Zack Exley

I have always believed that humanity has everything it needs to build a sustainable economy that delivers prosperity for all — in one generation. Recent developments now make that more easily achievable than ever before. Helping that to happen is my primary focus.

New Consensus

I’m the Co-founder and Executive Director of the think tank New Consensus, where we’re building the Mission for America — a comprehensive plan for a sweeping, WWII-style economic mobilization to build a new economy. We argue that the mass elimination of bullshit jobs in the AI era is a blessing that will free hundreds of millions to participate in the urgent work of building a clean economy that delivers health, security and real abundance to billions of people left behind by capitalism and saves the planet from global heating catastrophe.

AI will not eliminate work. Humanity has an enormous global to-do list before it that we must accomplish just to survive the century, let alone to thrive. We must throw ourselves into this work — and AI, just like all technology, is a tool to help us achieve our goals if it is controlled by the public instead of a few private owners.

The Mission for America

The Mission for America is a comprehensive, detailed plan for national economic transformation. It is the Project 2025 for creating instead of destroying. It’s a playbook for the U.S. to harness AI and other technologies to upgrade old industries and create new ones to deliver true prosperity sustainably in a single generation. Read more at newconsensus.com.

We’re actively looking for new staff and collaborators who share the vision of the Mission for America and who would like to develop similar missions for their own countries. Get in touch by email!

Background

After serving as Saikat Chakrabarti’s launch director for his historic campaign that convinced Nancy Pelosi to finally step aside, I’m back at New Consensus full time. I co-founded New Consensus with Saikat in 2017, where we created the Green New Deal which re-introduced the left and progressive movements to industrial policy and the idea of economic mobilization.

Before New Consensus, I co-founded Justice Democrats and Brand New Congress — campaigns to replace every corrupt member of the U.S. Congress with honest, visionary local leaders. They made a beautiful movie about us that you can watch on YouTube or Netflix.

I served on the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign, where I led the national grassroots organizing infrastructure that powered the movement. Becky Bond and I wrote a book about our experiences on the campaign called Rules for Revolutionaries: How Big Organizing Can Change Everything.

I’ve enjoyed being a random minor note in some major songs:

• Organized the first flash mobs and first purely online-organized protests
• Created the first political parody website, which made George W. Bush call me a “garbage man” and declare “there ought to be limits to freedom”
• Helped lead MoveOn.org as its first Organizing Director — the first major online political organization
• Built cutting-edge online organizing and fundraising tools for the Dean, Kerry, Obama, and Bernie presidential campaigns
• Led the NGO and political practice at a global software services firm, serving organizations and parties in Brazil, South Africa, India, and the US
• Worked as a union organizer all through my 20s, in factories all over the Midwest and South
• Experienced the rise of Trump & MAGA while living in a tiny town in Missouri
• Served as Chief Community Officer for Wikipedia
• Saw real communism while studying in Xi’an and hitchhiking all over China for a year in 1987
• Lived in a tiny village in western Kenya before running water or electricity arrived
• Built my own Space Invaders and Missile Command with 3.5K RAM on my Commodore VIC-20. </small>

Contact

Email me at zack@newconsensus.com

Yes, you can invite me to speak! I love traveling and speaking to groups, especially if we can spend time brainstorming and learning from each other about how to advance and strengthen our movements.

I’ve been writing with em dashes since 1980 and I’m not giving them up.