Long Now: Seminars About Long-term Thinking

Forest Ecologist Suzanne Simard reveals that trees are part of a complex, interdependent circle of life; that forests are social, cooperative creatures connected through underground mycorrhizal networks by which trees communicate their vitality and vulnerabilities, and share and exchange resources and support. Simard's extraordinary research and tenacious efforts to raise awareness on the interconnectedness of forest systems, both above and below ground, has revolutionized our understanding of forest ecology. This increasing knowledge is driving a call for more sustainable practices in forestry and land management, ones that develop strategies based on the forest as a whole entity, not on trees as isolated individuals.

Interdisciplinary artist Alicia Eggert and Long Now's Executive Director Alexander Rose will be in conversation for this special evening discussion of time, art and long-term thinking. Eggert's sign work uses sculpture to bring time to the foreground, embodying its passage through carefully chosen quotes. These words, rendered in neon and steel, cycle rhythmically through subtle text changes designed to encourage a heightened awareness of time and place in the viewer. In the sculpture “This Present Moment,” she uses an epigram of Stewart Brand’s from his book The Clock of The Long Now, which she first encountered while doing research in 02008. For more in-depth reading, see Long Now Managing Editor Ahmed Kabil's 02021 interview with Alicia Eggert and Long Now Fellow Jonathon Keats' article on Eggert's work in Forbes. Alicia Eggert's work gives material form to language and time, powerful but invisible forces that shape our perception of reality. Her creative practice is motivated by an existential pursuit

Jonathan Haidt sees that we have entered a social-psychological phase change that was initiated in 02009 when social media platforms introduced several fateful innovations that changed the course of our society and disintegrated our consensus on reality. In this conversation with Long Now co-founders Stewart Brand and Kevin Kelly, Haidt presses on questions of technological optimism, morality vs ethics, teen mental health, possible platform tweaks that could reduce the damage and just how long this next cycle of history could last. Prompted by Haidt's piece on Why The Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid, this discussion offers a behind the scenes look at the thinking going into Haidt's next book; release slated for the fall of 02023.

How do we address society's most pressing issues and create opportunity for those who need it most? Can we create a blueprint for a just and inclusive economy that includes a safety net that centers dignity, quality jobs that empower workers, housing as a human right, wealth creating opportunities for all, and much more? Michael Tubbs is developing that blueprint by creating and implementing policies that address these inequalities, and projects like the Universal Basic Income pilot in the city of Stockton. Our Q&A; Host will be Michael McAfee, president of PolicyLink, a national institute that advances racial and economic equity. Michael Tubbs is the Founder of End Poverty in California (EPIC); the Founder of Mayors for a Guaranteed Income; and the Special Advisor to California Governor Gavin Newsom for Economic Mobility. In 02016, he was elected Mayor of Stockton at 26, the city’s first African-American Mayor, and the youngest Mayor of any major city in American history. Tubbs piloted the first mayor-led

Attend the Long Now Talks in-person or via our livestream Watch & share these talks on YouTube and Long Now Personal goals need a long-term strategy too. Dorie Clark offers concrete practices to sharpen strategic thinking and incorporate a long-term perspective within a personal time scale. By reorienting ourselves to focus on the big picture, and using the power of small but persistent changes over time, Clark shows how long-term thinking can be applied to reshape our own futures. Clark's new book The Long Game: How to Be a Long-Term Thinker in a Short-Term World will be for sale at the in-person talk. Dorie Clark is a frequent contributor to the Harvard Business Review, and consults and speaks for clients such as Google, Yale University, and the World Bank. Clark teaches executive education for Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business and Columbia Business School, and offers continuing professional education through her newsletter, courses, writing and appearances. Clark is author of The Long Game,

Attend the Long Now Talks in-person or via our livestream Watch & share this talk on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Long Now Long Now continues our dialogue with the acclaimed writer Kim Stanley Robinson around COP26 and his most recent book The Ministry for the Future. Clean energy advocate & author Ramez Naam will join Robinson on stage after the talk for a further discussion. Tackling topics from carbon quantitative easing, to political action, to planetary-level engineering, Robinson describes our current situation as "all-hands-on-deck" where every possible mitigation strategy should be tried. You can find our other talks with Kim Stanley Robinson on our YouTube channel. Kim Stanley Robinson is an American novelist, widely recognized as one of the foremost living writers of science fiction and increasingly, climate fiction. His work has been described as humanist or literary science fiction and his use of scientific accuracy and non-fiction descriptions places him in the hard sci-fi genre. Robinso

Attend the Long Now Talks in-person or via our livestream Watch & share these talks on YouTube and Long Now Join us for an illuminating evening with journalist John Markoff in conversation with Long Now's Co-founder Stewart Brand and Executive Director Alexander Rose around Markoff's new biography of Brand. Journalist John Markoff writes about technology, society and the key figures who shaped Silicon Valley and the personal computer revolution. Along the way, his stories and reporting intersected with Stewart Brand's paths numerous times and in surprising ways. And now Markoff has distilled Brand's formative rise from the Merry Pranksters and the Whole Earth Catalog, to the marriage of environmental consciousness and hacker capitalism into his newest book, Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand. The book will be available to purchase at the in-person talk, and sales will benefit BookShop West Portal. John Markoff writes for the New York Times, has covered Silicon Valley since 01977, wrote the fir

