The Venus Project, since the death of Jacque Fresco and the appointment of a board of directors made up of former volunteers, has become an information citadel, with non-disclosure agreements, no news and no feedback. It became the perfect breeding ground for corruption and manipulation, the deliberate destruction of the movement, and of anyone who could freely express disagreement. In this brew pot, a wide variety of ideas and thoughts were digested and fostered behind the scenes. Nathanael Dinwiddie, living in The Venus Project’s guest house with Jacque Fresco’s colleague Roxanne Meadows next door for the past 9 years, did his best to introduce Roxanne to the new world of conspiracies, alternative scientists, and the survivalist subculture with books, podcasts, and the proper people. Information has begun to leak out to the public from the directors themselves and their new Jacque Fresco, Simon Michaux. Strange wording and goals are becoming clearer on The Venus Project’s completely revamped website.

From the recently released “Building a State from scratch” podcast, we learn new details about the planned Venus Arantas city in the desert, and most notably, the political system is finally being addressed as well.

The Venus Project is playing politics (or religion)

The main governing body turns out to be meeting on “Game Theory Lab” where 40 scientists and philosophers will play (debate) for hours and days long about the optimal social order, fantasizing how you can live better taking the best of all social systems, including fascism, feudal system, etc.

The Venus Project’s board of directors, Nate, Theo, a philosopher and a pilot, and Simon Michaux, a pseudo-scientist survivalist and conspiracy theorist. And judging from other podcasts, there could be some pretty odious personalities, pseudoscientists, and maybe even tribal shamans (I’m serious). They will make sure that the whole endeavor “doesn’t go the wrong way”, and will determine the way of life not only for the supposed 10.000 people that will live in Venus Arantas, but at the same time, not clear how, set the trend for the rest of the mankind.

What kind of political regime would it be if you have a certain ruling group, and everyone else separately? Feudalism with a nobility? A dictatorship with a ruling party? Or just an apocalyptic cult with all-knowing priests? (Nate stipulated that he would be a “monk” on this board).

I can’t recall any peaceful groups of people that have long existed, or ever existed, who play “let’s create our own state in an existing state”, except for religious communities, which are protected by laws – after all, they are the only ones who can make weirdo inner rules.

And then we find out that the introduced social order in the city can be changed (!) at any minute at the will of the members of “Game Theory Lab”, and if something fails – to roll back to purely corporate relations “employer-employee”, and then think what else to invent.

A mining settlement with traditional medicine

Well, it’s not exactly Jacque Fresco’s utopian, highly automated city. Utopia? No, what we have here is a harsh reality and a game of survival. And you’re going to have to get your hands dirty, both in the mine and in the field. Given the claims of technology rollback, and the specifics of the climate, with the need to desalinate water, it’s going to be a hell of a place.

Having embellished with words from Jacque Fresco’s dictionary and high aspirations to save humanity, we will actually get a kind of mining settlement, a recycling station for used tires, an eco-village with garden plots in the desert and water desalination, and a testing ground where tests will be conducted, including tests on people, both socially and medically – and it is a pity that this topic is not touched upon. Perhaps on purpose. And after all, the medicine is a big part of the idea of this city. I saw this super-secret slide, and there are the same pseudo-scientific researches, but not of free energy, but in this case of medications, traditional healing remedies, energy healing, and methods dating back thousands of years – and you, it turns out, are just a lab guinea pig.

Simon’s quote from a podcast on AccidentalGods: “One of the segues, is this a school of thought that the modern pharmaceutical medicine can now no longer be trusted as an institution, as a science and everything like that. The whole thing will have to be reinvented, and this is going to make you laugh. Let’s go to South America and we’ll get Chinese herbal medicine to meet with the Amazon Shaman methods.”

The Prometheus Institute is a magnet for pseudoscientists and charlatans

An entire institute studying “non-conventional” energy sources will be the heart of this city. The disbelief in “official science” coupled with all the conspiracy theories that Simon Michaux, and apparently all the new directors of The Venus Project, believe in, has evolved into a hybrid of the scientific method with philosophy, New Age, to the new science, and the idea of retesting all the theories and technologies rejected by science, especially free energy and perpetual motion machines.

This is exactly what dozens of teams of “scientists” in the planned Prometheus Institute will be working tirelessly on. This topic deserves a separate article, partly already covered in notes from other podcasts by Simon Michaux.

But if we assume that it will be possible to find money for such a city, then one of the likely sources could be the interest of all kinds of charlatans with magic stones, perpetual motion machines and New Age methodologies, to have a place called a research center, conducting “independent research”. To loudly announce on websites, in videos and from the stage that there is “real science” confirming the efficacy of miracle pills and perpetual motion machines, and not the corporate-bought “official science” – and thereby collect even more money in exchange for feeding crap into the ears of gullible clients and followers.

They promise a multi-hour podcast on the Prometheus Institute coming soon. Can’t wait. Could you please mention on it about the same institute of unconventional medicine that will be standing right there nearby?

Money, culture, and your own anti-utopia novel

Money? What money? Remember, you’re working for an idea here. Simon had repeatedly mentioned that there would be no paychecks, at least not until some high level of profit reached and the investors had become satisfied with the return on investment. But it will be up to management to decide when they have enough to share the hard earned pennies with the workers. You signed up for a cashless society – work and don’t worry, give all the power to the 40 philosophers and don’t think about anything else, just work.

Let’s remember that the place was chosen far away from all civilization. Getting somewhere in urgent need will be a challenge, leaving all the cultural life and connection to civilization behind. The developers want to compete with corporations, but remember what Google offices look like and the conditions in which their employees work.

Medicine, dental care, safe childbirth, education, music concerts, hobby clubs, entertainment – leave those things in a former life. Maybe the internet will be allowed there, but I can’t guarantee that. How long can you keep people in such conditions if you don’t brainwash them properly all the time? For example, that the rest of the world is on fire, or is about to be destroyed, and the workers are very lucky to be here – they are the chosen few, to rebuild the entire human civilization. All in all, it’s not going to be easy! The plot is well wrapped up, you can start writing up your own Peruvian dystopia novel.

Preparing for the apocalypse – a safe harbor in Peru

You might have somehow thought what a strange place was chosen for a city: it’s not at all suitable for a starting point, it’s not supportive of agriculture, nuclear power testing, it’s very far and expensive to get to, all civilization is not close either, shipping is expensive, earthquakes, tsunamis, social instability in the region, crime, droughts, the vast empty Andean mountain ridge, etc….

