I do not wish to hide my origins, nor do I seek to make it a subject of conversation. I am what I am.
–Ryan Giggs
Given the possibility of newcomers being confused where our International came from, as well as the inevitable tendency of some towards conspiratorial thinking, it is important to give a full account of our history and origins, transparently, and sourced with citations.
Predecessors
The Accessist International was formed as a splinter movement originating from the old Venus Project, an organization who’s focus was on the promotion of the ideas of futurist Jacque Fresco, who envisioned a reset of human economics and society, based upon applying the scientific method to all material aspects of human society, and in particular, the use of cybernetics and automation to liberate humanity from the need of labor or wages, replacing market anarchy with an automated, real-time balanced steady state economy, without the need of without a price tag, without debt, barter, trade, money, credits, or servitude of any kind, thereby allowing human potential to truly flourish.1
The Venus Project(TVP) is itself a sequel to Jacque Fresco’s previous organization called SocyoCyberneering Inc.2, who was reconstituted into the new entity, under dubious circumstances, if certain critics are to be believed.3
While Fresco’s behavior during or after this event are the subject of debate, his ideas formed the core of a valuable and much needed alternative to our capitalistic, monetary system, as well as other labor-based economic theories.
Interest in this piqued in the aftermath of the 2008 Financial Crisis, where the collapse of people’s livelihood showed the inevitable and cyclical failure of our monetary system4, while the resources and infrastructure were still there, a paradox previously lived and noted by Jacque during the Great Recession.5
But this time, it was in a backdrop of an interconnected and digitalized, global human civilization, which could easily use it’s computers and machines to coordinate and supply production in ways that ensured no one lived lives of deprivation.
This spike in interest coincided with TVP’s alliance with the also then famous Peter Joseph, and his Zeitgeist Movement(TZM), a collaboration which would be ended a couple of years later, though by that time, their “Resource-based economics”(RBE) ideas would thereby spread to TZM, as well as a number of other organizations, proposals and movements.6
Things would go strong at first, with TZM and TVP both creating a network of chapters all across the globe, but as the 2010’s progressed in it’s second half, these movements would begin to stagnate, contract or die, accelerated by Jacque Fresco’s death in 2017.7
This happened against a strategy on both TVP and TZM’s side of focusing exclusively on promotion, while waiting for the resource-based economy to inevitably happen once most of humanity is convinced, post-collapse of society.
This was not helped by a noticeable lack of empirical progress in their projects, and increasingly vaporware-like fundraising campaigns that made the public uninterested or hostile.
Jacque Fresco Education Network
Ultimately, the reveal of a 2020 Venus Project agenda focused almost exclusively on selling merch and other materials8, an almost complete mockery of the ideas for which it was founded, led to our creation of a free archive of Jacque Fresco’s teachings, plucked from various sources on the Internet.
I have linked the announcement of said initiative below, for dating purposes, as well as the link to the site.9
There was also a collaboration with the former Russian-speaking section of the Venus Project, which split after being increasingly disturbed by TVP’s opacity, ideological drift towards Luddite New Age apocalyptic cultism(once again, precisely the complete antithesis of Jacque Fresco’s vision of a bright, optimistic, high-tech, scientific future), financial issues and blackmail.10
While we collaborated for a while, it was clear they inherited TVP’s self-centeredness when dealing with other groups, and despite our warnings, they vastly overestimated their reach, as well as how difficult it was to breach the English speaking audience.
Other splinter groups, like Moneyless Society or World Beyond Capitalism, would steadily drift towards Marxism11, with the latter also becoming apologetic for China’s CCP-led regime.12
It was clear at that point that the above, the ambiguity of the term “Resource-Based Economy”13, as well as the damage and lack of trust created by TVP’s tactics was impossible to recover from.
Founding
In order to prevent the faults of previous attempts, namely the centralization of power, opacity, passivity, as well as ideological drift and linguistic drift, led to the creation of the Accessist International.
While it inherits the general principles of the The Venus Project, it is painfully aware of it’s faults as well, which led to the following changes:
1.New names and terms
We use “accessism” as the general term for our ideal: a non-competitive, open-source economy where resources are treated as a common heritage, distributed intelligently via feedback-driven systems to meet human needs without markets, debt, or wage labor.
