A good portion of this website is dedicated to research of the decline of The Venus Project (TVP) organization and its dramatic shift away from the core ideas promoted for decades, coupled with mismanagement and little or no results along with total closeness.
But not everything is lost. And the first step in the right direction is to understand the situation as it really is. Study the whole document or go through the entire branch of the menu on the website.
Thank you!
Direct contact with the author: sluzko.com
About the Author
Many people know me and our team from our YouTube channels “Jacques Fresco and The Venus Project”, the largest of which has 1.5 million subscribers. But not many people know that before we started professionally running the channel – for the first 8 years it was practically just hosting for translated videos, without any monetization connected, gathering 420k subscribers. We started the channel professionally after The Venus Project basically prohibited us from doing anything else after a series of TVP’s mismanagement and internal upheavals.
I am a lawyer and entrepreneur from Kyiv, I have a lot of experience in running a business, I had 2 offices in different cities, doing construction, design, 3d-visualization and wall finishing, I also had a small online store of musical instruments, before that there was an author’s course on guitar playing, a small music studio, and since 2020 I moved to work exclusively in the direction, having wrapped up all the previous activities. Now I live in the UK.
So. 2014… In just 3 years of our activity, after a series of participation in festivals, our own events, screenings of the movie “Paradise or Oblivion” on the streets, cafes and festivals, creating a network of more than 60 chapters in cities in 5-6 countries (where an average of 5-7 people gathered regularly), appearances on TV, presentations to various groups and even parties, and many small actions on the ground, presentations at universities, creating a professional community and team, and much more – We were able to personally find and reach investors who were totally interested in the project, and they even flew twice to the then living Jacques Fresco. Back then we already had a bigger team and more success than the rest of the Venus Project movement combined.
For the next 3 years our team and I personally negotiated and planned this whole venture as something that would actually come to fruition, bringing in architectural firms and a whole staff of board experts, many of whom had their own Wikipedia pages.
Under different circumstances, 10 years ago we could have had a university city with elements of what Jacques Fresco was proposing to start to be built. Only 30-35 minutes from the outermost metro station in Kyiv.
It was stated by a former The Venus Project board of director member, Stan Aisin, that this was the most real and promising opportunity to build an entire smart city in the history of The Venus Project (see “The First Director” chapter).
I was one of the first people to create The Venus Project movement in the former CIS countries, and have been in a leadership position all along. Not everyone could get in, we had good filters, we had a spectacular team, many people and their skills were practically molded by us, and we did our work professionally, selflessly, staying the original course, working for results, giving interviews, and working with a very influential group of people. We have a video https://youtu.be/hVbT9rHwJQY , where Jacque and Roxanne call us official representatives of The Venus Project – they have never called anyone that before, and they never will again. I have a signed book, “The Best That Money Can’t Buy” (by Jacque Fresco, which we translated) with a thank you note from Jacque and Roxanne for my contribution to humanity – we sent the same one with wishes from the then living Jacque Fresco to several leaders, including Nursultan Nazarbayev through his daughter – then President of Kazakhstan (and a couple years later there was an Expo with a building very much like Jacque Fresco’s architecture).
At some point we actively worked with universities, and thanks to us Fresco’s lectures were included in the educational program in Kazakhstan (nationwide testing of the 9th grade) and the Russian Federation (in the program of the Polytechnic Institute), this is in addition to dozens of diploma papers and essays on the topic, we had in our team the rector and dean of the top university of Kazakhstan, we held a teleconference with Jacque Fresco for 1700 people in the Kyiv Polytechnic Institute, with the support of the Institute itself, holding the premiere of the film “The Choice is Ours”, the creation of which was also involved our team.
Over time, key people from our team have started their own ventures in science pop, fighting obscurantism, logic and logical fallacies, working in research institutes as researchers, starting environmental organizations, holding positions in government, organizing their own thematic events and clubs, and community organizations. Key partners are social activists and venture capitalists working in the IT field, gathering at the moment influential conferences for political and business circles in Europe, organized a club to share experiences in building smart cities, which includes existing companies and cities around the world as well as just planned projects. We are all also planning to build a smart city, and influence the agenda in research, development of smart cities, experiments in social arrangements within them. And I would love to be doing just that, rather than desperately fighting for the very right to continue working in this direction.
Our fight for the reputation of Jacques Fresco and The Venus Project, for exposing pyramid schemes, scammers, eco-villagers, political parties, crypto-businessmens, pseudo-research institutes, and city builders who want to take the name and attention of our vast audience, is worth its own thick book.
Despite our huge successes – no one has sponsored us during this time, we have managed with our own funds, voluntary contributions and income from regular youtube ads. We have also not been bribed or bought out of our resources, and The Venus Project has not given us any funds. However, we have redirected all donations and prospects to The Venus Project’s organization, trusting that they will find a better use for it. From the history of our interactions with The Venus Project — we have been increasingly restricted in our activities rather than encouraged. I regularly, about once every 1-2 years, make a proposal to Roxanne Meadows, suggesting options for development, reforming the organization in our experience, and projects to look at, analyzing their situation, and suggesting that we do it directly, and I’ve always been thorough, but each time I’ve been rejected, and it’s like insanity to do the same thing over and over again without results, but I’ve never given up hope.
The last such proposal, it was when our channel was approaching 1 million subscribers, I kind of even managed to convey to Roxanne the need to publish Jacque Fresco’s lectures in the open access, to use our experience in promotion, and in how exactly to develop a professional team using work hubs in cheap countries (3 people from us were already in Turkey, and we tested this option) – I gave all the necessary figures, calculations, was ready to take personal responsibility for the realization of plans, and even willing to sell all my property and move closer with my family.
Roxanne got excited, but suddenly Nate Dinwiddie appeared on the stage! I’d previously thought of him as a secondary person left to help Roxanne, working with the archives, and living at The Venus Project Research Center, but in response to my presentation to Roxanne, I got an angry review from him accusing me of my sneaky and devious plans to antagonize their team in a struggle for power! …Turns out things are much worse than I could have imagined. And it’s only now starting to unfold.
Between 2022 and 2023 I spent two weeks at the Venus Project Research Center where Nate Dinwiddie and Roxanne Meadows were trying to explain to me the new course of The Venus Project and what they were basing it all on. I spent all of 2023 negotiating with The Venus Project, doing extensive presentations on the risks they were going to face, trying to get it back on track. I didn’t know what was hidden under the surface at the time, and I tried in vain to change things with logic and facts and analysis and big presentations, and as you can see, it was all pointless.
at The Venus Project Research Center