Long Now Clock Backers Include Jeff Bezos, Mitch Kapor, and Esther Dyson

(Yes.) Do you write it in English? (To be determined!) Working with composer Brian Eno on the sound of the clock chime, and with a team of geologists and physicists, Hillis had made the clock into a natural extension of his tinkertoy computer, a device that both served a purpose and sent a message. If there was an emotion it conveyed, a feeling that it tickled in the way Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne might inspire terror or joy or faith, it was meant to be awe. Stewart Brand, one of the supporters of the clock and an early member of the New Caste too, would tell you that the idea for the clock had emerged from a desire to emphasize, to physicalize in a way no one could forget, the importance of longer- term thinking. We'd all arrived now, Brand and the other clock masters worried, ata moment in history when no one had a view that extended much past their own lives — or sometimes past the next election, or year, or the next financial quarter. Our modern “on to the next thing” economics and politics were eroding every slow, patient instinct. “Civilization is revving itself into a pathetically short attention span,” one manifesto for the clock began. “What we propose is both a mechanism and a myth.”!7? With its steady 10,000 year ticking, the Clock of the Long Now was meant to make us think in longer jumps. The human winding mechanism, for instance: Generations of clock-winders had to share in the work, and they would be connected in a long thread over the 10,000 years. A sacred priesthood of time. Moving slowly. As I spent time thinking, dreaming about the clock, I found myself too craving the solidity and patient isolation it promised. Who among us these days doesn’t want a break from the instant nowness of our age? Yet, the more | understood the clock, the more | realized something else was at work. Stop fora moment to consider who was backing and building the device. It was a cluster of people who had, as a common link, the fact that they had their hands honestly sunk into the guts of the Internet. Hillis, after all, had been waving more than that slim book of email addresses when he talked about the early days of the Internet. He was waving the credentials of a man who had been living in the virtual cyber neighborhood of Web connections from its very first days. He was as close toa native of the connected, fiber optic, light-speed world as you could find. All the names supporting the clock smelled similarly of burning electrons: Jeff Bezos had built Amazon into a high-speed marketplace whose backbone was the Web itself. Another backer, Mitch Kapor, had cracked apart several centuries of slow accounting habits when he created Lotus 1-2-3, the first successful computer spreadsheet program in 1983, software that permitted you to see and change your whole business one keystroke at a time. Kapor’s software helped move finance from quarter-by-quarter calculations to a really instant-by-instant sort of business - more or less the opposite of the “long time frame” the clock team was aiming to preserve. Esther Dyson was one of the earliest, best investors in network companies. This was a collection of men and women unified by a genius for connected change, sure, but also by a desire for ever faster clock speeds, ever speedier delivery, ever faster 179 “Civilization is revving itself’: Stewart Brand, The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility. (New York: Basic Books, 1999) 2 129 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018361