This rebranding removes outdated terminology (e.g., “resource-based economy”) that carried utopian connotations or ideological ties, reducing linguistic drift and making the vision accessible to various audiences.
Terms like “access” mean practical entitlement over abstract equity, grounding the concept in everyday usability rather than philosophical debates.
2. Decentralized
Both TVP, as well as previous attempts as cybernetic planning(see OGAS) showed having a single-point-of-failure is a recipe for disaster, either through corruption, bureaucratization, or hacking.
The cybernetic economy needs to be planned in a decentralized, federated way. This is a non-negotiable principle, ensuring no one entity holds the kill switch and fostering active participation at every scale.
3. Open-source
The difficulties which we saw in the IP control of Jacque Fresco’s work, trying to shut down use even by internal groups like the Russian-speaking chapter14, as well as it being strategically walled-off under an opaque fundraising campaign15, which was then placed under a WIP “foundation”, who’s website has shown no progress since it was first launched.16
Information and science has to be free and open access, since it’s value to society far outweighs it’s cost.
All Accessist tools, blueprints, and code will be released under permissive licenses (e.g., MIT or GPL), enabling forks, translations, and local tweaks without permission. This counters opacity by defaulting to transparency and empowers passivity-prone followers to become builders.
4. Explicit identification as a political movement
Unlike TVP’s apolitical framing, which positioned it as a “think tank” above the fray, leading to isolation and underfunding, we are an explicit political movement, while RBE’s vagueness allowed left-leaning narratives to dominate, turning anti-market visions into partisan proxies.
History shows that visionary ideas remain prototypes without arena presence: Cybersyn fell to geopolitical forces it ignored, while TVP’s non-engagement left it vulnerable to internal drifts.
Realizing we’ll never achieve a post-scarcity accessist society unless we’re viable in elections, advocacy, and policy debates, we claim our political desires, even if suppressed in certain countries.
5. Anti-Cult and Leadership Safeguards
Fresco’s unchallenged charisma and TVP’s post-2017 leadership drifts toward personality-driven control mirrored cult-like dynamics, stifling dissent and innovation.17
Accessism enforces term limits and mandatory conflict-of-interest disclosures, and aggressively debunks “founder worship”, for us, ideas stand on merit, not myth.
6. Tech-Centric Neutrality
We apply science (cybernetics, AI, open data) directly to economics/social concerns, without Marxist labor-value anchors or anarchist anti-state dogma.
Abundance via automation isn’t “seizure”, it’s engineered access.
This firewall preserves Accessism’s purity:
A pragmatic, evidence-based path to post-scarcity, untainted by the cycles that doomed its forebears.
- https://thevenusproject.fandom.com/wiki/Resource-Based_Economy ↩︎
- https://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/~bat/IMG/SEA-CITY/JF/Jacque_Fresco-Venus_Project_Press_Kit.pdf ↩︎
- https://web.archive.org/web/20110907001956/http://anticultist.wordpress.com/2010/04/14/tvp-ex-1970-1980s-member-speaks ↩︎
- https://medium.com/the-tech-bible/the-venus-project-a-world-without-war-poverty-and-money-part-i-of-total-ii-parts-7d9b9a4ffcec ↩︎
- https://www.thevenusproject.com/multimedia/book-of-insights-meme-series-2-9th-of-9/ ↩︎
- https://tzm.one/t/the-reason-for-the-break-between-the-zeitgeist-movement-and-the-venus-project-by-jacque-fresco/53094 ↩︎
- https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/24/us/jacque-fresco-futurist-who-envisioned-a-society-without-money-dies-at-101.html ↩︎
- https://www.thevenusproject.com/the-venus-project-agenda-for-year-2020/ ↩︎
- https://jacque-fresco-edu.net/blog/1 ↩︎
- https://designing-the-future.org/rip-the-venus-project/ ↩︎
- https://moneylesssociety.com/ ↩︎
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWYAA5d5Vd8 ↩︎
- https://designing-the-future.org/resource-based-economy-by-jacque-fresco/ ↩︎
- https://designing-the-future.org/why-create-a-new-movement-what-about-the-venus-project-movement/ ↩︎
- https://designing-the-future.org/jacque-frescos-archived-lectures/ ↩︎
- https://www.frescofoundation.org/ ↩︎
- https://www.reddit.com/r/thevenusproject/comments/1me4nwf/the_venus_project_has_gone_silent/ ↩︎