Metacrisis and Polycrisis, dear ladies and gentlemen. You’ve been told about it all over, maybe you haven’t been paying attention. It’s on every podcast, it’s all over The Venus Project’s updated website, everything is in preparation for the end of humanity as we know it in about 10 years. The few will remain, and the cities will turn into scenes from The Walking Dead with the scavengers who survive. Simon and company want to close down in a city from the rest of the world for 10 years, calling it ” Jacques’ Rest” mentioned on several of Simon’s past podcasts, and then go out into the world with a better offer. Having to be outliving that particular apocalypse. Just imagine what will happen inside a locked down city for all those 10 years and what will be told to the residents to keep them in the city.

According to the legend, laced with every possible conspiracy you’ve probably heard of, corporations are hiding the fact that oil has 8 years left, and without it there will be collapse, and, along with global warming, all hope for renewable energy generation will evaporate when it turns out that corporations have been lying to us about the efficacy of wind and solar power. This is according to Simon Michaux, and The Venus Project’s directors repeatedly refer to such literature, and even recommend it now on their website instead of the Jacque Fresco recommended reading.

This topic has been dropped a couple times on this podcast, perhaps because it doesn’t fit the format. But on other podcasts Simon has spoken quite explicitly about this place and its true purpose. And they called themselves the Arcadians, the guardians of the knowledge, the rebuilders of all civilization.

According to Simon, the place is easy to defend, and militarized guards and other points of defense – he does not undertake to discuss publicly, but they are “working hard on them”. Actually, it’s not a new topic for the preppers (survivalist) community, that at all times wait for the global ending under various reasons, but for a person from the outside it can be quite discouraging, that’s why this topic is omitted in many interviews, although it is the only logical explanation for the choice of the place.

Simon has covered this in a number of other podcasts – here are the notes from 5 of those podcasts gathered separately here, if you’re interested.

Recycling tires and living in an eco-village

Another source of income and goods for the city. But has anyone thought about what it’s like to live next to a mine and processing plants? What’s the point if you want to be one with nature, in harmony, but at the same time, you choose the dirtiest jobs, which will obviously affect your health.

You should think twice about how such a community would be better than the blooming gardens of the local eco-village, in more viable latitudes, whose inhabitants are not subjected to all sorts of experiments. In an ordinary eco-village, everything is as simple and clear as a rake that you will use to plow a vegetable patch. And you don’t even need to build anything – there are thousands of them. Choose the most successful ones that are closer to you ideologically/spiritually, and go forward. You will be free to make jokes around the campfire, sing songs, be able to visit your relatives at a reasonable distance, have some money in your pocket, have influence in the village decision making, and you can always change your priorities in life and easily move to a new job in a neighboring city or a state without risking anything.

A Thorium nuclear powered city in your crypto wallet

The centerpiece of the city of Venus Arantas, the thorium nuclear reactor, is mentioned everywhere. “We’ll put up a tent and next to it a thorium reactor” is how Simon Michaux sees the beginning of this settlement, even before the mine and the tire recycling.

Is it worth mentioning that everything related to nuclear power is subject to the most severe procedures of inspections, approvals and permits at the highest level? The region where the city of Venus Arantas is planned is a rocky area where earthquakes are not rare, even 7-8 magnitude, and tsunamis are not uncommon. The question to ask: will a bunch of ideological people, philosophers, be allowed to build their eco-village with a nuclear reactor in such a region?

It took about 5-10 years for real countries like China to get approval for the first test load of a thorium reactor that is still in development, a real thorium reactor. And we haven’t talked about the fact that this technology simply doesn’t exist for anyone but laboratories, that they are still developing it – there is no finished product. We don’t see countries ordering reactors, even for the distant future, but The Venus Project, along with Simon Michaux, are already planning crowdfunding for this project.

And if it were actually feasible, and the technology was sufficiently developed – imagine a number of countries and corporations waiting for a scarce supply of cheap energy. What number in that queue would Simon Michaux and The Venus Project’s board of directors be? Will they set up their initial camp tent 50-100 years from now? Will the developer be eager to prioritize sending his reactors to a region with earthquakes, corruption, and high crime to people with questionable reputations whose podcasts get a few thousand views? One accident and a loud headline about the accident and the queue will be significantly reduced.

This whole thorium reactor thing is very speculative. And, please pay attention, the issue is not the technology itself, although you will be moved to this angle if you try to argue.

The Venus Project’s secret partner, The Thorium Network, which was recently listed as a partner on The Venus Project’s website, is pushing thorium reactors as if they were already on the market and greedy corporations were hiding them from us.

I did a whole study on The Thorium Network and its director, Jeremiah Josey, as part of a larger investigation, “The Venus Project’s End”, in a nutshell – they are a bunch of fraudsters, with a fake biography of an oil director, dummy companies shut down by the courts every few years, scammed investors, creating cryptocurrency bullshit coins with fake stories and promises: supposedly based on gold and thorium resources.

Jeremiah chose thorium as the key topic, and like a real info gypsy, he is hooked into the topic, broadcasting all possible news and fakes on this part, making up his own stories. He has a fictional company with millions of dollars in turnover. He even finds real researchers and scientists, fooling them with loud slogans, a story about his company being oppressed by corporations, and the presence of other like minded scientists in the citations. The real, few scientists, serve as a perfect image for the new investors in “promising technologies” and the next cryptocurrency.

It was Jeremiah Josey who promised to organize the thorium reactors, the financing, the land in Peru where they plan to build. And although, after our investigations, this partnership is being tried to hide it in every way possible – for example, by replacing the partners in the block with a real organization with an almost identical name – this persona is not so easily taken out of the equation. Either Roxanne Meadows, the original head of The Venus Project, still believes him, or the whole company is starting to play a fraudulent game, mimicking Jeremiah Jossey’s cheating ways, except it’s not a one-day firm that’s at risk, and they’re not moving to another country to escape angry investors and the courts.

Corporations and a devil’s contract

Corporations supposedly obstructed Jacque Fresco, corporations are hiding unfavorable technologies, conspiring around the switch to renewable sources, and lying to us about the efficiency of solar panels and wind power (all from the same words of the new The Venus Project team led by Simon Michaux). Corporations are even drawing up the plans for new types of cities, and will dictate how you live! “You won’t own anything, but you’ll be happy” – No way! We’ll create our own mini corporation, a mining city, with money from investors, and we’ll be the ones to tell you how to live!

