The future of privacy begins with the current state of surveillance. The 21st century practices of US intelligence agencies push the technological, legal and political limits of lawful surveillance. Jennifer Granick is a civil liberties and privacy law expert with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) who is the perfect guide to how the system works and the technological and political means we have to defend our privacy. Jennifer Granick fights for civil liberties in an age of massive surveillance and powerful digital technology. As surveillance and cybersecurity counsel with the ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project, she litigates, speaks, and writes about privacy, security, technology, and constitutional rights. She is the former Executive Director of Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society and also former Civil Liberties Director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Her book American Spies: Modern Surveillance, Why You Should Care, and What To Do About It won the 02016 Palmer Civil Liberties Prize for scholarship exploring the tension between civil liberties and national security in contemporary American society. An experienced litigator and criminal defense attorney, she has taught subjects like surveillance law, cybersecurity, and encryption policy at Stanford Law School.

Clandestine influence campaigns are rampant on social media. Whether pushing Russian agitprop or lies about vaccines, they can impact policy and make us question what is true. A technologist, Wall Street veteran, and citizen advisor to Congress, DiResta will tell us how bad it is and some things we can do. Renée DiResta studies narrative manipulation as the Director of Research at New Knowledge. She is a Mozilla Foundation fellow on Media, Misinformation and Trust, and is affiliated with the Berkman-Klein Center at Harvard and the Data Science Institute at Columbia University. Renee is a WIRED Ideas contributor, writing about discourse and the internet. In past lives she has been on the founding team of supply chain logistics startup Haven, a venture capitalist at OATV, and a trader at Jane Street.

Burning Man co-founder Michael Mikel (aka Danger Ranger), who serves as Director of Advanced Social Systems for the Burning Man Project will discuss the thirty-year history of the event. Outlining the five eras of Burning Man, he will 
explain how over time the event and organization
 have evolved and been molded by external and internal forces.

Is it possible to preserve and read memories after someone has died? Robert McIntyre thinks it is, and that the technology is closer than most people realize. His company Nectome is working on documenting the physical properties of memory formation, and studying ways to preserve those physical properties after death. McIntyre has already won the Brain Preservation Institutes' "Small Mammal" & "Large Mammal" prizes for preserving a full brain down to the synaptic level, and is now taking the next steps in figuring out how to decode those synapses. These are early experiments, but this is the type of work that will be required if we are someday able to preserve a mind and memories past biological death. Robert McIntyre is a former AI researcher at MIT, where he worked with Marvin Minsky, Patrick Winston, and Gerald Sussman studying the role of embodiment in AI. He left MIT in 02015 to compete for the Brain Preservation Prizes, and is currently CEO of Nectome, a company he founded to further develop brain preservation technology.

The future is a kind of history that hasn’t happened yet. The past is a kind of future that has already happened. The present moment vanishes before it can be described. Language, a human invention, lacks the power to fully adhere to reality. We live in a very short now and here, since the flow of events in spacetime is mostly closed to human comprehension. But we have to say something about the future, since we have to live there. So what can we say? Being “futuristic” is a problem in metaphysics; it’s about getting language to adhere to an unknowable reality. But the futuristic quickly becomes old-fashioned, so how can the news stay news? Bruce Sterling is a futurist, journalist, science-fiction author, and culture critic. He is the author of more than 20 books including ground-breaking science ficiton and non-fiction about hackers, design and the future. He was the editor in 01986 of Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology (1986) which brought the cyberpunk science fiction sub-genre to a much wider audience. He previous spoke for Long Now about "The Singularity: Your Future as a Black Hole" in 02004. His Beyond the Beyond blog on Wired.com is now in its 15th year. His most recent book is Pirate Utopia.

Fred Lyon is a time traveler with a camera and tales to tell. At 94-years-old, this former LIFE magazine photographer and fourth generation San Franciscan has an eye for the city and stories to match. We showed photos from Fred's books San Francisco, Portrait of a City: 1940-1960 and San Francisco Noir, and images spanning his diverse career. In conversation he'll discuss his art, work, and life; recollections of old friends like Herb Caen and Trader Vic Bergeron; and more. He shared his unique perspective after nearly a century in San Francisco. Fred Lyon's career began in the early 01940's and has spanned news, architecture, advertising, wine and food photography. In the golden years of magazine publishing his picture credits were everywhere from LIFE to VOGUE and beyond. These days find him combing his picture files for galleries, publishers and print collectors. He has been called San Francisco's Brassaï. He's also been compared to Cartier Bresson, Atget and Andre Kertez, but all with a San Francisco twist. That's fine with this lifelong native who happily admits his debt to those icons.