As a society, how do we address the "wicked hard problem" of vaccine acceptance? How can public health institutions reach those who are hesitant when even robust fact-based campaigns don't seem to work? Infectious diseases are one of the long-standing challenges for humanity; historical plagues and flare ups of disease have transformed societies, redrawn boundaries across the globe and instigated mass migrations. Successive civilizations have grappled with attempts to control contagion and tried to protect their populations. With the advent of vaccines in the late 1700's it seemed humanity had finally found the way out of this potentially existential threat. But despite humans' deeply embedded fear of infectious disease, issues of vaccine acceptance arose from the start. Through decades of public health campaigns in multiple countries, a persistent thread can be seen of reluctance to adopt vaccines, despite extensive educational campaigns or even coercive tactics to get populations fully vaccinated. Pre

What is time? What is humankind’s role in the universe? What is the meaning of life? For much of human history, these questions have been the province of religion and philosophy. What answers can science provide? In this talk, Sean Carroll will share what physicists know, and don’t yet know, about the nature of time. He’ll argue that while the universe might not have purpose, we can create meaning and purpose through how we approach reality, and how we live our lives. Sean Carroll is a Research Professor of theoretical physics at the California Institute of Technology, and an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. His research has focused on fundamental physics and cosmology, especially issues of dark matter, dark energy, spacetime symmetries, and the origin of the universe. Recently, Carroll has worked on the foundations of quantum mechanics, the emergence of spacetime, and the evolution of entropy and complexity. Carroll is the author of Something Deeply Hidden, The Big Picture, The Particle at

Long Now Talks are in-person or via our livestream; get tickets for the in-person talk in San Francisco or RSVP for the free livestream. Watch & share this talk on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Long Now Live. Join us for an evening with Neal Stephenson reading from his newest book Termination Shock (pub. 11/16/21) and a discussion with Long Now's Executive Director and 10,000 Year Clock builder, Alexander Rose. Tickets are bundled with a signed copy of the new book. Long Now Members purchase the book but get their usual complimentary tickets for the in-person event. You can request a short personalization during checkout; but note these requests are subject to time & availability of the author during presigning. Copies of Termination Shock can also be purchased from The Booksmith; curbside pickup or $5 domestic shipping (free for orders $50 or more). Neal Stephenson’s sweeping, prescient new novel transports readers to a near-future world, and brings together a fascinating, unexpected group of character

Geoff Manaugh and Nicola Twilley track the history and future of quarantine around the globe, chasing the story of emergency isolation through time and space—from the crumbling lazarettos of the Mediterranean, built to contain the Black Death, to an experimental Ebola unit in London, and from the hallways of the CDC to closed-door simulations where pharmaceutical execs and epidemiologists prepare for the outbreak of a novel coronavirus. But the story of quarantine ranges far beyond the history of medical isolation. In their new book, Until Proven Safe, the authors tour a nuclear-waste isolation facility beneath the New Mexican desert, see plants stricken with a disease that threatens the world’s wheat supply, and meet NASA’s Planetary Protection Officer, tasked with saving Earth from extraterrestrial infections. They also introduce us to the corporate tech giants hoping to revolutionize quarantine through surveillance and algorithmic prediction. We live in a disorienting historical moment that can feel both

How has time been imagined, politicized, and weaponized over the centuries—and how it might bring peace? Horologist David Rooney tells the hidden story of timekeeping and how it continues to shape our modern world. From medieval water clocks to monumental sundials, and from coastal time signals to satellites in earth's orbit, Rooney takes us on a global journey that showcases the ingenuity and craftsmanship humans have used to track and measure time. His in-depth research illustrates the very real effects clocks and timekeeping have on everything from navigation, to capitalism, to politics, to our very identity. An expert storyteller, Rooney brings pivotal moments from the past vividly to life and shows us how a history of clocks is a history of civilization. David Rooney, is a historian of technology and expert on clocks and timekeeping practices. As a curator at the Science Museum, London, Rooney was the lead caretaker of Long Now's Prototype 1 of The 10,000 Year Clock which is on display there in the Ma

One of Long Now’s founding premises is that humanity’s most significant challenges require long-term solutions, including institutions that caretake and guide the knowledge and commitment needed to work over long time scales. However, there are a limited number of organizations that have managed to stay stable over many centuries, and in some cases, over a millennium. Long Now has been informally tracking these organizations for years, and in 02019 formed The Organizational Continuity Project to study long-lived institutions more formally. Alexander Rose, Long Now's Executive Director, discusses how The Organizational Continuity Project hopes to discover the lessons behind these long-lived organizations and build a discipline of shareable knowledge that will help contemporary institutions, companies, and governments develop into robust, long-lasting structures. In turn, we hope these institutions will be better equipped to address civilizational-scale problems with multi-generational thinking.

