I am, however, pretty relaxed about this building up slowly, and part of the reason why is Stewart Brand.
Sometimes you read something so compelling that it seems to sing inside you as right. And sometimes you read something that's so obviously true that you can't believe no one thought of it before. And sometimes you read something so well expressed that you are delighted that complex stories can be told in simple sentences. And sometimes you read a book so good that you buy copies of it to give to your friends.
Stewart Brand's 'The Clock of the Long Now' is all of these things.
This is a book about time, our relationship to it, and changing the way we think about and approach it. Brand thinks that our idea of the future has become too short. We focus on the immediate and the instant. Long term thinking means years, or decades at best, and this is to our great detriment. "We are revving ourselves into a pathologically short attention span", says Brand, and he is right.
Even our most profound problem as a society - climate change - seems to be portrayed and viewed as something that lasts a century. We are told that temperatures will increase by X degrees by 2100, but what happens after 2100? Will the temperature rise magically stop at that point, or will it continue to go up? Why don't we look beyond the end of the century? Is this the limit of our knowledge, or of our perception? It's a very strange way of looking at this problem, especially when you consider that if you have children, then, assuming the worst predictions don't come to pass, their children - your grandchildren - will be alive to see for themselves what happens the other side of 2100. And what about their children? Are we really unable to think about how our kids might feel about their grandchildren? Is that such an inconceivable concept? Sometimes it seems like we can't even think past the end of the week.
To help counteract our collective short-termism, Brand and his collaborators in the late 1990s built a foundation dedicated to fostering long term thinking and responsibility, and to reconnect with caring about something larger than ourselves and our immediate surroundings. The Clock of the Long Now is the story of the birth of the Long Now Foundation, and the development of its iconic project - the clock itself.
The idea is to build a monumental clock, which will run, with minimal maintenance and winding, for 10,000 years - a roughly equivalent time into the future that agriculture has been around up until now. In an exciting development for this blog, there's a picture of the prototype over there <
To help counteract our collective short-termism, Brand and his collaborators in the late 1990s built a foundation dedicated to fostering long term thinking and responsibility, and to reconnect with caring about something larger than ourselves and our immediate surroundings. The Clock of the Long Now is the story of the birth of the Long Now Foundation, and the development of its iconic project - the clock itself.
The idea is to build a monumental clock, which will run, with minimal maintenance and winding, for 10,000 years - a roughly equivalent time into the future that agriculture has been around up until now. In an exciting development for this blog, there's a picture of the prototype over there < It will tick once a day, and bong once a century. The display on the prototypes shows the year in 10,000 year form (so this year is 02008). This sounds gimmicky, but it looks odd and makes people think. When I went to look at the prototype in London's Science Museum, a kid next to me pointed out that it was showing the wrong year, so I explained why it was designed like that. "Oh", he said, "that's really clever".
The clock is going to be as looter-proof as possible, made with non-precious metals, and having no easily detachable collectable parts - it's hoped that there won't be a black market in ball-bearings taken from the clock of the long now. It will be designed to be intuitive, so people can figure out how to repair it in the absence of a manual, and it will be designed to be fixable with bronze age technology, in case we balls everything up and have to start over. And the Foundation has built a big stable chunk of rock in Nevada to build it in, so if you ever find yourself in a post-apocalyptic nightmare world, you'll at least have one place to go on holiday.
But besides all the cool, geeky features, the best thing about the clock is obviously what it symbolises. That there are people, alive today, who are thinking 10,000 years into the future and, as the clock's chief designer Danny Hillis puts it, saying to themselves "I plant my acorns knowing that I will never live to harvest the oaks."
But besides all the cool, geeky features, the best thing about the clock is obviously what it symbolises. That there are people, alive today, who are thinking 10,000 years into the future and, as the clock's chief designer Danny Hillis puts it, saying to themselves "I plant my acorns knowing that I will never live to harvest the oaks." Speaking of oaks, there's a fantastic anecdote in the book about a note the Swedish navy received from the Swedish forestry department in the 01980's (see what I did there?) telling them that the oak trees they had ordered 150 years ago were now ready for harvesting. The forest they planted in the 1830s to make ships with is now a nature reserve.
The Foundation has other great projects, and one of the most fun for interweb lovers is longbets, where Warren Buffet has just placed a (say it in a Dr Evil voice) one million dollar bet, over ten years, on financial fund performance. All of the proceeds go to charity, so it's good clean fun, and some of the bets are really creative. Fans of Cheers will be interested to see how Ted Danson did.
The term 'long now' was coined by Brian Eno (yes, him out of Roxy Music). "Eno's Long Now", writes Brand, "places us where we belong, neither at the end of history nor at the beginning, but in the thick of it. We are not the culmination of history, and we are not start-over revolutionaries, we are in the middle of civilization's story."
There's a much better article than this one by Michael Chabon on the Foundation's website, where at the end he shows just what it means. His son asks him if there will still be people alive in 10,000 years time, and he answers that there definitely will. The clock is a beautiful symbol of a commitment to making that statement come true - a commitment to ourselves, and to civilisation.
What has all this got to do with a lazy blogger? Nothing much, save that I'm happy to take my time over this. As Brand said, bad things happen fast, good things happen slow. And if you subscribe to the RSS feed, you'll get a little message whenever I post. I promise I'll try and be a bit quicker than the Swedish forestry.
And if you really, really, can't wait, then you can follow the advice the Fat Cyclist gave to his readers, and try to decide which is the very best kind of pie.