Do you know what you’re signing up for? By reposting, auto-liking, or donating to The Venus Project of Nathanael Dinwiddie and Simon Michaux. Where is there even a hint of connection to Jacque Fresco’s proposals or approach? This time, Nate gave an extensive presentation on the life and work of Jacque Fresco to emphasize that Jacque’s ideas are outdated, and that the ones giving them “evolution” are self-proclaimed adopters Nathanael Dinwiddie and Simon Michaux.

If you just fantasize about the fact that it was possible to realize such a city – what can it look like in reality, not in your rainbow perception and associations? What is really behind generalized slogans, streamlined formulations and promises?

How seriously can one take all this when even simple projects like the Jacque Fresco Foundation website, Jacque Fresco lecture transcripts, Major Motion Picture announced as completed and launched, have been non-functional for years? And much smaller amounts of $220,000, $110,000 in crowdfunding, not backed up by the promised realization of The Venus Project three times out of four?

What else is interesting from the podcast? Synopsis

The podcast was planned to be a conversation format, and this was a separate cut-in added by the interviewer, with a suggestion to skip ahead about an hour or so. But Nate had prepared a lengthy presentation on Jacque with an excursus into his biography, trying each time to make a ghostly connection to what they were doing now, drawing parallels that weren’t obvious.

It started with Jacque Fresco in order to legalize themselves, to show continuity, and it does not matter that the case itself does not relate to Jacque. This is done in order to bring the established audience and all the resources, generally everything that has been gathered and developed through Jacque Fresco, into a new endeavor, the “Evolution of Venus”. In this part, Nate compares past movements of techno-optimism about a better future, etc., but as it turns out, corporations have taken over the world, shifting the focus to a dystopian future, and Fresco simply continued to carry on that old, “no longer relevant”, vision from the early 20th century.

Nate reports that Jacques’ inventions were rejected, suppressing the emergence of certain technologies – “this is where you’ll see that our case with Simon is about the same thing” – referring to the Prometheus Institute for Energy Sources, which was rejected by science, as well as Simon’s research, which was not accepted by the scientific community. Jacque Fresco was upsetting corporations with his inventions, the example of prefabricated houses made of aluminum being cited.

Roxanne Meadows: “I want to show you how Simon Michaux fits into all of this, and how it relates to the coming Metacrisis!” and further… “Some of the Board of Directors (and who else but Nate) have been diligently researching the reasons why we’re in this tight situation” – and essentially digging more and more into the prepper (survivalist) community and literature, and the Degrowth Movement – which is how they found Simon. “We saw that Simon had done a lot of research on the lack of resources for the green energy transition”

• We won’t focus on this “research” for now, just to let you know that for 3 years of its existence it has never received positive reviews, it has not been published in scientific journals, but it has received well-justified criticism from real scientists in the field, and there are directly opposite peer-reviewed studies. Oh, and since Simon did what Jacque didn’t – counted all the planet’s resources – Simon is in charge now.

Nate: “The green transition won’t work – it’s too late. We found Simon, who was ahead of everyone else with his research. We had to stop further looking for options because of Simon Michaux’s research, and Simon was already familiar with The Venus Project.” “Now we have the concept of The Venus Project Evolution – to adapt what Jacque Fresco was saying to the limitations that we have.” “Jacque was asked how to get to the realization, he kind of gave a couple of ideas, but Simon came up with a better solution.”

Simon: “We’ll set up a camp far away from civilization, make a mining camp, and then it will grow into an industrial mine and organize a city around it.” “The philosophy of Degrowth Movement is a very useful one.” “I’m combining the paradigms of Degrowth + circular economy + permaculture + elements of very old technologies”

“In 2008 I saw the Zeitgeist movie and it was the coolest thing I’d ever seen, but at the time I was learning about growth limits and didn’t understand how to achieve it” – Simon was living in a survivalist community in Australia preparing for the apocalypse and promoting the same ideas, and now he’s written himself a 1000 page ‘research’ that he refers to all the time. “…The Venus Project was lacking in steps to realization, but now I can give that realization, and do it in the right way!”.

“We’re going to build a city of 10,000 people. It will take 1-3 billion dollars” – other podcasts have quoted both 5 and 10 billion dollars, and it seems like the number is just pulled from nothing. “…the settlement itself will cost 800 million or 1-2 billion.”

Sources of funding: Grassroots funding – mobilizing local budgets and people (good luck in Peru). “We will attract capital. There are people that would like to be associated with the progress we will propose.” “We may have a different problem, that we get too much money too fast.” “The second type of investor – they want a return on investment.” “Industrial permaculture.” “We take used tires and recycle them into diesel, and we also make different other things from local materials.” “Everyone is working, getting everything they need, after a while we’ll give a paycheck so they can travel out.”

The hosts asked how many people are working on this right now? Our heroes got off topic – in fact there are several people: three people from The Venus Project’s board of directors, Simon Michaux and Jeremiah Josey. There are a few more volunteers who don’t know what they’re doing, and it turns out they’re not working on this project – they’ve been left with an aquaponic greenhouse project in India to keep them busy, and the volunteers have organized a discussion club, meeting once a week, pretending to be working on something important.

Simon: we’ll pitch a tent and put a thorium reactor next to it and it will change the world. “Hippie communes didn’t last long together, but there are some good communes – like the Amish” and a couple others, clearly religious, they’re being held up as an example. What a good example.

The Game Theory Laboratory, wanted to be headed by Viktor Sheuberger – there will be 40 people of scientists and philosophers that will discuss and imagine how we should all live better.

3-4 office buildings, there will be residential buildings all around, and then factories and fields. “It’s going to be a little mining town.”

“We are not looking for new -isms” – but here they lie, as they did not give any alternative to the political system, except that they tried to camouflage their political system in some way. “A community of enlightened individuals.”

The interviewee is from Chechnya, and worries that whenever someone proposes something utopian, it turns into a dictatorship like Stalinism and similar systems.

“What kind of social contract is gonna allow a sustainable existence? One visionary person leads a project, then they step away and the social contract collapses.” – If ours collapses, Simon says, we’ll roll back simply to a state of “we’re a company and we have some work to do.”

