The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility (Brand, 1999)

The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility (Brand, 1999)

Touted as "the least recognized most influential thinker in America," Brand, creator of The Whole Earth Catalog, wears that mantle with aplomb in his latest offering. He takes on civilization's "pathologically short attention span" with a proposal to encourage us all to assume long-term responsibility for the continuation of the human species. How to do this? By creating both a myth and a mechanism with which to counter our short focus these days, which Brand names as the core of the problem. He spends the remainder of this rumination clarifying that thought and outlining the details of the myth and mechanism that he suggests as a catalyst: a clock that ticks once a year, bongs once a century, and cuckoos but once a millennium. The Clock of the Long Now is both fascinating and, yes, maybe just a bit revolutionary and is most likely to find a suitable home in academic and larger public libraries with readers who are fervent in the desire to see us go on.

[JLJ - Stewart Brand presents his ideas in an easily readable format, challenging his readers to think about the long-term. This guy is sort of counter-culture, but sharp and bright and he aims to teach you a thing or two, if you'll listen...]

p.1 the emphasis must shift from addressing problems in isolation to studying whole complex systems and the dynamic interactions between the parts. Complex systems are characterized by non-linearities, autocatalysis, complex, time delayed feedback loops, emergent phenomena, and chaotic behavior... This means that the whole is significantly different from the simple sum of the parts, and scaling (the transfer of understanding across spatial, temporal, and complexity scales) is a core problem. Incorporating both biophysical and social dynamics makes these problems "wickedly complex" and difficult. They are impossible to address from within the confines of any single discipline.

p.15 At any time the several "probable" things that might occur in the future are vastly outnumbered by the countless near-impossible eventualities, which are so many and individually so unlikely that it is not worth the effort of futurists or futurismists to examine and prepare for even a fraction of them. Yet one of those innumerable near-impossibilities is what is most likely to occur. Reality is thus statistically forced to be extraordinary. [JLJ - this is the reason that humans try adopt resilient positions in whatever they do - they aim to have a reserve capacity to face the unexpected, because it will eventually happen that an unforeseen event will surprise you, against the odds.]

p.34 Instead of breaking under stress like something brittle these systems yield as if they were malleable. Some parts respond quickly to the shock, allowing slower parts to ignore the shock and maintain their steady duties of system continuity. The combination of fast and slow components makes the system resilient, along with the way the differently paced parts affect each other.

p.35 The destiny of our species is shaped by the imperatives of survival on six distinct time scales. To survive means to compete successfully on all six time scales... Every human being is the product of adaptation to the demands of all six time scales. That is why conflicting loyalties are deep in our nature. In order to survive, we have needed to be loyal to ourselves, to our families, to our tribes, to our cultures, to our species, to our planet. If our psychological impulses are complicated, it is because they were shaped by complicated and conflicting demands.

p.118 Imaginative scenario planning, by giving up on any hope of accurately predicting the future, yields strategies made robust by their wide scope of alertness and swift adaptivity. You don't plan for a single certain future but rather for multiple possible futures, each based on a different theory of what's really going on.

p.119 "We go from anticipation to anticipation," said Samuel Johnson, "not from satisfaction to satisfaction."

p.119 We can see the past but not influence it. We can influence the future but not see it.

p.163 Wisdom decides forward as if back. Rather than make detailed, brittle plans for the future, wisdom puts its effort into expanding general, adaptive options... Preserving and increasing options is a major component of a self-saving world.

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