Do you find yourself tossing and turning at night, tortured by the stupendous challenge of addressing your culture’s pathologically short attention span by reinventing its relationship to the passage of time? Here then, at last: a cheaper, more portable alternative to a monument-scale 10,000 year clock embedded in the side of a mountain.

Projected view of New York’s skyline after constructionof Ground Zero Memorial :: image from timesonline.co.uk

Here at The Long Now we’re always interested in large-scale, ambitious architecture projects, partly because, of course, designing and building the 10,000-year Clock of the Long Now offers a few large-scale challenges of. . .   Read More

art:21, a recent PBS documentary series on contemporary art and artists, featured an episode on works dealing innovatively with time, which I saw on DVD over the weekend. Among those profiled was Paul Pfeiffer (born in Honolulu, 01966) a video artist who now lives and works in New York City.

His work entitled “Morning. . .   Read More

photo of flooded Thames by elyob

The Long Now’s Long Bets project asks us, active bettors and wider public alike, to think more deeply and carefully about the medium- to long-term future than our assumptions (and busy schedules) might otherwise allow.

Nudging our culture towards assuming greater responsibility for addressing (and creating) possible. . .   Read More

Philip Tetlock (screen shot from high-res Seminar video available to members) Philip Tetlock recently presented a Seminar About Long-Term Thinking to the effect that confident forecasters ought to be ignored. Despite his research showing the profound unreliability of such speculation, it’s rare to find even a moderately systematic evaluation of political forecasts in the popular […]

Making long-term thinking viable depends partly on rendering slow processes perceptible, compressing them onto a scale we can relate to more easily. Given that the quintessential long-now change processes (geology, deep culture etc) extend over many human lifetimes, a similar challenge is to make the passage of time more personal.

Here’s an. . .   Read More