Nate: there’s tension in many groups since Jacques’ death, and we’re trying to bring them together, to explain what we’re doing. (Yes, of course, and the main tool is total silence, closure, non-disclosure agreements, making threats and logical manipulations in the few announcements we’ve had)

“A research institute for 2,000 scientists, engineers, etc.”

There was a good question from the hosts – who would want to stay there, what about personal life, activities, culture, etc.? What is available only in big cities, what do those who got out far away suffer from. – They were unable to answer in any meaningful way.

“The Hype Cycle” is what Nate calls the period of The Venus Project’s popularity and the development of movements based on it.

Roxanne: The movement was great, inspiring – but we now need different kind of people to make it happen.

Nate: Metacrisis dictates everything.

Roxanne: The city will be dedicated to the survival of human civilization. We should strive to make sure it doesn’t go back to where we started… (she was interrupted in her response)

Nate: We want to be advisors – members of the board of directors. Our job is to be monks… (the answer was cut off at this point, because Nate was starting to give out more than necessary).

Michaux: We’re gonna have a university later. Nate wants to build a library.

Toward the end, Simon read from a sheet of paper: “This is an evolution of The Venus Project powered by an unorthodox but mature energy source operating to a new resources management paradigm. We are proposing to develop a way with a more responsible relationship with a planetary environment and a new paradigm in social contract and how we might live. We will construct a technology innovation hub in an unconventional city to the purpose of developing a new energy, a new raw materials and a new manufacture paradigm operated by a more socially mature kind of society.”

Bottom line

Well, you can draw your own conclusions. I tried to quote directly what I heard here or on other podcasts. I didn’t make that up, but you can hear it from the main heroes of this article. The Venus Project was previously associated with the scientific method, the evolution of society to a moneyless society through the creation of high-tech automated cities, social design and the unlocking of each person’s potential, the automation of all boring and dangerous jobs, the dramatic reduction of crime and the abandonment of the political system, a global focus on improving the lives of all mankind and, as a result, ending wars and conflicts, and many other things that resonated with millions of people around the world.

It’s a shame that such great ideas have fallen into the wrong hands, hands that are burying both the ideas themselves and their reputation under layers of pseudoscience, conspiracies, and even public manipulation and outright fraud. Which is something we’ve partially succeeded in putting on hold – after all, the million-dollar crowdfunding for this city was promised back in December 2023, planned to be about to go live in the coming week, in conjunction with the launch of the cryptocurrency on Thorium. At the very least, the disruption of this big hoax is already being considered an accomplishment for us.

It’s still not clear how to promote Jacque Fresco’s original ideas and work towards their realization when the materials, names and everything worked on for decades have ended up in the ownership of a few people who no longer see any point in them except to squeeze all the juices in the crudest and most dishonest way into their new endeavor.

The post From Utopia to Dystopia. What happened to The Venus Project after Jacque Fresco died? appeared first on Designing The Future.

The “Mission on Earth” project itself involves the creation of an experimental site and a smart city, where joined IT and technology companies will work on the development of smart city direction, aiming to present it all as a single system, rethinking many things we are used to, including economic and political models of society. All of this is planned with the support of major foundations, cities that have signed on as part of the Oxygen Summit initiative, and recognizable players in the market. In theory, this will give us a good opportunity to set the right direction: to influence the evolution of our cities into highly automated city-systems, which will be the transition to a post-scarcity sustainable world.

Everything looks promising, but we can’t give 100% assurance yet about what exactly we will see at launch, and whether it will be as we tell you. The format of our involvement and participation is not fully understood. There are certain fears and risks that we will present it in the wrong way and the realization will be completely different, because there is no information about this project on the Internet yet.

We are freezing the public work in this direction until everything is clearer and we see more official details about the project in public sources, media and on the project website – to understand where this is going, and our answers would be based on verified publicly available information. We wouldn’t want to mislead anyone, or give the wrong expectations.

So don’t expect any news yet. Although the work in this direction will continue outside the public plane. We’ll be putting the whole picture together piece by piece, and when the time comes, new articles, videos and podcasts on the topic will be released.

This is the project on which we have put the main stakes, fit into a program. It remains the main option for how we could have a significant impact on the development of world society, with a minimum of resources on our part – but in no way defining or limiting the work of our organization Designing The Future. We have about six months left until the official launch, maybe more – and during this time we will be more active in the basic areas that will help us to remain independent and adhere to the basic principles of the original direction – popularizing and implementing Jacque Fresco’s proposals about the prospects of transition to a post-scarcity system already in our lifetime.

The post Mission on Earth Project: pausing the public campaign appeared first on Designing The Future.

Some of Jacque Fresco’s most memorable lectures for me are his recordings from the 70’s where he covered more topics – I could see the enthusiasm, the belief in a better future, and the desire to use technology to solve problems as quickly as possible. As Jacque got older, he became calmer and more deliberate, repeating calibrated examples and phrases, but it was during those years that his main ideas and suggestions were shaped. That’s why I want to tell you about such an important topic as “transcription and preserving his legacy”.

Earlier I wrote an article about why The Man of Tomorrow, a biographical movie about Jacque Fresco authored by Nathanael Dinwiddie, was not released. And it would seem that one failed project is not proof of his incompetence or irresponsibility in other areas. It wasn’t until I started delving more into Nate’s other projects as a newly minted director that I realized he was treating them the same way he did his Jacque Fresco film project, devouring the reputation and popularity of The Venus Project, which he may well have already permanently destroyed.

The legacy of Jacque Fresco

Not only do I realize the importance of access to these materials, but young Nate does as well. So in 2011, Nathanael Dinwiddie began researching the biography and work of Jacque Fresco, and now “His Life’s Work,” this research, aimed to create an organized archive, produce a film called “The Man of Tomorrow”, and digitize and transcribe all available materials:

• 616 audiocassettes
• 1879 videotapes
• 195 promotional documents
• 5500 design sketches
• 200 schematic designs
• 400 handmade scale models.
• 297 books
• 85 hard disks
• 113 floppy disks
• Hundreds of CDs
• Thousands of photographs and negatives
• thousands of text documents

And so, from 2014 through 2020, 125 volunteers worked to convert his 864 lectures into transcripts. They managed to transcribe about 14% of them. Wow! That’s a hundred lectures. Where are all those lectures?

