I belong to an organization called the Long Now Foundation.
- The Long Now Foundation was established in 01996* to develop the 10,000-year Clock and Library projects , as well as to become the seed of a very long-term cultural institution. The Long Now Foundation hopes to provide counterpoint to today’s “faster/cheaper” mind set and promote “slower/better” thinking. We hope to creatively foster responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years.
Long-now people write the year as 02010 to remind us where we fit, sort of like odometer on Volvos showing six digits to suggest you might drive yours more than 100,000 miles. For long-nowers, civilization is 10,000 years old, and we should be thinking about the next 10,000.
Founder Stewart Brand encourages us to look at long-term patterns of change. The layers of the world spin at different rates:
Long now?
The term was coined by one of our founding board members, Brian Eno. Upon moving to New York City, Brian found that “here” and “now” meant “this room” and “this five minutes” as opposed to the larger here and longer now that he was used to in England. We have since adopted the term as the title of our foundation as we try to stretch out what people consider as now.
Guidelines for a long-lived, long-valuable institution:
- Serve the long view
- Foster responsibility
- Reward patience
- Mind mythic depth
- Ally with competition
- Take no sides
- Leverage longevity
Obviously, a group like this is not going to have much patience with conventional short-term thinking. (Personally, I think the major problem in business organizations is their knee-jerk readiness to sacrifice the long-term for the near-term.) The Board is an amazing line-up of progressive thinkers. In addition to Stewart, there’s Kevin Kelly, Danny Hillis, Brian Eno, Esther Dyson, Doug Carlston, Mitch Kapor, Michael Keller, Roger Kennedy, Paul Saffo, Peter Schwartz, Kim Polese, Chris Anderson, and David Eagleman.
This Saturday in San Francisco, the Long Now Foundation is sponsoring the Longplayer and Long Conversation:
A 70 foot diameter 1000 year musical instrument played for 1000 minutes, 19 amazing speakers in a relay conversation lasting 360 minutes, and a realtime 3D mapped-video- linguistic interpretation by MIT’s Sosolimited. All in downtown San Francisco around Yerba Buena Gardens.
You can spend your day wandering back and forth from the musical piece at
YBCA, to a slow lunch at Samovar, to the conversation at the Contemporary
Jewish Museum.Speakers include: Melissa Alexander, John Perry Barlow, Violet Blue, Stewart Brand, Stuart Candy, Danese Cooper, Jem Finer, Ken Foster, Katherine Fulton, Saul Griffith, Paul Hawken, Danny Hillis, Jane McGonigal, Peter Schwartz, Tiffany Shlain, Robin Sloan, Jill Tarter, Ken Wilson, Pete Worden.
Lord, I love living in San Francisco, where the unexpected is every day. Where else would I have an opportunity to chat with the likes of Doug Engelbart?
Photo by Bill Daul
Related posts:
{ 1 trackback }