Long Now

The first salon talk took place before The Interval was officially opened, when the back bar and much of our signature decor weren’t fully installed. It was an opportunity that couldn’t be missed: the launch of the first book by Adam Rogers, articles editor at Wired; Proof: The Science of Booze is the 10,000 year history of alcohol. And so, as William Faulkner says: 'Civilization begins with distillation.' The subject was perfect for our new Long Now bar; but the talk was even more fitting because Adam had been instrumental in helping realized our vision for The Interval. He connected Long Now with both Jennifer Colliau (our Beverage Director and the mastermind of our cocktail menu) and Lance Winters of St George Spirits (whose artful distillations fill the bottles of our "bottlekeep" ceiling). You will hear both of those stories in detail during this talk, as well as the tale of picking wild juniper on Nevada’s Mount Washington to use in the gin Lance crafted for The Interval. Adam’s presentation also includes his close encounter with the 10,000 year-old “Mother Eve” of booze and a remarkable anecdote about a Japanese chemist who nearly changed history by applying sake techniques to American whiskey in the 19th Century, in the process he filed some of the first biotech patents ever. So the launch of Proof made for the perfect premiere to our “Conversations at The Interval” lecture series. Yet another reason to thank Adam Rogers. If you’ve been to The Interval (or just watched our other videos), you can see how early it was—not only is the Otto chalkboard nowhere to be seen, the back bar has yet to be built. Jennifer led our very first bartending team that night, though she also stepped on stage to tell the audience a bit about our gin. For an organization that is all about time, this event encapsulated a remarkable moment in our history: as the lively project we call The Interval became manifest. Cheers to you, Adam! Thanks for a great talk, and everything else.

Before Andy Weir's self-published novel _The Martian_ became a _New York Times_ bestseller and a blockbuster film, it began as a series of blog posts. Those posts, and the online conversation they sparked, reflect Andy's lifelong love of space and his detailed research into how humans could survive a journey to the fourth planet in our Solar System. In October of 02015, in his talk at The Interval, Andy skipped the fiction and discussed the details of how a real world mission to colonize Mars would work. Hosted by Long Now's Peter Schwartz.

Memory technologies from papyrus to print have given humans a unique survival advantage: allowing us to accumulate knowledge. These technologies shape our perception of history, time, and personal and cultural identity. The capacity of our brains to remember lags far behind our capacity to generate information. Digital technology gives us an abundance of information, but creates a scarcity of attention that makes it hard for us to grasp what is important before it slips away. Unless we learn how to preserve memory in the digital age, we risk losing the traces of the past that are vital for building a future true to our commitment to democratic access to information.

In 1999 “Pace Layers” made its debut in the book [The Clock of Long Now](http://www.amazon.com/Clock-Long-Now-Responsibility-Computer/dp/0465007805/lono0a20) by Stewart Brand. It appeared as a deceptively simple diagram with the caption: "The order of civilization. The fast layers innovate; the slow layers stabilize. The whole combines learning with continuity." The six Pace Layer levels in descending order from the highest & fastest to the lowest & slowest are **Fashion, Commerce, Infrastructure, Governance, Culture, Nature**. Stewart’s initial point was to give insight into how a healthy society works. But fifteen years later, this idea about interacting layers that change at different speeds has been useful in ways he never expected. Prominent designers and tech company executives have cited the _Clock_ book and Pace Layers and told how it has changed their thinking. Many others have applied the idea to their work in design, management, engineering, and numerous other areas. “This is a data free document,” Stewart quipped in response to an audience question about the Pace Layers illustration. That may reveal one reason for its longevity. Proposed initially as a way to view society, it has survived as a framework. It’s not tied to “facts” which may turn out to have expiration dates. Pace Layers travels well and ports easily to other systems. "Quite a lot of people decided it was about software and systems and systems design," chuckled Stewart; he wasn't familiar with the term "full stack design" before learning that Pace Layers had been endorsed as a good metaphor for it. [Paul Saffo](https://longnow.org/people/board/paul10/) and a few others who use and teach Pace Layers spoke about what makes it a useful tool for analyzing our past, present and future. Paul, a founding Long Now board member and futurist, finds the concept invaluable for his own work, including teaching forecasting at Stanford. Here’s how Stewart introduced the idea back in 1999: > I propose six significant levels of pace and size in the working structure of a robust and adaptable civilization. [...] In a healthy society each level is allowed to operate at its own pace, safely sustained by the slower levels below and kept invigorated by the livelier levels above. Stewart has credited Freeman Dyson and Brian Eno, amongst others, for helping him form the concept. In this talk he went deeper into Pace Layers’ origins. "Like all good things this was stolen," he began, then paid tribute to architect Frank Duffy's concept of the nested “Shearing Layers” of a building. Stewart wrote about Duffy's work in his 1994 book [How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built](http://www.amazon.com/How-Buildings-Learn-Happens-Theyre/dp/0140139966). The presentation included an amazing artifact: a preliminary sketch of the Pace Layers diagram from December 1996, hand-drawn by Stewart after a talk with Brian Eno. That conversation helped finalize the idea: after Eno’s input he changed the top layer’s name to “Fashion” from “Art” and the layer labeled “Government” became “Governance.” If there are only six words, they have to be the right words. Relationships between layers are key to the health of the system. More specifically, as both Stewart and Paul pointed out, conflicts caused by layers moving at different speeds actually keep things balanced and resilient. Paul called this “constructive turbulence.” Innovation challenges orthodoxy. Wisdom repels destabilizing change, but also takes useful novelty onboard. Stewart, as much as anyone, has been an intellectual participant across some of our society’s most remarkable decades. As an agitator and as a bulwark. He has been the firebrand and now the grey beard. Pace Layers has proven itself low, slow, and here to stay. It’s fitting that the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog has given us access to a tool that’s so simple and enduringly useful.