Money

I was able to find a fraction of all the materials, about 10 lectures, that were handled by volunteers and are now in the store on the website. Of these, only 1 is free, but you still have to leave personal information to access it – the others sell for $3-5-7 each, depending on the format (plain text, plain audio, white screen video with running captions, and audio). The Venus Project’s YouTube channel offers 2-minute clips of these hour-long lectures, prompting you to buy the full version.

I’ve only listened to a small fraction of the recordings, which has been in the public domain for a very long time – and these, again, are just snippets of hour-long lectures where you have to pay for the full ones.

In order to launch the full-fledged transcription phase, the newly formed Board of Directors decided to raise money in 2019. Crowdfunding was successful, resulting in a total of 105 thousand dollars (55,068 from supporters and another 50 thousand dollars from the SOUL team), thus starting the “intensive” work on the transcription of the materials.

This is not only mentioned on the crowdfunding page, but also in the video (see above). Where next to Roxanne is practically the first time Nate appears in public. He, as an archivist by profession, had to take care of this professionally.

For the transcribing itself 25 thousand dollars from the collected amount was allocated. The money was used to hire transcribers from the Fiverr website.

Plans and deadlines

Now comes the fun part! The Venus Project organization has always had big problems in this, and the new directors have taken it to a whole new level! In 2020, an incredibly important video is released about upcoming plans, stating that the transcription project that money was raised for in 2019 will be finished in 2022. But wait, it’s 2024.

The original video about the plans was hidden… I wonder why.

We still have a copy of it, you can view it above. This is the first time we have heard that “the board of directors have made a decision” and they have promised us:

• T-shirts
• lecture transcript
• a book of 200 Jacques quotes
• printed 3d building molds on sale
• website improvement
• better training for the teams
• A separate museum site where Jacque Fresco will be exiled and where you can buy a subscription to listen to his lectures, now known as the Jacque Fresco Foundation
• A podcast from Nate with guest experts

And then on to further plans, with no dates assigned. Publication of a book-collection of selected excerpts from transcriptions, a series of books of selected works, a series of books of collected works sorted by date, whatever that means. Promising critical reviews. Literature reviews. A transdisciplinary research program – I wonder if this is about that pseudoscientific energy research center in Peru we were promised recently? A virtual simulator. Science fiction and a new research center.

Fortuitously, I had two comments left, which I saved just before the video was moved from only by link status to private.

Actually, there were a lot of comments under the video with criticism, which I didn’t save. I was interested in specific comments, but not in emotions, for example, like this one.

Finalizing the transcription work?

In early 2024, the Venus Project’s website publishes a report article “Honoring the Legacy of Jacque Fresco: Transcriptions of His Visionary Lectures Completed” stating clear enough that the transcription of the lectures has been completed. The signed author of the article, Roxanne, writes that they encountered multiple challenges. Of course they have? How could they not!

The article was published on January 27, 2024, 2 weeks after the massive criticism of Designing the Future, as well as an unprecedented discussion of all the failures of The Venus Project. Nate himself was directly involved in these discussions. One of the points of criticism was the lack of reporting and real results from crowdfunding.

While writing this article, I couldn’t get rid of the thought that I didn’t understand the figures given in various sources at all. On the crowdfunding page, 747 lectures were announced. In the reporting article, a figure of 864 lectures (1800 hours) is given. The Jacque Fresco Foundation website lists 840 lectures. Pretty strange for an archivist where everything should be clearly counted.

By the way, for a number of other crowdfunding claims, I couldn’t find any information. Maybe someone knows more and will share?

The report supposedly explained the details of the delay. Seems pretty lame to me though.

Sure, but why couldn’t you ask for a little more money to hire a professional studio, where the sum is estimated to be higher, but the result would be of higher quality? At least for the selected lectures. Or why criticize the choice of people for transcription for whom English is a foreign language.

On the other hand, one could have gone the other way: involving a community that has done excellent translations before, that is completely on the subject, that knows the nuances of Jacques’s speech. At the same time, it is not clear why the material is kept unpublished, with no access for others. Why not publish the material when it’s ready, thereby filling the budget with money from YouTube monetization. Over 13 years, doing it this way, the amount of material could be significant. Is this technically challenging? – No. Well, about 30 lectures have simply become a product on the website, available to very few people.

Jacque Fresco Foundation – the lost Jacque Fresco and the original The Venus Project

So far, the Jacque Fresco Foundation has not published a single lecture or material on its website, even with the promised paid subscription. Well, the directors sent Jacque to the Jacques Fresco Museum, but that’s just lip service – where to really look for him now? Where to listen to lectures? Who is even working on that? Or if they decided to retire the original ” The Venus Project” – where can you read the original program, accomplishments, explanations, FAQs? – Nowhere.

All of this, including Jacque and the original The Venus Project, has been removed from The Venus Project’s resources without providing any platform, any chance to utilize all of the developments and achievements of the original course for those who wish to continue. The directors are now using the name, resources, and the platforms for a completely different direction, without even explaining the details of what is happening. And since Jacques’ lectures, original films and books are the main “assets” of The Venus Project organization, we, and others, are threatened with copyright for further use and promotion, burying all these ideas, and Jacques himself, in an even deeper grave. This, I’m sorry to say, already looks like a goal, not an oversight.

After Nathanael Dinwiddie crossed the doorstep of the archive, no one is allowed to use it, no one is allowed to listen/work on it, create a movie, a video, a review – not even us, with a million and a half subscribers YouTube channel of thematic content, promoting Jacque Fresco’s original ideas, and a more than a decade of our collaboration. Contrary to all the good statements about preserving the legacy of Jacque Fresco – it looks the exact opposite.

It’s been almost half a year since the Jan. 27 article claiming the end of transcription. Could it not have been possible to put up at least some of the material? Maybe the transcription project, in fact, is not yet complete, and this was purely a formalized message of “leave us alone”, “here’s the report”?

With such success, it was possible to announce the completion of the transcription even in 2019. After all, the publication is a separate project! Do we need to raise crowdfunding for that too?

The article was prepared in co-authorship with Yevhen Sliuzko.

The post Jacque Fresco’s archived lectures – promised, but where are they? appeared first on Designing The Future.

The invitation to the events came just in time. Things had been going from bad to worse in our 13 years of operation, from Russia’s large-scale war with Ukraine, which led to a severe reduction in our budget and consequently in studio and freelance orders, layoffs, loss of valuable volunteers on our team, and to a dramatic change of course by The Venus Project, an organization we had previously promoted as much as we could, instead of fully developing our own.

