| The Venus Project | |
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The Venus Project logo |
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| Motto | Beyond Politics, Poverty and War |
| Type | Non-profit Organization |
| Website | www.thevenusproject.com |
The Venus Project is a project started by Jacque Fresco with the aim of improving society with a design that it calls a "resource-based economy". The system aims to incorporate sustainable cities and values, energy efficiency, collective farms, natural resource management and advanced automation.
The name is derived from Venus, Florida, where a research center is located, near Lake Okeechobee. Within the center are ten buildings, designed by Fresco, which showcase the architecture of the project. Future by Design, a film about the life and work of Jacque Fresco, was produced in 2006.
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The Venus Project was started around 1975 by Jacque Fresco[1] and by former portrait artist Roxanne Meadows in Venus, Florida, United States.
The Venus Project is a two-part business called "Future by Design"[2] and a for-profit company called "Venus Project Inc./Global Cybervisions Inc."[3]
The Venus Project was founded on an idea that all nations are fundamentally corrupt[4] and that this corruption comes from the use of money.[5] Fresco instead advocates what he refers to as a "resource-based economy",[6] which is an economy where resources are allocated by a computerized automated system referred to as the Cybernation.[7][8]
Fresco suggests that in a "resource-based economy", resources would be allocated into the goods and services in consumer demand, based on factors of availability, sustainability and technological advancement. The role of money would be phased out; instead, central computers would serve a lineup of goods and services, which citizens could order upon demand. Central computers would serve a variety of goods based on sustainability and the latest technological advances; obsolete, unwanted, or unused goods would be recycled, reduced and/or reused. Resource waste is a burden which the system must eliminate to function efficiently.[9]
A "resource-based economy" would use machines as labor to deliver goods and services from resource mining to the finished product, distribution centers with drive-throughs for each category that consumers collect and courier home; there would be no charge at the point of consumption. It is supposed that the cost is the energy and resource used in the process, and that this would fall onto automated machines to regulate, removing the burden from consumers.
A resource-based economy aims to supplant the market economy as the entity to which people turn for goods and services. It aims essentially to take the market out of the market economy, replacing it with automation based on the assumption that machines do not profit and do not maintain an environment of scarcity[10][11] to gain indebtedness and servitude from the population. Machines would act as the mediator to deliver goods and service to people in-place of the market and the government.[12][13]
Fresco provides an example of this confusion in the following quote:
According to Jacque Fresco (unless otherwise stated)
The advance of technology, if it were carried on independently of its profitability, would make more resources available to more people by producing an abundance of products and materials. This new-found abundance of resources would reduce the human tendency toward individualism, corruption, and greed, and instead rely on people helping each other.[15] Fresco imagines a society in which people would live "longer, healthier, and more meaningful lives."[16]
Fundamental to the project is what Fresco calls a "resource-based economy". Such a system uses existing resources, rather than money, to provide an equitable method of distribution in the most humane and efficient manner. It is a system in which all goods and services are available to everyone without the use of money, credits, barter, or any other form of debt or servitude.[17] And human error will not be left to chance, but compensated by cybernated structures, these will manage the risk to minimize or eliminate the opportunities that allow damage to the functioning of society. Offenders will not be killed, instead they will be re-educated, provided with the pieces of information for them to be altruistic, the integrity of a peaceful sustainable society will hold priority. Predatory drives are bred within the individual, in a monetary system, drives as these are conditioned by culture, and combined with a lack (scarcity), these predators will take offensive action against the better-off or helpless whatever the power differentials are; resulting in social consequences like poverty, crime, corruption and war, when the root cause is removed (the flow of money) these troubles will vanish.[18]
His ideas stem from his formative years during the Great Depression.[19]
The proposed way to transition to a resource based economy is as follows:[20]
The Venus project claims that all funds raised go back to developing the project, which provide a viable alternative to the market system, for when the market economy falls their solution will provide. As mentioned by Jacque and Roxanne, it is imperative that a motion picture be made before Jacque dies, so that the vision will be readily and easily accessible and apprehensible into the far future. This would continue the cause into building a research city founded on principles laid out by Jacque, establish through years research, experience and experiment.[21]
The Venus Project was featured prominently in the 2008 documentary film Zeitgeist: Addendum, as a possible solution to the global problems explained in the first film and first half of the second film.[15] The film premiered at the 5th Annual Artivist Film Festival in Los Angeles, California on October 2, 2008, winning their highest award, and it was released online for free on Google video[22] on October 4, 2008.[23] Following the movie, an organization called the Zeitgeist Movement was established to promote the aims of the Venus Project. In 2011, an additional film, Zeitgeist: Moving Forward, was also released. The movement functioned as the activist arm of the Venus Project. However, in April 2011, the Venus Project formally disassociated itself from the movement as it no longer felt represented by the direction the movement was heading in.[24]