Author Neal Stephenson has had a long though informal connection with Long Now. Before the foundation was formed, soon after Danny Hillis began to consider designing a 10,000 year Clock, he asked a circle of friends to give input on the idea. Neal drew up his own imaginative Clock Designs and sent them along. Years later those ideas and sketches stuck with him and became the foundation for his book Anathem. He launched that book as a Long Now event in 02008. And more recently he asked Stewart Brand for some input about his 02015 book SEVENEVES. It is not a spoiler to say that Earth's moon explodes in SEVENEVES, because that happens in the very first sentence. Stephenson starts his intro by explaining that this novel is a "Space Ark" book, which it was his goal to write. But crafting a narrative where humans have time to build giant crafts to lift them off their planet is not trivial. It takes a particular kind of slowing ticking disaster, as he explains. In Neal's commentary we are treated to a quote of Bruce Sterling's definition of the "thriller" genre (which I won't spoil); Neal's own neo-acronym for a flavor fast-breaking Internet outrage, and an in-depth anecdote of German medical history--a footnote to his SEVENEVES research which didn't really figure in the book The lively discussion with Stewart and the audience brought out questions about Stephenson's work habits, back catalog, and his next book (of which he had already written hundreds of pages though he was just starting his SEVENEVES book tour). He is as precise and detailed-driven in these conversations as he is on the page; and likewise his sense of humor also shines through. This event took place in May 02015, days before the 1-year anniversary of the first event at The Interval (which was [Adam Rogers' talk](http://theinterval.org/salon-talks/02014/may/27/proof-science-booze)). It was Stephenson's first visit to Long Now's newly renovated bar/cafe and headquarters. In addition to being a friend of the organization and a vital contemplator of our future (near and far), Neal is one of just over 1,000 people who donated to building campaign for The Interval. It was the perfect way to mark one year, and our 30th event, for him to share his latest work in the space his support helped us build.

## Why cities live forever **West focussed on cities** in his discussion of the newly discovered exponential scaling laws that govern everything alive. “We live,” he said, “in an exponentially expanding socio-economic universe.” Global urbanization has reached the point that there are a million new people arriving in cities every week, and that rate is expected to continue to midcentury. What is the attraction? One reason for constant urban growth is that the bigger the city, the more efficient it is, because of economies of scale. With each doubling of a city’s size, the numbers of gas stations and power lines and water lines, etc. increase at a rate a little less than double. In other words, with every size increase there is a 15% improvement in energy efficiency. “That‘s why New York is the greenest city in America,” West said. The same dynamics of networks explain how what is called “power-law scaling“ works in biology. The bigger the animal, the slower and more efficient its metabolism is, at a rate lower than 1-to-1 (“sublinear” in West’s terminology). This leads to some remarkable constants. Shrews weigh 2 grams, and in their 14-month life their heart beats a billion times. Blue whales weigh 200 million grams, and in their 100-year life, their heart beats the same billion times. Ditto for all mammals (except humans, who have achieved a lifetime average of 2 billion heartbeats, presumably for cultural reasons.) In _physical_ terms, cities are like organisms, enjoying sublinear economies of scale with each increase in size. But when you look at cities in terms of their _social-economic_ networks, an astonishing finding emerges. Once again there is power-law scaling if you count patents, wages, tax receipts, crimes, restaurants, even the pace of walking, but _instead of slowing down with increasing size, cities speed up with increasing size_. Their increase is greater that 1:1. It is superlinear. “Bigger cities are better,” said West. Each time they increase in size, they are 15% more innovative socio-economically at the same time they are 15% more efficient in terms of energy and materials. Furthermore, they apparently live forever. They create most of civilization’s problems, but they are capable of solving problems even faster than they create them. However, when you compare companies with cities, companies have similar metabolic efficiencies of scale as they grow, but their innovation rate, instead of increasing with size, _slows down_ as they get ever bigger. And they are mortal. The average lifespan of a publicly traded companies is 10 years. They can grow prodigiously, but their net income, sales, profits, and assets can’t quite keep up—they are sublinear. Successful new companies start off like cities, full of innovation, but over time the nature of corporate growth leads them to focus ever more solely on exploiting their success, and eventually they taper off and die like animals. The city feeds on their corpses and creates new companies.

