Amazon.com Review

"How do we make long-term thinking automatic and common," asks Stewart Brand, "instead of difficult and rare?" Or, to put it another way, how does one get people to develop a natural perspective of their present moment that extends beyond a few days in either direction? The Clock of the Long Now describes a potential solution from the Long Now Foundation, a digerati brain trust co-chaired by Brand, the creator of the Whole Earth Catalog. The other chair, computer scientist Daniel Hillis, gave the group their initial premise in a 1995 Wired magazine article dreaming of a "Millennium Clock" that would measure time on a 10,000-year scale; musician Brian Eno gave the concept of the "Long Now" its name. Although there is a lot of discussion of the clock itself--Where to build it? How to design it?--Brand's main theme is about accepting responsibility for the long-term consequences of our actions. "We are not the culmination of history," he warns, "and we are not start-over revolutionaries; we are in the middle of civilization's story.... We don't know what's coming. We do know we're in it together." The Clock of the Long Now is a deceptively short book, written in a friendly, at times conversational, style. It can be read in an afternoon, but just might make you think for a lifetime. Maybe even a few lifetimes. --Ron Hogan

Ten thousand years = size of civilization thus far = 400 generations.

"Ancient" Egypt was relatively late in the game. The pharaohs started two hundred generations ago (3000 BCE) and built their greatest pyramids within seventeen generations, about the same time as Stonehenge (2575 BCE).

Responsibility, these years, means mastering long lead times, long lag times, and the hidden effects of cumulative change....

The deer frozen in the headlights, the driver frozen at the wheel with no time to brake--both are doomed by speed and bad luck. Luck you cannot do much about; speed you can. Overdriving the headlights--that is, counting on no surprises out there in the darkness--is folly on any road. Braking time must match awareness time.

Civilization is revving itself into a pathologically short attention span. The trend might be coming from the acceleration of technology, the short-horizon perspective of market-driven economics, the next-election perspective of democracies, or the distractions of personal multi-tasking. All are on the increase. Some sort of balancing corrective to this short-sightedness is needed“some mechanism or myth that encourages the long view and the taking of long-term responsibility, where "the long term" is measured at least in centuries.

Two types of time:

1. kairos (opportunity or propitious moment), the time of cleverness, offers hope
2. chronos (external or ongoing time), the time of wisdom, extends a warning.

Moore's Law leads to "continuous discontinuous change," says Regis McKenna.

The Singularity, shorthand for impending technology acceleration and convergence. Just the concept changes behavior. People already refer to the near future in months instead of years, and to the distant future in years instead of decades or centuries. What may happen decades from now--beyond the imagined event horizon--is treated as not only unknown but unknowable. Under such conditions speed becomes glorified. Haste switches from a vice to a virtue; behavior that once might have been called reckless and irresponsible becomes swift and decisive action.

There are so many new varieties of short-term opportunity, and the pace of events buffets our attention with so many surprises, it is as if the old dialogue between opportunistic kairos and durational chronos has become a monologue, just a shriek of joy into the gale of freefall.

Seymour Papert tells of a group of friends eating lobsters at a Boston fish house. The question came up, "Can anyone eat lobster without making a mess?" Papert reports, "A brain surgeon at the table did it. It took him two hours“a completely eaten lobster with a perfect absence of mess. He took the time appropriate to the job, which he knew about. It wasn't his skill. It was his patience."

Two hours was the difference between impossible and easy. For what tasks would two hundred years make that kind of difference?

1959-1999

When I pronounce the word Future,
the first syllable already belongs on the past.

Wislawa Szymborska

Each new president leaves behind more papers to be preserved than all the previous presidents combined. At the same time, with digital media it is increasingly possible to store absolutely everything. The traditional role of the librarian and curator--to select what is to be preserved and ruthlessly weed out everything else--suddenly is obsolete.

Brian Eno observes, "I had a large house once. Effectively it had infinite cheap storage. I've never been so miserable as when I found myself living among the unselected heaps of crap that I'd accumulated. I favor savage selection, but everyone making their own. That way you get a myriad of perspectives instead of one and instead of an undifferentiated heap." This pretty well describes how the WWW is organizing itself.

Written on the wind... Commercial software is almost always written in great haste, at ever-accelerating market velocity; it can foresee an "upgrade path" to next year's version, but decades are outside its scope. And societies live by decades, civilizations by centuries.

There is no business case for archives.

"America," wrote Goethe, "you have it better than our old continent; you have no ruined castles and no primordial stones. Your soul, your inner life remain untroubled by useless memory and wasted strife."

Time will not have a stop; it won't even slow down. That may explain why people have been speeding up, as if by cramming more and more life into each passing hour they can personally enact Zeno's Paradox, always never more than halfway to death.

Does anyone really want to live in medieval times? Have rotten teeth, eat turnips, and die at the age of twenty-seven of exhaustion?

Danny Hillis points out, "There are problems that are impossible if you think about them in two-year terms--which everyone does--but they're easy if you think in fifty-year terms." This category of problems includes nearly all the great ones of our time: The growing disparities between haves and have-nots, widespread hunger, dwindling fresh water resources, ethnic conflict, global organized crime, loss of biodiversity, and so on.

This present moment
That lives on to become
Long ago.
Gary Snyder

This present moment
Used to be
The unimaginable future.
Stewart Brand

The Long Now Foundation site lists these GUIDELINES: (for a long-lived, long-valuable institution)

1. Serve the long view (and the long viewer).

2. Foster responsibility.

3. Reward patience.

4. Mind mythic depth.

5. Ally with competition.

6. Take no sides.

7. Leverage longevity.

---

TIME & BITS: Managing Digital Continuity
(conference logo)

How Long Will they Be Around? Computer scientists are concerned that digital data stored on various media won't last as long as archival materials on paper. The life expectancy of various media at 68 degrees Fahrenheit and 40% relative humidity:

All major brands:

CD-R (recordable): 2 years

CD-ROM (play only): 5 years

Medium-term microfilm or newspaper*: 10 years

High-quality paper**: 20 years

Archival-quality (silver) michrofilm or permanent paper***: 100 years

* * * High-quality brands:

Medium-term michrofilm or newspaper*: 20 years

CD-R (recordable): 30 years

CD-ROM: 50 years

High-quality paper**: 100 years

Archival-quality (silver) michrofilm: 200 years

Permanent paper***: 500 years * * *

_____________
*High acid, unbuffered
** Low acid, unbuffered
*** Low acid, buffered

Source: National Media Lab

Researched by Jennifer Oldham / Los Angeles Times