The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility: The Ideas Behind the World's Slowest Computer

Author: Stewart Brand List Price: $14.00 Our Price: Click to see the latest and low price ISBN: 0465007805 Publisher: Basic Books (April, 2000) Edition: Paperback Sales Rank: 43,483 Average Customer Rating: 4.38 out of 5

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Customer Reviews

I confess to being dumb. Although I know and admire the author, who has spoken at my conference, when the book came out I thought--really dumb, but I mention it because others may have made the same mistake--that it was about building a cute clock in the middle of the desert.

Wrong, wrong, wrong (I was). Now, three years late but better late than never, on the recommendation of a very dear person I have read this book in detail and I find it to be one of the most extraordinary books--easily in the top ten of the 300+ books I have reviewed on Amazon.

At it's heart, this book, which reflects the cummulative commitment of not only the author but some other brilliant avant guarde mind including Danny Hillis, Kevin Kelly (WIRED, Out of Control, the Rise of Neo-Biological Civilization), Esther Dyson, Mitch Kapor (Lotus, Electronic Frontier Foundation) and a few others, is about reframing the way people--the entire population of the Earth--think, moving them from the big now toward the Long Here, taking responsibility for acting as it every behavior will impact on the 10,000 year long timeframe.

This book is in the best traditions of our native American forebears (as well as other cultures with a long view), always promoting a feedback-decision loop that carefully considered the impact on the "seventh generation." That's 235 years or so, or more.

The author has done a superb job of drawing on the thinking of others (e.g. Freeman Dyson, Esther's father) in considering the deep deep implications for mankind of thinking in time (a title popularized, brilliantly, by Ernest May and Richard Neustadt of Harvard), while adding his own integrative and expanding ideas.

He joints Lee Kuan Yew, brilliant and decades-long grand-father of Asian prosperity and cohesiveness, in focusing on culture and the long-term importance of culture as the glue for patience and sound long-term decision-making. His focus on the key principles of longevity, maintainability, transparency, evolvability, and scalability harken back to his early days as the editor of the Whole Earth Review (and Catalog) and one comes away from this book feeling that Stewart Brand is indeed the "first pilot" of Spaceship Earth.

It is not possible and would be inappropriate to try to summarize all the brilliant insights in this work. From the ideas of others to his own, from the "Responsibility Record" to using history as a foundation for dealing with rapid change, to the ideas for a millenium library to the experienced comments on how to use scenarios to reach consensus among conflicted parties as to mutual interests in the longer-term future, this is--the word cannot be overused in this case--an extraordinary book from an extraordinary mind.

This book is essential reading for every citizen-voter-taxpayer, and ends with an idea for holding politicians accountable for the impact of their decisions on the future. First class, world class. This is the book that sets the stage for the history of the future.

The idea of 'deep' or 'geological time' is hardly new, but arguing that a 10,000 year view of history is beneficial is simply fatuous. Brand somehow manages to miss the obvious First Nations concept of stewarding land for future generations rather than owning it, and the Inuit concept of making decisions based on what's best for the seventh generation to follow. And by doing so he misses the larger lesson contained therein - that such long views are always eclipsed and subsumed by more powerful, shorter views with more immediate returns.

Brand is also hampered by recurring (and surprising) technical errors - a supposed 15-year lifespan for optical media, a four-digit date for computer dating, sufficient digital storage for all the information in the world(!), etc. His "Long Now Foundation" -- a dodge for attracting short now investors -- envisions a huge mechanical clock built into a mountain somewhere, which completely ignores the lessons of long history that he claims to revere. We still have a few 10,000 year clocks that our predecessors left us, but having lost the owner's manuals, Stonehenge and the pyramids at Cheops have become all but useless.

Documentation is everything - and documentation is ephemeral. That's why his proposal for a 10,000 year library brought guffaws - daily newspapers? Books on computer programming? How long does he think 10,000 years is? I was reminded of Rudy Rucker's "Saucer Wisdom" which imagines itself (with a good deal more humor) still popular in the year 4004 - and that's less than halfway there!!! Ray Kurzweil's "The Age of Spiritual Machines" is much more mind-boggling, and he had the good taste to look forward only100 years.

John Lennon as usual summed up everything pertinent when he said, "Life is what happens to you when you're making other plans."

These days time seems to be getting ever shorter, our subjective "now" shrinking from generations to years or less. People need to think on the longer term, for the sake of earth and civilization. Brand broods on how to accomplish this with a series of short, themed articles addressing everything from a visit to Big Ben to a commentary on how the digital age has made things more impermanent rather than less. (Want to try to run a Commodore 64 program? Well, you might almost as well forget it.) He provides a list of levels of paces, from fashion (the quickest) through commerce, infrastructure, governance, culture, and (the slowest) nature. He points out the twentieth century phenomenon of organizations and movements devoted to historical preservation, both a luxury that earlier ages would have found it hard to afford and perhaps a need to be filled in our fast-paced age.

A fascinating and thought-provoking read.

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