Taking the long view

April 29th, 2006

The Long Now Foundation says

The Long Now Foundation was established in 01996* to develop the 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.
The Name
The term was coined by one of our founding board members, Brian Eno. When Brian first moved to New York City and found that in New York 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 are trying to stretch out what people consider as now.

The emminent Stewart Brand says

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 the short-sightedness is needed-some mechanism or myth which encourages the long view and the taking of long-term responsibility, where ‘long-term’ is measured at least in centuries

Though the Long Now Foundation is not neccessarily about Communities, it is certainly about what our world might become through a consilience of very different minds thinking about the future.

The Foundation has been running a number of seminars and these seminars can be download as podcasts.

Previous speakers have been: Chris Anderson Jimmy Wales ? Kevin Kelly ? Stephen Lansing ? Peter Schwartz ? Sam Harris ? Clay Shirky ? Esther Dyson ? Ray Kurzweil ? Robert W. Fuller ? Jared Diamond

If you are interested in seeing a wider horizon line, jump in or at least dip your big toe in, the water may not be quite as cold as you think.

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