposting stuff on social media for between 0 to 20 likes(the Venus Project is the exception, and gets around 50, on average), most of that being "I fucking love science" tier articles, inspirational quotes, and anti-capitalist rants, that is, when they are not begging for money.
Bibliography: https://www.thevenusproject.com/become-a-volunteer/sociocyberneering-education-project/
https://www.bigworldsmallsasha.com/2019/09/13/why-i-left-the-venus-project/
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1cIkdI7qBQzif7z3yFKKNuYNyw7gKADrzoyPq__Adjhg/edit
https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=&sl=auto&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fzeitgeistmovement.gr%2F
http://www.auravana.com/conflict-resolution.html
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1eVM165G06fFBi3RO0cJQIXXnUa_k_tM2D4234nD4Yg0/edit#gid=0
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