## Death’s Honesty **In one of Long Now’s most moving talks** , Ostaseski began: “I’m not romantic about dying. This is the hardest work you will ever do. It is tough. It’s sad and it’s messy and it’s cruel and it’s beautiful sometimes and mysterious, but above all that, it’s normal. It’s a boat we’re all in. It’s inevitable and intimate.“ He said that people think it will be unbearable, but they find they have the resources to deal with it, and “they regularly—not always--develop insights into their lives in the time of dying that make them emerge as a much larger, more expansive, more real person than the small, separate self they’d taken themselves to be.” That is one message that dying gives to living. “Reflection on death,” he said, “causes us to be more responsible—in our relationships, with ourselves, with the planet, with our future.” Ostaseski summarized the insights he’s learned from the dying as “five invitations to be present.” 1) Don’t wait. 2) Welcome everything, push away nothing. 3) Bring your whole self to the experience. 4) Find a place of rest in the middle of things. 5) Cultivate don’t-know mind. For 2), Ostaseski quoted James Baldwin: “Not everything that can be faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed that is not faced.” An example of 4): a woman who was panicking at her difficulty breathing was encouraged to try resting in the moment _between_ breaths, and there she found the handle on her panic and relaxed into the situation. Ostaseski ended with a story. One day at Zen Hospice in San Francisco he was in the kitchen reading a book called _Japanese Death Poems_. A tough old lady from the streets named Sono, who was there to die, asked him about the book, and he explained the tradition of Japanese monks to write on the day of their death a poem expressing the essential truth discovered in their life. He read her a few. Sono said she’d like to write hers, and did, and asked that it be pinned to her bedclothes when she died and cremated with her. She wrote: > Don’t just stand there with your hair turning gray, > soon enough the seas will sink your little island. > So while there is still the illusion of time, > set out for another shore. > No sense packing a bag. > You won’t be able to lift it into your boat. > Give away all your collections. > Take only new seeds and an old stick. > Send out some prayers on the wind before you sail. > Don’t be afraid. > Someone knows you’re coming. > An extra fish has been salted. > \--Mona (Sono) Santacroce (1928 - 1995)

## Doing Good Better [](https://media.longnow.org/files/2/lomborghaiti.jpg) **Lomborg opened with a photo from Haiti** , showing a young girl dressed for school wading through the muck and garbage of a slum, with pigs in the muck right behind her. Lomborg was just back from working with the government of Haiti and the Canadian Development Agency to prioritize aid projects there. He sympathized that when people see that photo they instantly want to donate to urban sanitation in Haiti, but that is not the most effective good that can be done for the girl. There is a limited amount of aid money that can be spent in Haiti, and in the world. (Total world aid is $200 billion a year.) It helps to look at what are the greatest multiples of good you can get for each dollar spent—the benefit-cost ratio (BCR). For urban sanitation, when you do the math on the costs of building and maintaining pit latrines and compare it with the benefits (measured in dollars) of deaths and diseases avoided, of productivity and education gains, etc., for each dollar spent, you get only about 77 cents of benefit. How does that benefit-cost ratio (BCR) of less than 1 compare with other forms of aid such as, say, cleaner cook stoves? Indoor air pollution from traditional cooking kills 4.3 million people a year in the developing world. According to Lomborg and his Copenhagen Consensus colleagues, when you substitute cleaner fuel, you get a BCR of 15—each dollar spent yields $15 of benefit, with drastically fewer deaths, and a far better home to grow up in. Not all problems have such direct solutions though. Poverty is hard to fix directly, and so is corrupt government, but working in areas that do have known solutions can affect them indirectly. Better education helps everything, and the form of education that has far the highest yield is tripling preschool in Africa (BCR = 33!). But what helps education more than anything is making sure that there’s good nutrition for infants up to two years old, which gives them better brains, making them better and happier students (BCR = 45), and follow-up research shows that they have far better lives. The worst infectious disease that can be treated easily is tuberculosis, which kills 1.5 million people a year. Good treatment gives a huge BCR of 43. From 1995 to 2010, 37 million lives were saved with ever-improving TB treatment. And so it goes across the spectrum of aid. Lomborg noted that the way the $200 billion of annual aid is currently spent gives a BCR of about 7. That’s $1.4 trillion of good. But if spent for highest effectiveness, it could give a BCR of 32--- $6.4 trillion of good, an extra $5 trillion of benefit each year. Returning to the young girl in Haiti, Lomborg said that prioritizing aid intelligently would focus on helping provide her with: better nutrition; better school; better health; safer births; higher income; less violence in her society; less air pollution in her home; more energy; and more rights as a person. The photo evokes none of those things. Her life would.

