The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility - Hardcover

Brand, Stewart

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 046504512X ISBN 13: 9780465045129

Publisher: Basic Books, 1999

Synopsis

The author explores the dearth of "long-term" thinking in the Western World and proposes a plan to make future planning a regular feature of human consciousness.

About this title

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 braintrust 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, and musician Brian Eno, who came up with the concept of the "Long Now." 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 civilisation'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, Amazon.com

From the Publisher

How we have become dangerously short-term in our outlook
Civilization is revving itself into a pathologically short attention span. This trend, which originates in the accelerating changes in technology, the short-term perspective of market-driven economics, the next-election priorities of democracies and the distractions of personal multi-tasking, is on the increase. Some sort of balancing corrective to short-sightedness is needed – some mechanism or myth that teaches us to take the long view and to accept our long-term responsibilities, where 'long-term' is measured in decades and centuries. That corrective is the Clock of the Long Now.

The Clock of the Long Now is both a mechanism and a myth. It is a long-term project designed to encourage people to think beyond the psychological barrier of the millennium and into the future. The Long Now Foundation, founded by some of the world's most influential and cutting-edge thinkers, plan to build a gigantic mechanical clock, perhaps as large as Stonehenge, in the American desert. It is intended to record time for 10,000 years.

Such an impressive and well engineered structure should reframe the way people think about their responsibilities towards the generations that follow them. It could come to embody the 'long term'. It may even do for thinking about time what photographs of Earth from space have done for thinking about the environment.

The Clock of the Long Now combines an account of fantastic technology with a visionary philosophical enquiry about our relationship to time in a way that could change dramatically the way we think about the next millennia.

Acclaim for Stewart Brand's How Buildings Learn

'A classic and probably a work of genius.' Jane Jacobs, author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities

'A stunning exploration of the design of design... How Buildings Learn will irrevocably alter youur sense of place, space and the artifacts that shape them.' Michael Shrage, Wired

'A fascinating and indefinable book... How Buildings Learn is a hymn to entropy, a witty heterodox book dedicated to kicking the stuffing out of the proposition that architecture is permanent and buildings cannot adapt.' Stephen Bayley, The Times

'Penetratingly original' Philip Morrison, Scientific American

Edition details

• Publisher: Basic Books
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 046504512X
• ISBN 13: 9780465045129
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 190