Long Now

Through building and analyzing systems, [D. Fox Harrell](http://foxharrell.com)'s research investigates how the computer can be used to express cultural meanings through data-structures and algorithms. In his talk he showed that identities are complicated by their intersection with technologies like social networking, gaming, and virtual worlds. Data-structures and algorithms in video games and so...

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...

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 told us how bad it is and some things we can do. [Renée DiResta](http://www.reneediresta.com/) studies narrative manipulation as the Director of R...

Burning Man co-founder Michael Mikel (aka [ Danger Ranger](https://twitter.com/danger_ranger)), who serves as Director of Advanced Social Systems for the Burning Man Project discussed the history of the event. Outlining the five eras of Burning Man, he explained 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_](https://nectome.com/) 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 Institu...

Companies that operate with a long-term mindset tend to outperform their peers over time. But the pressure to achieve short-term quarterly gains often works against longer-term sustainable growth, and can push even the most visionary company into a short-term mindset. In 02019, the Long-Term Stock Exchange was approved as the country’s 14th and newest stock exchange. It offers a new framework for...

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 f...

[Fred Lyon](http://www.fredlyon.com/) 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_](https://www.papress.com/html/product.details.dna?isbn=9781616892661 "San Francisco, Por...

The ambition to think on the scale of thousands, millions, even billion of years emerged in the 19th century. Historian and author [Caroline Winterer](https://history.stanford.edu/people/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. [Car...

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_](http://www.tiffanyshlain.com/) new book [_24/6: The Power of Unplugging One Day A Week_...

What does practical long-term thinking look like? Bina Venkataraman’s new book, [_The Optimist's Telescope: Thinking Ahead in a Reckless Age_](https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780735219472), brings this abstract question to life. Through a series of anecdotes and case studies that draw from her background in public policy, climate change strategy, and journalism, Venkataraman explores pragmatic ta...

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 th...

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](http://www.karaplatoni.com/), she discusses how short-term desire is addiction, affecting not just individuals but institutions and culture. Dyson’s founded the 10-year [Wellville](http://wellville.net) project,...

Millennia before engineering or software, robots and artificial intelligence were brought to life in Greek myths. The author of [_Gods and Robots Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology_](https://press.princeton.edu/titles/14162.html) traces the link between technology and tyranny from modern day concerns over AI to back to antiquities fear of beings were "made, not born.” [Adrienne Mayo...

[_Annalee Newitz's_](https://www.techsploitation.com/) new novel, [_The Future of Another Timeline_](https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780765392121), is about time travelers in an edit war over history. But it's also about using stories to change the course of civilization. Annalee discusses the idea of time travel, as well as the extensive scientific and historical research they did for the novel....

If we use AI to write our favorite music for us, will we lose the ability to write music ourselves? If an AI coach keeps divorced parents from arguing by text, can they get along without it? If the only novels and screenplays that get a green light are the ones that AI believes match up with past hits, will we wind up reading and watching the same thing over and over? In this conversation, NBC’s [...

Andrew McAfee draws on a wide range of evidence to show that the world is already on the right track toward long-term health when it combines 1) technological progress, 2) capitalism, 3) responsive government, and 4) public awareness. That blend demonstrably gets humanity “more from less.” It dematerializes the economy and decouples it from exploiting nature while increasing prosperity for ever mo...

From the cultivation of the first crops to the founding of modern states, the human story is the story of environmental forces, from plate tectonics and climate change, to atmospheric circulation and ocean currents. Professor [_Lewis Dartnell_](http://lewisdartnell.com/en-gb) dove into the planet’s deep past, where history becomes science, to explore a web of connections that underwrites our moder...

From kings and philosophers to craftsmen and inventors, horology has been prized as an extraordinary marriage between art and science. Antiquarian Horologist Brittany Nicole Cox shared her unique experience with objects born from this lineage. We traced their origins to discover how these objects serve as critical mirrors in a world of accelerated discovery. Her lifelong passion for horology has s...

Big Data promises unparalleled insights, but the larger the data, the harder they are to find. The key to unlocking them was discovered by mathematicians in the 18th century. A modern mathematician explains how to find patterns in data with new algorithms for old math. Gurjeet Singh is Chief AI Officer and co-founder of [Symphony AyasdiAI](https://www.ayasdi.com). He leads a technology movement th...

Coming to the fore in this century is Asian perspective on everything. A thrilling place to watch the shift is in art. Extraordinary contemporary art from all over the world, especially Asia, has been collected for the new world-class museum in Hong Kong called M+. The massive museum won’t open for a year or two, but a rich sample of the collection as well as insight on why it was collected for di...

The invisible backbone of our food system is a man-made, distributed, and perpetual winter of refrigeration we've built for our food to live in. It has remade our entire relationship with food, for better and in some ways for worse. The time has come for us all to explore the mysteries of the artificial cryosphere. We need to understand refrigeration's scope and impact in order to take stock of wh...

“Cities were the first Internet,” says archaeologist Monica Smith, because they were the first permanent places where strangers met in large numbers for entertainment, commerce, and romance. And the function and form of cities, she notes, have remained remarkably constant over their 6,000 years of history so far. Modern city dwellers would quickly find their way around any city in the past, given...

Neal Stephenson author of _Fall, or Dodge in Hell_ in conversation with Long Now Board Member, Kevin Kelly. Tickets included a signed copy of _Fall, or Dodge in Hell_. [_Fall, or Dodge in Hell_](https://www.harpercollins.com/9780062458711/fall-or-dodge-in-hell/) is pure, unadulterated fun: a grand drama of analog and digital, man and machine, angels and demons, gods and followers, the finite and t...

We need a poly-temporal worldview to embrace the overlapping rates of change that our world runs on, especially the huge, powerful changes that are mostly invisible to us. Geologist Marcia Bjornerud teaches that kind of time literacy. With it, we become at home in the deep past and engaged with the deep future. We learn to “think like a planet.” As for climate change... “Dazzled by our own creatio...