The Long Now Foundation

In his Talk, poet-philosopher Bayo Akomolafe presented a riveting critique of linear time, and gave a persuasive invitation to step sideways, to slow down, to notice the cracks in our temporal systems. Through Yoruba cosmology, slave ship histories, and decolonization strategies, he invited us to look at the space between the tick and the tock, to sit in the uncomfortable and incomplete. Only here...

What if we redefined “profit” as maximizing human flourishing? Eric Ries has seen the corrosive effects of shareholder primacy at every company he’s worked with. Mission-driven companies, however, are the outliers: demonstrating stronger profits, better talent, and deeper loyalty. So why don't we build differently? In the long arc of economic history, our current definitions of profit and value ar...

The ocean is not empty. It is a vast storage facility of memory agents. Ocean organisms use the chemical signatures of seawater for memory and intelligence in ways we can barely imagine. In her Talk, Melody Jue said our struggle to understand ocean memory comes from our terrestrial bias. This bias shapes what we try to protect and the technologies we develop. We must, she said, “deterritorialize t...

What is consciousness — and how might we describe it scientifically? Neuroscience can map neural activity with extraordinary detail, yet the relationship between electrical signals and subjective experience remains one of humanity’s most enduring questions. Mathematician and machine learning researcher Nina Miolane approaches this question from an unexpected direction: geometry. In her work, patte...

Acclaimed designer Stefan Sagmeister brings data to life to convey an uplifting message for our current times. Amid the stark reality of a world facing the aftermath of an unprecedented global pandemic, natural disasters, and political turmoil “Finally, Something Good” presents tangible evidence that, when assessed from a long-term perspective, most aspects of human development have improved. Usin...

In this talk, Indy Johar proposes that civilization’s longevity depends less on stability or efficiency, and more on optionality. Entropy drives systems toward homogenization and exhaustion, but life acts as a counterforce, generating new pathways for becoming. Johar argues that our current economic system collapses value into singular metrics like price, which renders our systems brittle and less...

Kate Crawford - Mapping Empires by The Long Now Foundation

In her Long Now Talk, NASA researcher Dr. Lynn Rothschild explores how the extreme constraints of space travel can enable radical sustainability on Earth. Hear how her teams have used mycelium, the root structure of fungi, to grow off-planet construction materials, and programmed bacteria to print new biological materials on demand. Cells, Rothschild explains, are micromachines with a 3.8-billion-...

Blaise Agüera y Arcas - What is Intelligence? by The Long Now Foundation

Kim Carson - Inspired by Intelligence: Purpose and Creativity in the AI Era by The Long Now Foundation

How will AI shape our understanding of our creativity and ourselves? In February, artist and technologist K Allado-McDowell delivered a fascinating Long Now Talk that explored the dimensions of Neural Media — their term for an emerging set of creative forms that use artificial neural networks inspired by the connective design of the human brain. Their Long Now Talk is a journey through the strange...

Sara Imari Walker - An Informational Theory of Life by The Long Now Foundation

As they look upon the United States of America in 02025, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson see a country wrought by a half-century of failed governance. They see states and cities theoretically committed to progressive futures instead bogged down in labyrinthine mires of process and deliberation — a society stuck in low gear. Yet they also see opportunity to turn those failures on their heads, and to...

We find ourselves in a pre-paradigmatic moment in which our technology has outpaced our theories of what to do with it. The task of philosophy today is to catch up. Benjamin Bratton is a Professor of Philosophy of Technology and Speculative Design at University of California, San Diego and the Director of Antikythera, an cross-disciplinary think tank researching the philosophy of computation suppo...

Stephen Heintz and Kim Stanley Robinson say we live in an “Age of Turbulence.” Looking around our geopolitical situation, it’s easy to see what they mean. Faced with the ever-growing threat of climate change, the looming potential breakdown of the post-01945 international order, and the ambiguous prospects of rapid technological changes in fields like AI, biotechnology, and geoengineering, it is c...

When you feel the future, how do you share that feeling in order to build community? Over the past quarter-century, Best — first as an actor, musician, and performer, and later as an Afrofuturist scholar and lecturer — has worked to answer that question. Drawing on his experiences as a cast member on the award-winning percussion performance Stomp, as Jar-Jar Binks, the ground-breaking first major...

Social philosopher Roman Krznaric and renegade economist Kate Raworth explore how we can survive and thrive by looking to the past for clues on how to build more regenerative economic frameworks. Doughnut economics describes the social and planetary boundaries needed for all people to prosper within the means of the living planet. Studying historic examples through the lens of doughnut economics,...

We are thrilled to be hosting the launch of Neal Stephenson's newest book Polostan. This is the first installment in a monumental new series called Bomb Light -- an expansive historical epic of intrigue and international espionage, presaging the dawn of the Atomic Age. Set against the turbulent decades of the early twentieth century, Polostan is an inventive, richly detailed, and deeply entertaini...

The Bureau of Linguistical Reality is a participatory artwork facilitated by artist Alicia Escott and Heidi Quante which collaborates with the public to create new words for feelings and experiences for which no words yet exist. Recognizing the climate crisis is causing new feelings and experiences that have yet to be named, the project was created with a deep focus on these and other Anthropoceni...

Alternative visions for social change rooted in the frameworks of capitalism and colonialism only reproduce contemporary structures of power. How can indigenous perspectives and knowledge inform the structural transformation necessary to improve the health of the natural world and of human communities? Dr. Cordero will discuss how indigenous epistemologies challenge the ideas and practices related...

Economic policy can seem abstract and distant, but it manifests the physical world – affecting us all. Our economic stories shape our systems, and they in turn shape us. What myths continue to constrain us, and how might new stories emerge to scaffold the future? This talk will explore concepts we often take as gospel: profits, competition, economic value, efficiency, and others -- and asks how we...

"What really interests me is how long-lived plants allow humans to think about—and emotionally relate to—long units of time. They provide a bridge between human time and geological time." -- Jared Farmer Join us for an evening with geohumanist and historian Jared Farmer, who will share his multi-faceted approach to understanding our human relationship with trees over millennia. From ancient storie...

As authoritarianism continues to rise around the world, the stories we tell ourselves about our collective history become a battleground for competing visions of the future. Drawing extensively from Russian history in the 20th century, Rumsey offers a framework to discuss our current social and political tensions and how our increasing polarization could shape our future. This Long Now Talk is pre...

Over the last two years, the US government has started thinking about the future of the world in a very different way. Across speeches and policy papers, a vision of world politics has emerged which breaks sharply both with the old logic of the Cold War and the newer politics of globalization. The globalization bet has turned sour, but it has created a far more closely connected world than ever ex...

Coco Krumme traces the fascinating history of optimization from its roots in America's founding principles, to its dominance as the driving principle of our modern world. Optimized models underlie everything and are deeply embedded in the technologies and assumptions that have come to comprise not only our material reality, but what we make of it. How did a mathematical concept take on such outsiz...