Zeitgeist Returned — But Not as We Hoped
AI doesn't just automate labor. It automates the monetization of meaning.
In the late 2000s, "Zeitgeist" wasn't just a film for many — it was a door. Suddenly it became visible that the economy isn't nature, it's design. Back then it seemed: technology will lift scarcity, and therefore lift the necessity of turning life into a commodity.
Today, years later, I look at AI and realize something strange: part of the "Zeitgeist future" has arrived — but with the wrong sign.
The Venus Project and The Zeitgeist Movement promised a resource-based economy where automation would free humanity from labor-for-survival. What we got instead is automation that eliminates revenue streams while ownership structures remain unchanged.
This isn't a post about nostalgia. It's about why questions that seemed utopian 20 years ago are now engineering problems.
Jacques Fresco died on May 18, 2017. The project officially continues as a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization. They publish updates, conduct tours and seminars in Venus, Florida.
Important nuance: "The Venus Project" today is more of an educational platform + community + research center rather than "building cities tomorrow." This can be honestly presented as the idea maturing.
The movement still has an active official website with sections "Mission / Model / Education / Community." Based on public traces, the last prominently featured ZDay page is from 2021 — meaning the movement looks less "massive" than in the late 2000s.
Historically, TZM was organized as a 501(c)(3).
The creator of "Zeitgeist" is now actively promoting the next iteration — Integral — as a transitional post-monetary cooperative architecture.
This provides a convenient frame: "TZM as a cultural explosion then — Integral as an engineering/organizational response now."
AI is not just labor automation. It's the automation of "meaning monetization."
A profession doesn't disappear when robots "learn hands." It disappears when:
This is a fundamentally different mechanism than the industrial automation that TZM discussed. Factory robots replaced physical labor. AI agents replace the entire value chain of knowledge work.
The most revealing example isn't that AI "replaces programmers." More revealing is that AI breaks monetization methods even for those who became the standard.
In January 2026, the creator of Tailwind wrote in a GitHub discussion that:
This is the new pattern: You become the standard. But the standard stops being "bought" because the agent simply silently adds you as a dependency.
An important detail for honesty: Tailwind Plus is not a subscription but a one-time payment, and the team publicly emphasized that the model isn't changing. The problem isn't a "bad subscription" — it's that the visibility funnel disappears.
The agent doesn't need to read documentation and see commercial products. It silently installs the dependency and generates code. The value of the tool remains. The value capture mechanism breaks.
Here's the bridge:
And here's the question for the finale: "If robots/agents do everything — who owns the robots, who distributes access, and where does happiness live?"
This honestly acknowledges the risk of utopia — and transforms it into a design problem rather than a dream.
This isn't about choosing between "embrace AI" and "resist AI." It's about recognizing that the economic questions TZM raised are no longer philosophical — they're engineering and policy problems:
None of these are silver bullets. All have tradeoffs. The point is that they're now questions of implementation, not philosophy.
I started this essay with nostalgia — remembering Zeitgeist and realizing it didn't die, it just became reality with the wrong sign.
The Venus Project asked the right questions: what happens when technology can provide abundance? Who decides distribution? What gives life meaning beyond labor?
AI is giving us a compressed preview of these questions. Not in the clean utopian form Fresco imagined — with circular cities and resource-based planning. But in the messy form of engineers losing jobs while their tools become more popular than ever.
The question isn't whether post-scarcity is coming. Parts of it are already here. The question is: are we designing the distribution, or letting it happen by default?
My Stoic inclination remains: focus on what's within your control. But part of what's within our control is how we organize, what we build, and what questions we insist on asking.
Venus Project's cities may never be built. But the questions they asked? Those are being answered right now, whether we participate in the answer or not.
If this theme interests you, I explored related questions about agency, determinism, and what it means to "decide" in the AI age:
→ Emergent Agency: Why AI Seems to "Decide"This article was created in hybrid human + AI format. I set the direction and theses, AI helped with the text, I edited and verified. Responsibility for the content is mine.