Hey,What is this (Zeitgeist) Movement really all about?
Zeitgeist Movement SA Chat
So I got a question from someone today asking what The Zeitgeist Movement is about. This is something that resonated with me because Cliff and I are working on remaking the tzm.community website and a big part of it for me is that question. What is TZM about?
My really short answer:
The Zeitgeist Movement is about having a Post Scarcity society come to fruition.
Michael Kubler
The more detailed response with some history:
It used to be about getting the Resource Based Economy to come to fruition as per Jacque Fresco’s vision in the Venus project. Unfortunately the Venus project is now a closed source organisation which isn’t trying to get Jacque Fresco’s vision to come to light (I can provide some other people’s documentation if requested which explains this in more detail).
As such we’ve pivoted slightly to the more generic version. So The Zeitgeist Movement is aiming to have a Post Scarcity society (what I call an Abundance Centred Society) come to fruition.
Unfortunately because the movement is so intimately tied to Peter Joseph, if it does something untoward, then that reflects badly on PJ and as such PJ is mostly happy for the movement to die out and is somewhat hostile to activities which would really help the movement thrive.
The movement also spent the first decade being run by someone I think was a sociopath. Although they’ve since died from what’s effectively alcohol poisoning. So during that very important and formative time the movement was forced into a structure which helped the person in question be able to control 
just about everything and take credit for anything anyone did, but ultimately it didn’t do anything tangible. People of high calibre left the movement and there was a bunch of other issues as well which means the movement didn’t do practical things. It wasn’t working on physically making a new RBE community then city and expanding the civilisation model. So after a decade people ask “what have you done” and the answer is mostly “outreach” we let lots of people know. Probably 30-100 million people have seen the movies and know the ideas in details and I’m guessing over 500 million people have some idea of the concepts.
So what’s left is the community. The people who’ve decided that this is their people. Like minded individuals who are interested in changing society.
That’s at least my interpretation and understanding as someone who’s been a part of the movement from the first year and having run multiple Zday events. I’ve met with Jacque Fresco (and Roxanne) when they toured Australia. I’ve had multiple meetings with PJ and spent time with others who were formative in the earlier years. I helped run www.thezeitgeistmovement.com until PJ revoked myself and Cliff’s access and closed it off so only he can make changes.
The Zeitgeist Movement feels like it’s gone through a bit of a resurgence in the last 4 years since I posted about it needing to be reinvigorated. It’s not a lot bigger and there’s still only a small number of people who are keeping it running. But it doesn’t feel as likely to just die off as it did back then.
I’m of course hoping that my Abundant Mars idea will take off enough and actually provide some useful value. But there’s groups like Moneyless Society now which are doing well and Future Thinkers are posting more content and it looks like they are living off grid and look to be thriving.
I also like that Koto Co-op is still going, even if it’s not thriving as well.
H.U.M.A.N.I.A is also an amazing proposal that seems to have mostly stabilised.
So things are starting to look up.
It might not be The Zeitgeist Movement itself which goes actually manages to directly enact the transition to an Abundance Centered Society, but instead most likely it’ll be through multiple different groups working together.
