Long Now: Seminars About Long-term Thinking

Art is humanity's long-term unconscious memory.  Artists work by creative misuse, and thanks to the Internet there have never been so many tools for so many artists (and multitudes who don't know they're artists) to creatively misuse.  Take a cruise through how strange and meaningful it is getting with the authors of At the Edge of Art .

Principles are fundamental and moral, and they abide. Professor Kanter from the Harvard Business School, author of renowned leadership and strategy books such as The Change Masters and When Giants Learn to Dance, has a new book titled America the Principled. In it and in this talk, she "offers a positive agenda for the nation, focussed on innovation and education, a new workplace social contract, values-based corporate conduct, competent government, positive international relations through citizen diplomacy and business networks, and national and community service."

Enriquez has a world-class collection of historic maps made at the very point of discovery. He will deploy them for the first time in one of his dazzling presentations, to examine how we image and imagine what we are exploring, and thus image and imagine exploration itself. Enriquez is author of As the Future Catches You and The United States of America, and CEO and Chair of Biotechonomy, a life sciences research and investment firm.

The best introduction to the current realities and benefits of nuclear power is Gwyneth Cravens' forthcoming book Power to Save the World: The Truth About Nuclear Energy. A science journalist and novelist, and long an activist against nuclear, Cravens had her assumptions shaken through friendship with the leading expert on nuclear risk assessment at Sandia National Laboratories, D. Richard Anderson, know as "Rip." Both are professional skeptics. They took their skepticism on the road to travel the uranium atom's path in America from mine to refinery to reactor to short-term and long-term storage, with a side trip to the coal alternative. It is a revelatory journey.

Frank Fukuyama's 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man had profound and lasting impact with its declaration that science and technology, the growing global economy, and liberal democracy are leading history in a quite different direction than Marx and Hegel imagined. In this revisit to those themes, Fukuyama examines conflict with and within Islam, the need for a diffuse form of global governance to deal with problems like climate change, and the deeper implications of biotechnology.

"I now believe there are over one million organizations working toward ecological sustainability and social justice. This is the largest social movement in all of history, no one knows its scope, and how it functions is more mysterious than what meets the eye. What binds it together is ideas, not ideologies. The promise of this unnamed movement is to offer solutions to what appear to be insoluble dilemmas: poverty, global climate change, terrorism, ecological degradation, polarization of income, loss of culture." Paul Hawken is the author of Blessed Unrest and co-author of Natural Capitalism.

Nobody discovers or imparts an insight with the dexterity of Steven Johnson, author of Emergence, Everything Bad Is Good For You, and The Ghost Map. In this talk he examines how humanity is transformed by its new scaling capability--- our ability now to examine and relate events at the nanometer and nanosecond scale and then zoom right out to a cosmic scale and time frame. With tools like Google Earth and Will Wright's "Spore" game, we all are learning to zoom with comfort. How does that change us?

Acclaimed nature photographer Lanting has created the most graphic timeline ever, at its best as a live performance. This is the "long now" in glowing imagery.

How vulnerable are we to climate change? What does it do to us, exactly? Human experience over the last 15,000 years shows that even slight climate shifts have been one of the major shapers of history and pre-history, though that is overlooked in most history books and in most of the current public discourse about climate change. An experienced television presenter, anthropologist Brian Fagan is the author of The Long Summer: How Climate Changed Civilization.

Technology acceleration is like what happens approaching the singularity in the center of a black hole--- everything is transformed utterly and unpredictably. That metaphor was invented by science fiction writer Vernor Vinge in 1980s and has entered standard usage as a way of thinking about the near future. In this talk Vinge challenges his own idea, investigating scenarios of "a human-scaled world with long time horizons," and how that might play out over ten or twenty thousand years.

Why are so many experts so wrong, yet people keep listening to them? Who really is worth listening to about the future? The author of Expert Political Judgement builds on Isaah Berlin's characterization of judgment modes into Hedgehogs (who know one big thing) and Foxes (who know many things). Hedgehogs don't notice and don't care when they're wrong; that's why they're so compelling. Foxes learn.

Philip Rosedale is the founder of a burgeoning Web phenomenon, the massive multi-player substitute reality called "Second Life." When the scheduled speaker for this month, Francis Fukuyama, was suddenly sidelined by a motorcycle injury, Rosedale sprinted from the bench to take his place at the podium. He'll be improvising; he has a scintillating world to improvise with.

New money, new ideas, whole new kinds of programs, and growing global impact characterize the transformations going on in philanthropy these days. Katherine Fulton, president of the Monitor Institute, is behind the scenes in all of it. She is joined on the stage by a fifth-generation Rockefeller and the head of newest philanthropic enterprise, Google.org.

This graphic extravaganza from mathematical physicist John Baez shows not only humanity's nested time dimensions but how we expand our time perspective to understand and solve crises. Baez's famed online column, "This Week's Finds in Mathematical Physics," which began in 1993, was an influential pioneer of the blog genre.

Orville Schell is author of nine books about China and dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley. The question facing China now is whether in practice it can live up to its sense of itself as the society with the longest and deepest continuity on earth. In a time of fabulous short-term gains, can it step up to long-term responsibility?

John Rendon, head of The Rendon Group, is a senior communications consultant to the White House and Department of Defense. His subject in this talk is how to replace tactical, reactive response to terror with long-term strategic initiative.

Will Wright, creator of the video games "Sim City," "The Sims," and the forthcoming "Spore," will speak on playing with time.

A new economic principle is the "the long tail," discovered and named by the editor of Wired magazine, Chris Anderson. The former dominance of best-sellers has been augmented by the new dominance of innumerable tiny-sellers, thanks to the Internet. Investor and publisher Will Hearst notes that there is a time dimension as well to the long tail phenomenon, still being discovered.

Vision is one of the most powerful forms of long-term thinking. Jimmy Wales, founder and president of the all-embracing online encyclopedia Wikipedia, examines how vision drives and defines that project and its strategy--- and how it fits into the even larger world and prospects of "free culture."