Published on Tuesday, January 31st, 02012 by Austin Brown
There is new media available from our monthly series, the Seminars About Long-term Thinking. Stewart Brand’s summaries and audio downloads or podcasts of the talks are free to the public; Long Now members can view HD video of the Seminars and comment on them.
Published on Tuesday, January 24th, 02012 by Austin Brown
Agricultural biodiversity is as much in need of defending as the world’s wildlife. Countless varieties of plants and animals were bred by the world’s peoples for talents specific to every soil, climate, and human culture. Most of them have been lost—their hard-won genetic sophistication extinguished. But many have survived, thanks to professional and amateur devotion, and they are wondrous—living embodiments of humanity’s deepest traditions.
Photojournalist Jim Richardson has been covering the agricultural beat for National Geographic since 1984. His spectacular photographs, and the stories he tells with them, are renowned.
Published on Friday, January 20th, 02012 by Austin Brown
There is new media available from our monthly series, the Seminars About Long-term Thinking. Stewart Brand’s summaries and audio downloads or podcasts of the talks are free to the public; Long Now members can view HD video of the Seminars and comment on them.
Published on Thursday, January 19th, 02012 by Alexander Rose - Twitter: @zander
Below is the Clock Project update by Jeff Bezos published at http://www.10000yearclock.net
Quick Update and Video of the Raise Bore Milestone
We just completed the 12½ foot diameter, 500 foot deep vertical shaft for the 10,000 Year Clock. We used a mining technique called raise boring. Take a look at the video – it’s an interesting operation. Instead of drilling down from the top, you pull a large diameter reamer up to the surface from the bottom using a smaller diameter pilot hole – more efficient than a top-down drill because the rubble isn’t fighting gravity. It rains down beneath the advancing bore and gets hauled out a horizontal shaft at the bottom. Our next major step will be cutting the spiral stairway using a robotic stone cutting saw. In parallel, we’re also manufacturing and testing the Clock components.
The Clock team continues to do an impressive and amazing job – they are organized and ingenious. Extra special thanks to Danny Hillis and Alexander Rose who deserve big kudos for driving to this key milestone. Big thanks as well to Swaggart Brothers, Cementation, and Geomagic, all of which played a crucial role. I encourage and invite you to become a member of The Long Now Foundation, the non-profit that was founded to foster long-term thinking and has focused tremendous energy on the Clock, as well as other noteworthy projects. You can visit their website to learn more and become a member.
Many thanks for your interest in the Clock and in the long view!
Jeff Bezos
Published on Thursday, January 19th, 02012 by Austin Brown
Larry Lessig gave a rousing performance for the 100th Seminar About Long-Term Thinking. In a lawyerly fashion he laid out evidence of a new type of corruption that is disrupting the American republic, and he offered a remedy for that corruption. Lessig has a very distinctive visual style of using slides that punctuates, word for word, the clear logic of his argument.
He said the type of corruption rampant in the US Congress is not the old type of bribery, where congressional representatives had safes in their offices to hold the cash they received for voting in certain directions. That is now illegal and eliminated. This new type of corruption is more subtle, indirect and harder to outlaw. Corporations legally donate money to the election campaigns of legislators, who in turn tend to vote in favor of the interests of those corporations. Non-profits like Maplight can graph the evidence that a representative voting in favor of a particular corporate-friendly law will receive 6 or 10 or 13 times the funding than someone who opposes the law. He cited studies that showed the ROI (return on investment) of lobbying to be 1,000%. It was one of the sanest expenses for a corporation. But the distortion is not just one sided. The issue that Congress spent the most time on in 2011 — a year when US was waging two wars, dealing with a near economic depression, and revamping health care — was the bank swipe fee. Who should pay the credit card use fee — the banks or the stores? There were corporations on both sides of this minor argument, but each side was promising campaign funds, so this was the issue that got all the attention of the officials. But the real money to be made in Congress is the relative fortune to be made as a lobbyist after leaving office. The differential in wages between a staff member and a lobbyist has escalated a hundred fold in the past 40 years. Now 43% of staff go on to become lobbyists. The promise of a well-paying job working for corporate interests later is enough to warp voting now.
None of this is illegal, but Lessig argues that we have a constitutional argument for eliminating it. The Constitution talks about the republic being “dependent on the people alone.” But now it is dependent on corporate funders, and more and more JUST on corporate funders. His solution is to return the republic to being dependent on the people alone. His solution is an innovative kind of campaign finance reform. Give every voter a $50 campaign voucher. The $50 comes from the tax pool. It can be given to any candidate who accepts only money from the vouchers (and maybe a limit of an optional voluntary $100 per single voter). Thus all campaign money would come in very small amounts from The People. Lessig calculates that the total amount of money raised this public way would be 3 times the amount raised by private means in the last election cycles, and therefore more than adequate. But it would break the grip of corporate influence over what is voted up. The result would not be harmonious utopia, but the usual give-and-take compromises of politics — which the US has not seen in decades. The issues that people cared about would return to the agenda.