We needed an opportunity to put the locomotive back on its own tracks, and the opportunity came!

Smart City Expo and OXYGEN Summit

May 22-23, 2024, New York City

Smart City Expo USA The event brought together industry leaders, presented smart city technologies, and held a number of lectures and panel discussions. It is not so easy to get here from the outside for a person not directly related to this topic – a standard ticket cost $1,049.

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OXYGEN Summit was held on the first day of the Expo in a separate zone, where only a few people could get in by invitation only. Participants: delegations from more than 10 countries, heads of funds, venture capital and project institutes. At the event, discussions were held on the development of Smart Cities, where I was able to participate from the Ukrainian delegation.

In the framework of the summit, an agreement was signed on the beginning of the implementation of test sites, with the help and allocation of resources from more than 20 major cities and metropolitan areas around the world, where thousands of IT-companies, organizations will be able to get support and unification point, and cities – a direct exchange of experience, with the opportunity to apply the results themselves.

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What can we offer?

The ideas we promoted in Jacque Fresco’s original ” The Venus Project” fit well with the latest trends, as well as technology, automation and robotization. This is especially true with the rapid development of artificial intelligence and the growing realization that the current order of things is outdated and out of step with modern scientific and technological progress, and with the very capabilities of our planet. These ideas help us to envision an inspiring future where many things work in new ways. Where are we going and what is appropriate to strive for? Participants in the smart city market do not yet have a common understanding of the ultimate goal, a desire to join forces for a realistically achievable bright future – and it would be great to give them this picture.

The evolutionary transition to a post-scarcity economy described by Jacque Fresco fits well with the concept of smart city development as a starting point.

Communicating on these topics with participants, speakers, representatives of foundations, companies, etc., I saw how it resonated with their company missions, technologies presented, and personal position. There is an understanding that the world is going to change, and our option, whoever I talked to – was enthusiastic, interesting and supportive. It was clear and eye-opening to many people to imagine the future city as a single highly automated system, controlled by AI, which produces, distributes, provides services, intelligently using resources, freeing people from boring and monotonous work, giving them everything they need to live a full life and realize their potential, without any additional conditions.

Where there are discrepancies – the ever-changing world will soon correct this. For example, not everyone believes in significant automation and mass replacement of humans in jobs. Directly working on products that do this, as in Microsoft calling AI, neural networks – “assistant”, explicitly saying from the stage that the goal is “not to replace people” but to “improve their capabilities”. Maybe such a speech looks better for the public image, but such tech giants should already realize where this is going and start adapting in advance, not clinging to the past and accepted patterns, like the work just for the sake of work. A lawyer on the panel suggested introducing a law requiring companies to hire people even if there’s nothing there for them to do. – What’s the point? Faced closely with the thinking of lawmakers, there is wild dissonance. We live in a monstrously inefficient world, clinging to outdated systems.

On discussion panels, it was often mentioned that after the Covid times, the work has changed. Conditions changed it, forced it to adapt. And when everything seemed to have returned to normal, it became much more difficult to get people to go to offices. Office buildings remain idle, new ones are hardly ever built, and heads of companies come up with various tricks to encourage people to work from the office. Shake-ups and putting new methods into practice is a recipe for change. And we’re in for more of that in the future. The world has not stopped, and we and our grandchildren will live in a completely different system – it is up to us to decide in which one.

I was pleasantly surprised by the panelists, where my question about technological unemployment and the mismatch between the level of development and our system was answered by a man, Corey Gray, head of the Smart City Consil Foundation, who told his colleagues on stage everything as it is and where it’s going, in our own words – and I, of course, recorded it all on video! We exchanged contacts, and Andrey Kolodyuk later discussed “Mission on Earth” with him.

«Mission On Earth» Project

The day before the Expo, we managed to hold a separate working meeting with Andrey Kolodyuk, where we went straight to practical things.

Andrey Kolodyuk – head of a venture fund, ambassador of Ukrainian business, has created and managed large companies, etc. You can just Google his name to understand the scale of the man. It was with him that we had been planning the construction of a new smart city near Kyiv since 2013, negotiating with then still alive Jacque Fresco ( Andrey flew to him twice) – and the project could have gone ahead in those years, if the circumstances had turned out a little differently.

Andrey spoke at the Kyiv Polytechnic Institute – at that time my team and I managed to gather 1,700 people in record time for the premiere of the movie “The Choice is Ours”, with a live broadcast with Jacque Fresco. That was in 2015. We also did an interview with him on Hromadske (see photo below).

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In addition to negotiating with Jacque Fresco, I was even part of the working group and board that planned it all. I have experience in the family construction business, designing almost any kind of structure and organizing the whole process on a turnkey basis. For example, part of the plan was to create a design institute from scratch, that would create a city, and then go on to work in the city itself on other cities, and similar projects. This would have been much cheaper than a third party: a design bureau from the U.S., which Roxanne Meadows, the head of The Venus Project, referred us to, because they, at The Venus Project, to our surprise, had nothing to offer but a concept and a brand. And this despite the fact that “this was the best opportunity to build something,” as said by Stanislav Aizin, the first director on The Venus Project’s newly-formed board of directors, who held the position from 2016-2018, before today’s woeful directors came along.

What about this city project today? Andrew has all along continued to organize this endeavor despite the challenges, building all the necessary groundwork: from land, to funding, to negotiating potential expanded permits and authority for the territories, and has been gathering influential and necessary people from politics, business, and the non-profit sector for over 10 years.

Andrey organized the “Ukrainian House” in Davos, which like a magnet gathers all the influential and active part of society from politics, business and public organizations – and he told me that the ideas proposed by Jacque Fresco are in great demand, and the time for these ideas is just around the corner, but there is still a vague understanding of possible implementation. We met recently in London, and before that we were always in contact. The period of active work with Andrey was in 2013-2018, when we held dozens of working meetings, traveled to potential construction sites and developed conceptual proposal and presentations.

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Photos and article about the Ukrainian House in Davos 2018: https://mc.today/vpervye-ukraina-vyzyvala-ne-zhalost-a-uvazhenie-andrej-kolodyuk-ob-organizatsii-ukrainskogo-doma-v-davose/

What’s this all about?