Reporter and writer Nathaniel Rich delves deep into conversation with Revive & Restore's Ryan Phelan and Ben Novak to discuss his newest book Second Nature: Scenes from a World Remade,which attempts to come to terms with the massive changes that are underway on our planet, and how humans can better understand our role to caretake, conserve and thoughtfully manage our relationship with nature for the long term. From Losing Earth to the film Dark Waters (adapted from his writing), Nathaniel Rich’s stories have come to define the way we think of contemporary ecological narrative. In Second Nature, he asks what it means to live in an era of terrible responsibility. The question is no longer, How do we return to the world that we’ve lost? It is, What world do we want to create in its place?

A compelling case can be made that we are in the early stages of another tech and economic boom in the next 30 years that will help solve our era’s biggest challenges like climate change, and lead to a societal transformation that will be understood as civilizational change by the year 02100. Peter Leyden has built the case for this extremely positive yet plausible scenario of the period from 02020 to 02050 as a sequel to the Wired cover story and book he co-authored with Long Now cofounder Peter Schwartz 25 years ago called The Long Boom: The Future History of the World 1980 to 2020. His latest project, The Transformation, is an optimistic analysis on what lies ahead, based on deep interviews with 25 world-class experts looking at new technologies and long-term trends that are largely positive, and could come together in surprisingly synergistic ways.

Tune in at 5:00pm PT on 1/26/21 to watch the public live stream of this talk on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter or Long Now Live. Jason Tester asks us to see the powerful potential of "queering the future" - how looking at the future through a lens of difference and openness can reveal unexpected solutions to wicked problems, and new angles on innovation. Might a queer perspective hold some of the keys to our seemingly intractable issues? Tester brings his research in strategic foresight, speculative design work, and understanding of the activism and resiliency of LGBTQ communities together as he looks toward the future. Can we learn new ways of thinking, and thriving, from the creative approaches and adaptive strategies that have emerged from these historically marginalized groups?

Tune in at 5:00pm PT on 12/8/20 to watch the public live stream of this talk on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter or Long Now Live. Drawing on thousands of years of medical texts and recent cutting-edge studies in pulmonology, psychology, biochemistry, and human physiology, journalist James Nestor questions the conventional wisdom of what we thought we knew about our most basic biological function, breathing. Nestor tracks down men and women exploring the science behind ancient breathing practices like Pranayama, Sudarshan Kriya, and Tummo and teams up with pulmonary specialists to scientifically test long-held beliefs about how we breathe. His inquiry leads to the understanding that breathing is in many ways as important as what we eat, how much we exercise, or whatever genes we’ve inherited.

Tune in at 5:00pm PT on 11/17/20 to watch the public live stream of this talk on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter or Long Now Live. Nadia Eghbal is particularly interested in infrastructure, governance, and the economics of the internet - and how the dynamics of these subjects play out in software, online communities and generally living life online. Eghbal, who interviewed hundreds of developers while working to improve their experience at GitHub, argues that modern open source offers us a model through which to understand the challenges faced by online creators. Her new book, Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software, is about open source developers and what they tell us about the evolution of our online social spaces. Eghbal sees open source code as a form of public infrastructure that requires maintenance, and that offers us a model through which to understand the challenges faced by online creators on all platforms.

Tune in at 11:00am PT on 10/28/20 to watch & share the live stream of this talk on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Long Now Live. Human beings have an astonishing evolutionary gift: agile imaginations that can shift in an instant from thinking on a scale of seconds to a scale of years or even centuries. The need to draw on our capacity to think long-term has never been more urgent, whether in areas such as public health care, to deal with technological risks, or to confront the threats of an ecological crisis. What can we do to overcome the tyranny of the now? The drivers of short-termism threaten to drag us over the edge of civilizational breakdown, while ways to think long-term are drawing us towards a culture of longer time horizons and responsibility for the future of humankind. Creating a cognitive toolkit for challenging our obsession with the here and now offers conceptual scaffolding for answering one of the most important questions of our time: How can we be good ancestors? ---Roman Krznaric Roma

Tune in at 5:00pm PT on 9/15/20 to watch the public live stream of this talk on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter or Long Now Live. Responding to climate change by building hard infrastructures and favoring high-tech homogenous design, we are ignoring millennia-old knowledge of how to live in symbiosis with nature. Without implementing soft systems that use biodiversity as a building block, designs remain inherently unsustainable. There is a cumulative body of multigenerational knowledge, practices, and beliefs designed to sustainably work with complex ecosystems. Watson's work reconnects with this sophisticated global body of knowledge. Julia Watson teaches Urban Design at Harvard and Columbia University and is author of Lo-TEK. Design by Radical Indigenism (02019). Her work focuses on experiential, landscape, and urban design, with an ethos towards global ecological change.