The Clock of the Long Now

"Brand wrote it in 1999. It came out of his Long Now Foundation which has at its core the idea of expanding our time horizons. For Brand and the Foundation, ‘long-term’ means 10,000 years in the future. One of their main projects is the clock you mentioned. And yes, it is an actual clock being built inside a mountain in the Texas desert as we speak. It is being designed to last 10,000 years, but it’s probably going to be a decade or more before it’s finished because the engineering to make it stay accurate for 10 millennia is very challenging. When you go to visit the clock you will hike through the desert and walk up steps cut into the mountain which each represent a million years of geological time. And the clock itself will be like a secular altarpiece for a civilisation that embraces long-term thinking. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter One of the reasons that Brand’s book is important is because it’s very different from many of the books about futurology and forecasting that had been around since at least the 1960s, when people like Herman Kahn were writing books on scenario planning for things like thermonuclear war. Brand is saying, ‘look, I’m not interested in predicting the future; rather, we need to care about the future, we need to expand our time horizons.’ His book is the first I know to explicitly explore what long-term thinking really is, or could be. He takes it as a concept and pulls it apart to examine it. That’s a real intellectual shift in the history of long-term thinking. And he does it so well: he’s an amazing, pithy prose stylist. Yes. It was in Stewart Brand’s book that I first came across Brian Eno’s concept of the long now. Later, I went back to read Eno’s original essay, “The Big Here and Long Now.” It was absolutely electrifying for me, and it’s been on my desk for the last three years as I’ve been working on this book. Eno coined the phrase in 1979, so he was way ahead of the curve—although there is an interesting precursor in an essay that H.G. Wells wrote back in 1902 called “The Discovery of the Future.” Eno’s point is that our sense of ‘now’ is getting shorter and shorter and if we are going to connect with future generations and deal with crises like weapons proliferation and our destruction of the living world we need a longer sense of now. He says we’re not very good at empathising with future generations and challenges us to do better. There is undoubtedly a tension in the project, in that the principal funder is the person who’s basically responsible for inventing the ‘Buy Now’ button—the essence of our culture of instant consumer gratification, short-term desires and rewards. But I don’t think it’s a vanity project, actually. Yes, it’s true that the Clock of the Long Now is not as practical as the Svalbard Seed Vault, which is protecting plant biodiversity with millions of seeds from 6000 species and is designed to last for at least a millennium. But I think that, like great sites of pilgrimage in the past such as the cathedrals of mediaeval Europe, there is value in cultural objects and symbolic artworks."