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Stewart Brand
How long is "now" for any one of us individual humans, or for society as a whole? An hour? A day? Maybe a week? In recent times it feels like "now" has been shrinking more and more, as we rush from one acute crisis to the next. But how long should our "now" be as a society to handle the long-term challenges and opportunities we face? Stewart Brand and the Long Now Foundation have a bold suggestion: ten thousand years. Ten thousand years ago the last ice age was receding and human civilizations were starting to take off. But that's not really all that long for our species; in total it's just a few hundred generations from then until now. All human history in a sense has been recent history. So maybe humanity's "now" could be seen as those ten thousand years past, and the next ten thousand to come. And if we were able to radically reframe our sense of time like this, what could we accomplish?
In The Clock of the Long Now, Steward Brand, a founding member of The Long Now Foundation, presents the concept through a series of essays. He lays out a vision of what a profoundly different sort of long-term thinking could look like, how it could be fostered, and what it could enable. At the heart of the plan is a literal, physical Clock to accurately keep time over these next ten thousand years, and an associated Library to store and track information relevant to long-term thinking. These concepts themselves require the kind of long-term thinking they're supposed to encourage, and the kind that we're just not used to.
Neal Stephenson manages to capture the essence of the Long Now even better in fiction, I think, than any direct literal explanation can convey. The characters in the world of Anathem live out their lives preserving and maintaining knowledge in their libraries, dutifully winding their clocks, and staying above the fray of the outside world, until a global crisis appears-- one that requires exactly their perspective and wisdom to address.