UPDATE:
• Bruce Sterling’s eulog video is now live (above).
• Four Bay Area TV stations will be going off the air tonight: KOFY (Channel 20), KCNS (Channel 38), KICU (Channel 36) and KFTY (Channel 50).
• Paul Saffo did an interview for the BBC on the Funeral for Analog TV.

Author Bruce Sterling, technology pundit Paul Saffo, and other special guests on the UC Berkeley campus mourned the loss of our long time acquaintance, the Analog Television Signal. Born in the 1920′s in San Francisco, the signal has been an integral part of all our lives, bringing us news of the rich, the famous, the politicians, the wars, the Apollo landings, the thrills of victory, and the agonies of defeat. While Analog Television has not been a good friend to us all, it has been important to each and every one of us. Analog Television is survived by its wife Digital Television, and its second cousin Internet Television. In a soap-operatic melodrama fit for TV itself, Congress has debated changing the official date for the switch to digital television; however this event went on as planned on Feb. 17 because we prefer to bury a fresh corpse rather than wait for the walking dead to fall over.

Many participants brought their Analog TV for display and recycling in memoriam to our life long friend. At the ceremony Paul Saffo spelled out the sordid history of the Analog TV Signal’s life, the group Author and Punisher performed the funeral dirge, and author Bruce Sterling delivered the eulogy just before the analog signal winked out for the last time and the frequency wasteland was invaded by pirate TV artists. It’s rare that the entire nation gets a specific date on which one major medium dies and is replaced by another.

Special thanks to the Long Now membership, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Rock Star bartenders, ACCRC, Bruce Sterling, Paul Saffo, and all the staff, partners and volunteers that helped make this happen.

More details are available on the website:
http://bcnm.berkeley.edu/tvfuneral/

Click the image to see the Flickr Set.

Managing social collapse

With vintage Russian black humor, Orlov described the social collapse he witnessed in Russia in the 1990s and spelled out its practical lessons for the American social collapse he sees as inevitable. The American economy in the 1990s described itself as “Goldilocks”—just the right size—when in fact is was “Tinkerbelle,” and one day the clapping stops. As in Russia, the US made itself vulnerable to the decline of crude oil, a trade deficit, military over-reach, and financial over-reach…

Read the rest of Stewart Brand’s Summary

This video answer sent in by Bryan Campen is one of the best considered answers to the economic crisis I have seen yet. It is a great lead in for tonight’s talk with Orlov, and points out the real hazards of how to invest stimulus funds.

 After over 5 years of producing our Seminars About Long-term Thinking series (SALT) we have begun to outgrow our available venues.  We are now offering an option for people (who arrive on time) to guarantee a seat.  This is to avoid having to turn people away (which we had to do at the last two events), and make sure that those people traveling a long distance to see a speaker can make the trip with piece of mind.  We also have a strong commitment to making sure there are some free seats at as many of our events as possible.  So here are the changes that we have made.  We will keep this post up to date as we evolve the system, and welcome your feedback so we can make it even better.

2 ways to make sure you get a seat (if we still have pre sell tickets available):

• Long Now Members can reserve a seat +1 guest for free at Brown Paper Tickets
• You can purchase Tickets for $10 at Brown Paper Tickets

Important Notes

• If you cant make it after making a reservation, please let us know by emailing services at longnow dot org as early as possible, but even up to the night of the event, as it will help us release those seats.
• In most cases there are no physical tickets, “getting a ticket” just means having you name on the list.
• Please note Members and Ticket holders: if you arrive after 7:25 we may not be able to seat you in the theater.
• All tickets and RSVP’s are Will-Call; advance sales and RSVP’s end when we reach our presell limit, or at 3:00pm on the day of event.
• Please allow time for traffic, parking, walking to the theater and check-in.
• The Seminar will be simulcast in the lobby with free overflow seating and extra seats in the theater will be released right before the lecture starts.
• You can also purchase advance tickets for events at our Museum & Store in Ft Mason, San Francsico.

All seminar audio is available for Download & Podcast.
High quality video with chaptering and video searchable transcript is available to all Long Now Members.

Become a Member for as low as $8/month and support Long Now and this lecture series.

There is a good article by Ben McGrath in the January 26th, 02009 New Yorker (reg. required) on the economic collapse that features our upcoming speaker Dmitry Orlov, past speaker Nassim Taleb and even a mention of Kevin Kelly.  Unfortunatley the article spends a bit too much time with the likes of Howard Kunstler, who I would consider way over the edge on how far this collapse will go.  Nevertheless its worth a read.   Some excerpts:

A year and a half ago, with real-estate prices falling, Dmitry Orlov, a forty-six-year-old software engineer from Leningrad, sold his apartment in the Brighton section of Boston, along with most of its contents, and bought a sailboat—an old sharpie made from Douglas-fir marine plywood, on which he and his wife, Natasha, a literary trans- lator, now live, debt-free.

Orlov moved to the United States when he was twelve, and returned to the Soviet Union for the first time in 1989, shortly after his uncle, a political prisoner under the Andropov regime, was released. During his second trip back, in 1990, the country was suffering from a fuel shortage, and he financed a road trip to the medieval towns of Pskov and Novgorod with a trunk full of vodka, trading half-litre bottles for ten litres of gasoline from black-marketeers along the way. (This was just after Gorbachev’s anti-alcoholism campaign, and Orlov capitalized on a death in the family by redeeming a funeral’s worth of vodka coupons.) The only comparable resource seemed to be bluejeans, of which he’d brought only one pair. No one wanted rubles. He internalized the lesson for future reference: “When faced with a collapsing economy, one should stop thinking of wealth in terms of money.”

Whereas Kunstler worries about being marginalized because of an association with “whack jobs” and their fringe ideas (he complains of being “pestered incessantly with conspiracy nutcases”), Taleb wonders how serious people can fail to understand how crazy the world really is. “I got two million  e-mails from people saying, ‘You’re right,’ ” Taleb said. “About a million people read my book before the crisis, but nobody got protection!”

Taleb’s perspective is not for the anxious or weak-willed. In an effort to protect yourself from too much dependence, you begin with the certainty that a side effect of globalization is “fragility”: a problem in Icelandic banks depresses Maine.

Capitalism itself, through the relentless pressure of quarterly reports, introduces too much efficiency and socially destabilizing leverage, so you recommend a reversion to something like an Islamic banking system, in which debt-based lending is forbidden, or at least heavily discouraged. (Taleb grew up in Lebanon, where an ongoing civil war had the beneficial effect of dissing people from trusting banks.)