The pilot name for the planned city is Mission on Earth, and the public company and the actual launch will begin later this year or next year. But I can already share some insights and great news with you!

Straight away to the good news – we, our organization Designing the Future, have already been invited as direct participants! Partnering in this endeavor brings us a large-scale, serious hands-on project to our account, opening up new perspectives, opportunities and contacts. The puzzle of our proposals, new trends, this partnership and potential opportunities is coming together very well.

The concept of “Mission on Earth” is to become a test site and cluster campus, a working hub and expo, a conference site, a center of attraction and a launching pad for many companies in the smart city field.

Unlike other smart cities – to offer a change in the social structure of society, to introduce new types of economies, social experiments in clusters, to give more freedom to participants and less regulation by the state. As an example, a much expanded sharing economy, where you can use many things just by borrowing them “from the library” – similar to the Resource Center in Jacque Fresco’s cities.

The purpose of the city is to set new tendencies, and drive forward human civilization, to present the construction of a smart city as a single product that can be easily ordered, pulling up all the accumulated experience, practices and the required companies at once. And by the way, it is not so far from this to planning the city as one big highly automated system with advanced AI – which, in my opinion, is the key to the transition to that post-scarcity world that Jacque Fresco was talking about.

We have an interview with Andrey Kolodyuk where he will give more details about the planned city.

Everything is very promising and will allow us to start working on our own reputation, achievements and practical projects in an accelerated mode. Finally, our path will be opened and artificial obstacles will be removed, which have been holding back our development for a long time, throwing us off the achieved heights for the umpteenth time in a very harsh way. But we have adapted, achieved new successes. And if we have coped in such conditions – it will be easier to do it now!

Would you like to join us?

Crowdfundings

There was only a couple of weeks to organize everything for the trip, but a few social media and sponsor chat announcements were enough to raise a sizable crowdfunding budget of $2,000, 75% of which was raised in just over 24 hours! An additional goal for equipment was quickly covered too.

Special thanks from all of us for the substantial contribution: Mikhail Sobolev, Vadim Rotary, Anatoly Karpov, Ilya Terentyev, Oleksandr T, Moonkiss.

The New Beginnings crowdfunding was launched shortly before we knew we were flying to New York. It is still relevant. The main goal hasn’t changed – to raise a fund or regular contributions for team salaries and development, building a solid base, reaching self-sustainability, moving forward with the Plan. With this journey in mind, we will rewrite the Plan a bit, but now in a more positive and practical way.

Thank you!
Join us, support, spread the word.

The post Now we will be directly involved in the construction of smart cities appeared first on Designing The Future.

The framing of the question and the very term suggests keeping things the way they are, but going backwards in many ways (including population numbers, by the way) instead of optimizing with technology, AI, and the evolution of the social system that The Venus Project had previously proposed, which the directors abandoned after convincing Roxanne to do so, largely by getting her hooked on podcasts and literature from the preppers and eco-village community.

https://youtu.be/o1vX03h7w9c?si=PF-CLdRdxUqVKf9W
An eye-opening exploration into the complexities of human overshoot. This podcast delves deep into the pressing issues facing our planet today. A must-listen for anyone passionate about sustainability and the future of our world

From a Facebook post

The post “The Great Simplification” in The Venus Project appeared first on Designing The Future.

His work was supposed to be culminating in a documentary, Man of Tomorrow, about Jacque Fresco’s life – however, for some reason we never got to see the movie. Why would that be?

I was surfing the internet a while back, and I came across a mention of this movie. I was extremely fascinated by the concept. After all, I had only heard about Jacque from himself, and it would be much more interesting to look at his life through the perspective of other people. I started researching: – When was this movie planned? – and when approximately it will be released? The head of the organization “Designing The Future”, Yevhen Sliuzko, helped me to find the necessary links.

When I checked out the Facebook page for the movie Man of Tomorrow, I discovered that production started back in 2013.

In one of the first pictures I immediately recognize Nate (he’s on the right). You can see his enthusiasm before an exciting endeavor – I wish I were in his shoes. Nathanael managed to get a grant and the necessary resources from the University of Kansas, the Center for Undergraduate Research, the School of the Arts, and the Department of Film where he was studying at the time to make the film. This was written on one of the Facebook Page’s posts.

The resources have been found, production has begun! Here are the photos from the page below. The number of invited interviewees is more than 24 people: those who were in any way related to Jacque Fresco.

A website was created for the movie, frescofuture.com, which is now available only through the Web Archive.

You can see Nate in the shots: he is acting as cameraman and possibly interviewer.

What’s more, the page is filled with photos of trips to key places from Jacque Fresco’s life. Oh, I would love to see this movie!

Everything seems to be working out more than marvelously. Based on the screenshots and presumably filmed footage, the movie is already shaping up to be the movie that was promised. However, in 2015, there’s this post that says the director of the movie, Nathanael Dinwiddie, has been brought on to another project, and the work on the movie will be delayed for a few more months.

After that, there will be some more posts referring to the movie before 2019. Some ads for The Venus Project itself… and then silence, until one interesting moment…..

That moment was the day I found out about this whole situation. I asked an friend of mine who runs a blog called JacqueFrescoEducation on The Venus Project to write about it all, providing material and links. Undeterred by the information he received, he made a post on his website on February 26, 2024, describing the whole situation to an English-speaking audience. Immediately someone created a thread with a link to this article, posted on the public Discord server where all The Venus Project board members are on, thus starting a public discussion.

A lot of people who support The Venus Project have begun to discuss the situation. I have also tagged Nathanael Dinwiddie without waiting for him to find the discussion himself. According to my observations, Nate is often online and has chatted a number of times on other topics.

Except, we never got an answer. Why hasn’t the movie that was started back in 2013 still haven’t been made? It’s already 2024 – 11 years have passed. Wasn’t it possible during this long time to find other filmmakers, video editors or a bit of money, something to finish the movie, based on the resources, footage and other things that have already been done. At the very least, he could publicly voice the problems he was facing and ask for help. The material has been filmed and there is a whole archive. An excerpt from the brochure:

“The film will contain much of the recently organized archival materials, consisting of more than 2,000 audio and video recordings, 2,500 photographic images, 3,500 design renderings, 300 physical models, and hundreds of documents.”

After 5 years of silence on the Facebook Page, suddenly a series of posts appear saying that there will be a 7-part autobiographical interview on Jacques’ biography.

