Long Now

From the Metaverse in Snow Crash to digital currency in Cryptonomicon, Stephenson's thrilling stories offer uncanny insights into our future. [Neal Stephenson](http://www.nealstephenson.com/)'s fifth Long Now Talk featured a reading from his book [_Termination Shock_](https://www.booksmith.com/book/9780063028050) (pub. 11/16/21) and a discussion with Long Now's Executive Director and 10,000 Year Clock builder, [Alexander Rose](https://longnow.org/people/board/zander/). Neal Stephenson’s sweeping, prescient _Termination Shock_ transports readers to a near-future world, and brings together a fascinating, unexpected group of characters from different cultures and continents, whose stories collide and transform. Ranging from the Texas heartland to the Dutch royal palace in the Hague, to the snow-capped peaks of the Himalayas, the novel grapples with the real-life repercussions of planetary system changes. Epic in scope while heartbreakingly human in perspective, _Termination Shock_ sounds a clarion alarm, considers dire risks, and ponders potential adaptations coming to our near future.

**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 book, [_Until Proven Safe_](https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780374126582), 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 unprecedented and inevitable; Manaugh and Twilley helped us make sense of our new reality through a thought-provoking exploration of the meaning of freedom, governance, and mutual responsibility.

As with all Long Now Talks, David Rooney’s talk on Thursday, September 9, 02021 began with a few tones from Brian Eno’s January 07003: Bell Studies for The Clock of the Long Now, based on the original algorithm for the Clock’s ever-changing chimes designed by Danny Hillis. These rings of the Clock’s bell were an especially good fit for Rooney’s talk, though: Over the course of an hour, his “History of Civilization in Twelve Clocks” engaged directly with the inexorably ticking logic of clocks just as Eno and Hillis’ work did so musically. Drawing on the wealth of stories on clocks contained within his recently published book, About Time, Rooney cleanly sketched a global history of imperial control, popular resistance, and the spread of information, illustrated vividly using clocks both ancient and modern. Rooney — a horologist and historian of technology by trade as the curator at the Science Museum, London — focused his story on three clocks within the United Kingdom and the British Raj in India between 01890 and 01920 CE. Yet his wide-ranging talk flowed naturally out of those more constrained examples, wading back through time to the reign of Timurid astronomer-king Ulūgh Beg in 01424 CE and the rule of Roman dictator and sundial-builder Manius Valerius Maximus in 00494 BCE and forward to the contemporary moment, where we are at once surrounded by clocks large and small and less aware of their presence in the form of technology like GPS satellites, which rely on atomic clocks to accurately track their positions. While his talk at times focused on the violent reactions against the imposition of clocks on oppressed populations in British India and the Roman Empire, Rooney’s overall message was one of hope: “while clocks might oppress us, clocks can and will save us as well.” The horologist, who first engaged with Long Now as the lead caretaker of Long Now's Prototype 1 10,000-year-clock, pointed to The Clock as a key example of how clocks serve as “proxies for humans,” their ticking mechanisms giving them a certain heartbeat-like quality that speaks to their deeply embodied humanity.

One of [Long Now](https://longnow.org/)’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](https://longnow.org/continuity/) to study long-lived institutions more formally. [Alexander Rose](https://longnow.org/people/board/zander/), 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](https://reviverestore.org/)'s Ryan Phelan and Ben Novak to discuss his newest book [_Second Nature: Scenes from a World Remade_](https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780374106034), 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_](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/01/magazine/climate-change-losing-earth.html) to the film [_Dark Waters_](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9071322/) (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?_

Based on four decades in technology and media, constantly in the eye of innovation, O’Reilly is starting vital conversations about our future. Be ready for keen details on how we got here, a frank assessment of emerging challenges, and a bold call to action for the sake of the generations on the horizon. Tim O’Reilly is founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media, Inc. If you’ve heard the term “open source software” or “web 2.0” or “the Maker movement” or “government as a platform” or “the WTF economy,” he’s had a hand in framing each of those big ideas. With these and many other efforts over the years, Tim has helped the tech industry better understand itself and its influence beyond innovation for innovation's sake. His leadership and insight continue to be invaluable as he now highlights the responsibility that goes along with that influence. [He spoke in Long Now's Seminars About Long-term Thinking series in 02012](https://longnow.org/seminars/02012/sep/05/birth-global-mind/).

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_](https://www.wired.com/1997/07/longboom/). His latest project, [_The Transformation_](https://medium.reinvent.net//), 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.

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?

A special night of short talks about the long history and scientific background behind a most persistent malady. And the drinks that can help keep it at bay. Featuring returning Interval speakers James Holland Jones (Stanford), James Nestor (Deep), Kara Platoni (We Have the Technology), The Interval’s Beverage Director: Jennifer Colliau, and more.

Rick Prelinger uncovers the diverse histories of Bay Area telecommunications infrastructure: telephone, radio, television, data, image and sound. A tour of technologies, dead and flourishing, that overlay, underlay and penetrate us all.