## Toward agile government Pahlka quoted: “Efficiency in government is a matter of social justice.” (Mayor John Norquist) It is at the often maddening interface with government that the inefficiency and injustice play out. Two examples (both now fixed)… At the Veterans Affairs website, you needed to fill out the application for health benefits, but the file wouldn’t even open unless you had a particular version of Internet Explorer and a particular version of Adobe Reader. Nothing else worked. In California, the online application for food stamps is 50 screens long and takes 50 minutes to complete. How did such grotesquely bad software design become the norm? Pahlka points to laws such as the “comically misnamed” Paperwork Reduction Act of 01980, which requires six months to get any public form approved, and the 775-page Federal Acquisition Regulation book, which requires that all software be vastly over-specified in advance. “That’s not how good software is built!” Pahlka said. “Good software is user-centered, iterative, and data driven.” You build small at first, try it on users, observe what doesn’t work, fix it, build afresh, try it again, and so on persistently until you’ve got something that really works—and is easy to keep updating as needed. Pahlka’s organization, Code for America, did that with the 50-minute California food stamp application and pared the whole process down to 8 minutes. These are not small matters. 19% of the US gross national product is spent on social programs—social security, medicare, food assistance, housing assistance, unemployment, etc. Frustration with those systems makes people want to just blow the whole thing up. Pahlka quotes Tom Steinberg (mySociety founder): “You can no longer run a country properly if the elites don’t understand technology in the same way they grasp economics or ideology or propaganda.” Government drastically needs more tech talent, Pahlka urged, and the user-centered iterative approach could have a broader effect: “It's not so much that we need new laws to govern technology,” she said. “It's that we need better tech practices that teaches how to make better laws. The status quo isn’t worth fighting for. Fight for something better, something we haven’t seen yet, something you have to invent.” She concluded: “Decisions are made by those who show up.”

## Inventing toward delight Humanity has been inventing toward delight for a long time. Johnson began with a slide of shell beads found in Morocco that indicate human interest in personal adornment going back 80,000 years. He showed 50,000-year-old bone flutes found in modern Slovenia that were tuned to musical intervals we would still recognize. Beads and flutes had nothing to do with survival. They were art, conforming to Brian Eno’s definition: “Art is everything you don’t have to do.” It looks frivolous, but Johnson proposed that the pursuit of delight is one of the prime movers of history—of globalization, innovation, and democratization. Consider spices, a seemingly trivial ornament to food. In the Babylon of 1700 BCE—3,700 years ago—there were cloves that came all the way from Indonesia, 5,000 miles away. Importing eastern spices become so essential that eventually the trade routes defined the map of Islam. Another story from Islamic history: when Baghdad was at its height as one of the world’s most cultured cities around 800 CE, its “House of Wisdom” produced a remarkable text titled “The Book of Ingenious Devices.” In it were beautiful schematic drawings of machines years ahead of anything in Europe—clocks, hydraulic instruments, even a water-powered organ with swappable pin-cylinders that was effectively programmable. Everything in the book was neither tool nor weapon: _they were all toys_. Consider what happened when cotton arrived in London from India in the late 1600s. Besides being more comfortable than itchy British wool, cotton fabric (called calico) could easily be dyed and patterned, and the democratization of fashion took off, along with a massive global trade in cotton and cotton goods. Soon there was an annual new look to keep up with. And steam-powered looms drove the Industrial Revolution, including the original invention of programmable machinery for Jacquard looms. Consider the role of public spaces designed for leisure—taverns, coffee shops, parks. Political movements from the American Revolution (Boston’s Green Dragon Tavern) to Gay Rights (Black Cat Tavern in Los Angeles) were fomented in bars. Whole genres of business and finance came out of the coffee shops of London. And once “Nature” was invented by Romantics in the late 1800s, nature-like parks in cities brought delight to urban life, and wilderness became something to protect. Play invites us to invent freely.