John Taylor has invented a “time eater” clock that depicts the erratic and limited nature of one’s personal experience of time. I’d love to get a Long Now perspective on the mechanics, philosophy, and aesthetics of the piece! Stephen Hawking introduced the clock, but the article doesn’t say anything about his remarks.

Stewart Brand’s essay emphasizes the purpose of focusing our own minds on long term thinking. Instinctively, that feels like an admirable goal. On the other hand, given the increasing rate of change in society, it could be that our instincts are misplaced: investing in the future involves real costs in the present, and the more volatile that future becomes, the less certain we can be that our decedents will be able to reap the benefits of our sacrifice. As that volatility increases, eventually we reach the point where the best we can do is stay nimble and select whichever course of action burns the fewest bridges. However, I think he’s right that an increased emphasis on long term thinking is necessary, because the consequences of a mistake today are much greater than they were in the past, so for a given amount of uncertainty about the future, the proper amount of energy we should put into thinking through our decisions has also increased.

But everything involves tradeoffs. If our motivation is increasing long term thinking, that might not be compatible with preserving an unvarnished view of the present. You could give a pretty good view of daily life in September 2008 by archiving the Twitter stream, for instance, and leaving it to some future digital archeologist’s grad students to sift through the layers of tweets just like today’s archeologists sift the earth. But blindly archiving the whole Twitter stream might not increase long term thinking because it doesn’t involve the selection process; just like in moving, nothing gets you thinking about the past, present and future like deciding what to keep and what goes to Goodwill.