Indeed, a series of interviews was released on the Jacque Fresco channel in occasion of his birthday on March 13th. But it can’t be called an autobiographical movie: it’s just a 7-part interview with Jacque where he solely talks about his life. How strange why haven’t they published it earlier, instead of a few months after a hot discussion on Discord. – What a Coincidence!

To summarize, we see that Nathanael, taking the resources of a number of institutions, including the grant, began work on a film that he couldn’t finish in 11 years, with more than enough footage already shot.

And that’s where the questions come in. Why is Nathaniel Dinwiddie keeping silent? What will happen to this undoubtedly valuable, already filmed material? And most importantly, where is the actual Movie?!

I see a simple and straightforward solution: talk about the problem, tell us what’s missing. In such a time I would have learned video editing myself and edited everything into one movie, or, a series of interviews could have been made accessible, and enthusiasts would have found a use for it. This should have been done a long time ago – interest in Jacque Fresco and his ideas is declining, and The Venus Project organization, and its director, Nathaniel Dinwiddie, have clearly not been working in this direction since at least the day he was appointed, in 2018.

PS: I’ve been trying hard to find an excuse for this. Things happen to everyone, well something doesn’t get finished, and it wasn’t just Nate who was working on the project, maybe he had lost the interest. But when I started digging further, I realized that this was not the only project he had taken on and never finished. The budgets for the following projects were way bigger than the University grant.

The post Why hasn’t the movie about Jacques Fresco, The Man of Tomorrow, by Nathanael Dinwiddie come out? appeared first on Designing The Future.

The film

The film will show the way out of the current world situation and what humanity can come to by cooperating. It will show a chain of constructive events, which in the near future will allow us to achieve and surpass the UN Sustainable Development Goals. The events will be beneficial to everyone – both those in power and ordinary people.

Virtual model of the first city

To demonstrate the standard of living in a resource-based economy, we plan to develop a virtual BIM model of the first city and subsequently the world as a whole. BIM (Building Information Model) is an information model of a building object.

To develop the city, we plan to invite experienced engineers, designers, landscape designers, architects, builders, manufacturers of various building materials, as well as developers of computer video games. So that everyone can visit the city via the Internet and familiarize themselves with the functionality in detail. Learn how his housing, kindergartens, schools will look like, how the autonomous transportation system will work, how water will be purified, electricity will be generated, where environmentally friendly products will be grown, garbage will be recycled and how all this beauty will be kept clean, and much more.

The interactive virtual model of the city will not only demonstrate comfort, technology and functionality, but will also allow you to calculate the necessary resources for construction and logistics.

Knowing the amount of materials and resources needed, the cost can be predicted. Knowing the cost, funding can be secured. With information on available resources, it is possible to calculate where and how many such cities can be built. This will gradually provide comfortable housing for all people in need.

About

This is a project by one of our long-time team members and a successful entrepreneur from the Ukraine – Anatoly Karpov.

• The website is planned to be translated into the most popular languages;
• The nearest plans are to get Google Ad Grants for advertising the project;
• Negotiations with a Ukrainian producer and director are underway.

We would be grateful for your support and feedback regarding the content of the website and the new project: thechoiceisours.org

The post New NGO for Jacque Fresco’s major motion picture and virtual reality city appeared first on Designing The Future.

Help our team continue the work, and do much more! In addition to The Venus Project’s dramatic change of course, the main challenge over the past couple of years has been the decrease in our budget. Whereas we used to rely on standard YouTube monetization (we don’t do integrations or paid placements), now our main source of funds comes from your contributions.

We have to pay for studios, devote time and run many areas at once because of the lack of hired people, and moreover, if it goes on like this – we won’t be able to do it as our main job anymore. But we don’t need to lay people off – we need to grow our team so we can do more.

If everyone who cares can give up the extra “coffee”, and donate $2-5/month – that will allow us to move forward. If you are able to do more – this period looks to determine the future of the direction. We are doing what we can, but it’s not enough. We need your help, and today more than ever.

Thank you to everyone who is already supporting us. Join in!

Make your contribution: designing-the-future.org/support

The post Your support matters appeared first on Designing The Future.

This interview confirms our research with direct official responses. Jacques Fresco’s “The Venus Project” really doesn’t exist anymore and it’s all considered “obsolete” in favour of eco-villages, permaculture, local self-sufficiency, and Nate and Simon Michaux’s vision of a conspiracy theories in science and energy, in preparation for the coming “apocalypse” or as they call it, Polycrisis.

Every other sentence they convince us that they haven’t deviated from Jacques Fresco, but it felt like a search for excuses with quotes taken out of context rather than a matter-of-fact explanation.

As Nate says, “The new The Venus Project, it’s just another level of abstraction, of a higher order than Jacques.” The transformation into a philosophy club is becoming more and more pronounced. You can now spend months arguing about things that don’t exist and never will, going through endless options and sub-options. Leaving the role of judge to the directors.

Simon Michaux (as well as his non-peer-reviewed, 3 year old, study) is highly praised and talked about as a defining piece of work for the new The Venus Project! … – well, Simon’s podcasts expose the pseudoscience, conspiracies, and flimsy research in their plans. Perhaps by emphasizing uncertainty and many options, there is a desire to hide the real plan they are working on now with Simon Michaux, which is uncomfortable for the established public on whose support and donations they depend.

Read our research to find out the details. Two and a half months after this document was published, we still haven’t seen any responses from Nate. Why? There are only their own quotes there, and what can be denied in their own words?

Our research “The Death of Jacque Fresco’s The Venus Project”

The post The Venus Project is no longer has a clear proposal and plan, but rather countless options appeared first on Designing The Future.

We are talking about The Thorium Network and MECi Group. You can still find The Thorium Network in the partner block on The Venus Project website, in a Facebook repost to The Venus Project’s group “The Thorium Newsletter” where they talk about working closely together to build the city.

It was our investigation of the fraudulent trails of Jeremiah Josey, a director of these companies, and his entire chain of shell companies, including a fake oil and gas company, that started the most tension with The Venus Project’s board of directors, with Simon Michaux promising to sue for slander, twice.

It seems it was our research-including on The Venus Project’s secret plans – that delayed the crowdfunding for City in the Desert that we kept a lot of The Venus Project and Jacque Fresco fans out of trouble. Or have we not yet?

What excuse will they come up with this time?

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