THE VENUS PROJECT & THE ZEITGEIST MOVEMENT
The Venus Project is something you can read about at its website here. You may like what you read, and you may dislike it. I, personally, have only glanced at this website and read enough to learn the following:
1. It is a blueprint, or at least damn close to being a blueprint, for how all humans could (should) arrange global society.
2. It is not about how to have a genuine democracy (as described here.). Genuine democracy is not even mentioned as far as I can tell. (Let me know if you find something on the website that does talk about genuine democracy.) The website's implicit message (despite its saying that it is opposed to elitism) seems to be that very smart people have figured out how we should live, and so that's how we should live.
In a genuine democracy, achieved by egalitarian revolution (as described here), people will have the option to make society be the way the Venus Project says it should be. Very importantly, however, they will also have the option to make it be different. And equally important, only the egalitarians in a local community will have the final say about what happens in their local community! There will be no law-making central government that everybody must obey no matter what.
The Zeitgeist Movement (TZM) is something you can read about here. It's similar to but not the same as the Venus Project. Like the Venus Project, it is all about how human society should be, with the emphasis on how technology when properly used (at the direction of a scientific elite) can solve humanity's problems. The Zeitgeist Movement also advocates using a moneyless economy and argues that the market/capitalist economy prevents us from using technology to solve humanity's problems.
TZM is right about the need to have a moneyless economy. And no doubt technology can indeed be used to solve a lot of our problems if we have a moneyless economy. But the problem--and it is a fundamental and huge problem!--with TZM is this.
TZM does not seem to understand what the actual obstacle is to solving our problems. It wrongly thinks that the obstacle is simply that the people in power today don't yet understand why TZM's ideas should be implemented. TZM is about persuading "elite businessmen" and governments (and ordinary people) to "see the light" in this regard.
TZM does not grasp the key fact: the obstacle to solving humanity's problems is the current ruling elite of the world--billionaire plutocracies, Communist Party leaders, royalty and in some cases "Supreme Leaders." For this ruling elite, the problems that cause so much suffering for ordinary people are actually solutions to the problem (for the elite) of how to control and dominate ordinary people and maintain class inequality so that the elites can enjoy great power and privilege at the expense of everybody else. Here is why that is.
The elites need to use divide-and-rule against ordinary people in order to prevent us from removing the elites from power and making an egalitarian society. This is why the elites foment wars--one of the greatest problems for ordinary people. It is why they create artificial scarcity of things such as food and decent housing and health care and education and jobs--the other huge problems of ordinary people: to pit us against each other in competition for such things. The morality of the elites is all about self-interest and greed, inequality and domination of the many by the few. This is why the elites don't care about pollution that harms the many have-nots; they only care if it harms the few haves.
In contrast, the morality of ordinary people--the vast majority of them, at least--is the opposite of the elite's morality. Most people have egalitarian values: no-rich-and-no-poor equality and mutual aid. The only way to solve the problems of humanity is for the great majority of ordinary people to remove the elites from power and to create a genuine democracy of, by and for the vast majority of people.
But TZM doesn't understand this.* TZM has no conception of the key fact about our society--that there is a fundamental conflict of values between the ruling elites versus most ordinary people. Consequently, TZM doesn't talk about the need for genuine democracy to replace today's fake democracies (or supposedly benevolent dictatorships) that are actually oppressive dictatorships of the rich (or of a privileged upper class.) TZM thinks power should be in the hands not of ordinary people but a scientific elite. This makes TZM, despite its name, not a movement but a think tank.
A genuine movement aiming to solve the problems of humanity can only be a movement that champions the values and aims of the vast majority of people, and works to remove the rich (and other privileged oppressive ruling elites) from power and to have genuine democracy.
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* TZM and the Venus Project are far from alone in failing to understand this. Karl Marx (and present day Marxists) fail to grasp it. Most academics and intellectuals today fail to grasp it. Most people who call themselves "progressives" fail to grasp it. Why?
The reason is that for millennia virtually all of the intellectuals of society have looked down upon ordinary people as being stupid and morally wrong--the very LAST people who should be calling the shots in society. This elitism is so pervasive that few even notice it. I have written about Karl Marx's elitism here. But much the same applies to virtually all intellectuals of not only the past but the present time as well. Intellectuals have advocated for either overt dictatorships of an elite class, or for an actual such dictatorship carefully disguised as something more democratic. TZM and the Venus Project are influenced by this same elitist viewpoint, perhaps without even being aware of it.