The ambition to think on the scale of thousands, millions, even billion of years emerged in the 19th century. Historian and author Caroline Winterer chronicles how the concept of “deep time” has inspired and puzzled thinkers in cognitive science, art, geology (and elsewhere) to become one of the most 
influential ideas of the modern era. Caroline Winterer is Anthony P. Meier Family Professor in the Humanities and Director of the Stanford Humanities Center. She is an American historian, with special expertise in American thought and culture. Her most recent book is American Enlightenments: Pursuing Happiness in the Age of Reason. Other books include The Mirror of Antiquity: American Women and the Classical Tradition, 1750-1900, and The Culture of Classicism: Ancient Greece and Rome in American Intellectual Life, 1780-1910. She has received fellowships from among others the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Humanities Center. Her writing appears in numerous publications and academic journals. For mapping the social network of Benjamin Franklin she received an American Ingenuity Award from the Smithsonian Institution.

As the world is becoming more technologically connected, finding time for oneself and face-to-face connections is becoming increasingly difficult.  Many of our talks at Long Now have aimed to help expand our collective now by centuries or even millennia, but what about our personal present?  Tiffany Shlain's new book 24/6: The Power of Unplugging One Day A Week discusses one way to slow down and be more engaged: a technological shabbat, or day of rest. She will be explaining some of the neuroscience, philosophy, psychology, and history of this 3000 year old concept, and how it can help promote creativity in our busy world. Honored by Newsweek as one of the “Women Shaping the 21st Century,” Tiffany Shlain is an Emmy-nominated filmmaker, founder of The Webby Awards and author of 24/6: The Power of Unplugging One Day A Week. Tiffany’s films and work have received over 80 awards and distinctions including being selected for the Albert Einstein Foundation Genius:100 Visions of the Future. She lectures worldwide on the relationship between technology and humanity.

Recent data shows damage from climate change rapidly increasing. There are many scientifically proposed methods (from the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the U.K. Royal Society, and the American Geophysical Union among others) for directly reducing atmospheric heat. Yet to date there are still no formal research programs or capabilities to further explore these geoengineering ideas. What are the potential risks and benefits? How do we balance this effort vs. emissions reduction and restoring the natural system?
 Kelly Wanser of SilverLining discusses her work advocating, educating and coordinating research on this important effort to combat climate change. Kelly Wanser, as Executive Director of SilverLining, helps drive research that will ensure safe pathways for climate for people and ecosystems within the coming decade. She works to accelerate adoption of technologies that help us understand and manage climate as a complex systems problem. Ms. Wanser works closely with leading scientists, engineers, technologists and government leaders on efforts to increase research and accelerate progress on reducing atmospheric heat. She testified before the U.S. House Space, Science and Technology Committee as part of a panel on "Geoengineering: Innovation, Research, and Technology." She serves as Board Director for BioCarbon Engineering, who use drone and AI technology to help restore ecosystems, and is a Senior Advisor to BlackBirch, whose hyper-local data helps companies manage weather risk.

Long Now board member Esther Dyson shares her ongoing work to move communities away from short-term thinking and into health. In conversation with previous Interval speaker Kara Platoni, she discusses how short-term desire is addiction, affecting not just individuals but institutions and culture. Dyson’s founded the 10-year Wellville project, now underway in five communities across the US, to tap into people’s natural resilience and build long-term desire: purpose. Esther Dyson is a Long Now Board member, founder of Wellville, and chairman of EDventure Holdings. She is an active angel investor, best-selling author, board member and advisor concentrating on emerging markets and technologies, new space and health. She sits on the boards of 23andMe and is an investor in Crohnology, Eligible API, Keas, Omada Health, Sleepio, and StartUp Health, among others. For 6 months in 02008-02009, Esther lived outside Moscow, Russia, training as a backup cosmonaut. Kara Platoni is a science reporter who has traveled around the world interviewing scientists and biohackers. She is lecturer and assistant dean for students at UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism. She has spoken twice at The Interval: once about her book We Have the Technology and also as part of our Scurvy Salon event.