Lessig spent the remaining time and some of the question and answers talking about the real-politic necessary to pass this reform. A similar public financing scheme works in places like Sweden, where one elected legislator told Lessig he had never had to worry about where his funding came from. But the US has a fierce free-speech component not found elsewhere, and ironically, since spending money is viewed as a type of free speech, this complicates reform. As a free-speech advocate himself, and a constitutional lawyer, Lessig talked candidly about the difficulties of reform. He ended by saying that it would probably be a generational task. Overcoming institutional racism and sexism took more than one generation, and returning the republic to the “people alone” could take just as long, although in this case, the republic might not last that long without reform.
Published on Thursday, January 5th, 02012 by Austin Brown
There is new media available from our monthly series, the Seminars About Long-term Thinking. Stewart Brand’s summaries and audio downloads or podcasts of the talks are free to the public; Long Now members can view HD video of the Seminars and comment on them.
Published on Tuesday, December 20th, 02011 by Austin Brown
A dazzlingly incisive presenter, Lawrence Lessig specializes in identifying deep systemic problems in public process (such as copyright malfunction and Congressional dysfunction) and then showing how they can be cured. Currently he is bearing down on the corruption of Congress by the practice of private funding for public elections through campaign contributions. He writes: “The dependency of modern campaign finance is the single most important cause of the bankruptcy of Congress. Fixing this bankruptcy is the single most important reform effort that Americans face just now.” As he did with helping fix copyright problems via Creative Commons, he has a plan for reforming elections to reestablish Congressional trust and effectiveness. (Public trust in Congress is currently at 12%.)
Lessig is director of the Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics at Harvard University and author of Republic, Lost (2011) and Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace (2000 and 2006).
Published on Monday, December 12th, 02011 by Danielle Engelman
There is new media available from our monthly series, the Seminars About Long-term Thinking. Stewart Brand’s summaries and audio downloads or podcasts of the talks are free to the public; Long Now members can view HD video of the Seminars and comment on them.
Published on Friday, December 2nd, 02011 by Austin Brown
There is new media available from our monthly series, the Seminars About Long-term Thinking. Stewart Brand’s summaries and audio downloads or podcasts of the talks are free to the public; Long Now members can view HD video of the Seminars and comment on them.
Published on Thursday, December 1st, 02011 by Stewart Brand
Universal access to all knowledge, Kahle declared, will be one of humanity’s greatest achievements. We are already well on the way. “We’re building the Library of Alexandria, version 2. We can one-up the Greeks!”
Start with what the ancient library had—books. The Internet Library already has 3 million books digitized. With its Scribe Book Scanner robots—29 of them around the world—they’re churning out a thousand books a day digitized into every handy ebook format, including robot-audio for the blind and dyslexic. Even modern heavily copyrighted books are being made available for free as lending-library ebooks you can borrow from physical libraries—100,000 such books so far. (Kahle announced that every citizen of California is now eligible to borrow online from the Oakland Library’s “ePort.”)
As for music, Kahle noted that the 2-3 million records ever made are intensely litigated, so the Internet Archive offered music makers free unlimited storage of their works forever, and the music poured in. The Archive audio collection has 100,000 concerts so far (including all the Grateful Dead) and a million recordings, with three new bands every day uploading.
Moving images. The 150,000 commercial movies ever made are tightly controlled, but 2 million other films are readily available and fascinating—600,000 of them are accessible in the Archive already. In the year 2000, without asking anyone’s permission, the Internet Archive started recording 20 channels of TV all day, every day. When 9/11 happened, they were able to assemble an online archive of TV news coverage all that week from around the world (“TV comes with a point of view!”) and make it available just a month after the event on Oct. 11, 2001.
The Web itself. When the Internet Archive began in 1996, there were just 30 million web pages. Now the Wayback Machine copies every page of every website every two months and makes them time-searchable from its 6-petabyte database of 150 billion pages. It has 500,000 users a day making 6,000 queries a second.
“What is the Library of Alexandria most famous for?” Kahle asked. “For burning! It’s all gone!” To maintain digital archives, they have to be used and loved, with every byte migrated forward into new media evey five years. For backup, the whole Internet Archive is mirrored at the new Bibliotheca Alexadrina in Egypt and in Amsterdam. (“So our earthquake zone archive is backed up in the turbulent Mideast and a flood zone. I won’t sleep well until there are five or six backup sites.”)
Speaking of institutional longevity, Kahle noted during the Q & A that nonprofits demonstrably live much longer than businesses. It might be it’s because they have softer edges, he surmised, or that they’re free of the grow-or-die demands of commercial competition. Whatever the cause, they are proliferating.
– Stewart Brand
[If you like these SALT talk summaries, all 100 or so of them are collected in Kindle format for $3, available here.]
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