From The Long Now website:
Stewart Brand is co-founder and president of The Long Now Foundation and co-founder of Global Business Network. He created and edited the Whole Earth Catalog (National Book Award), and co-founded the Hackers Conference and The WELL. His books include The Clock of the Long Now; How Buildings Learn; and The Media Lab. His most recent book, titled Whole Earth Discipline, is published by Viking in the US and Atlantic in the UK. He graduated in Biology from Stanford and served as an Infantry officer.
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Primary
From their website:
The Long Now Foundation was established in 01996* to develop the Clock and Library projects, as well as to become the seed of a very long-term cultural institution. The Long Now Foundation hopes to provide a counterpoint to today’s accelerating culture and help make long-term thinking more common. We hope to foster responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years.
* The Long Now Foundation uses five-digit dates, the extra zero is to solve the deca-millennium bug which will come into effect in about 8,000 years.
Web Properties
Recent Content
Last 50 posts on own channels (YouTube, Podcast, Medium or Website/Blog):
Making the world better
Published on: 10 Apr 18 in Stewart Brand – Medium
by Stewart Brand
Two ways to save humanity
Published on: 14 Feb 18 in Stewart Brand – Medium
by Stewart Brand
Cognitive Planet
Published on: 5 Nov 17 in Stewart Brand – Medium
by Stewart Brand
Life nearby
Published on: 7 Sep 17 in Stewart Brand – Medium
by Stewart Brand
How to finesse complexity
Published on: 22 Aug 17 in Stewart Brand – Medium
by Stewart Brand
Time travel is time research
Published on: 4 Jul 17 in Stewart Brand – Medium
by Stewart Brand
Why cities live forever
Published on: 22 Jun 17 in Stewart Brand – Medium
by Stewart Brand
Death’s honesty
Published on: 25 May 17 in Stewart Brand – Medium
by Stewart Brand
Doing Good Better
Published on: 27 Mar 17 in Stewart Brand – Medium
by Stewart Brand
Toward agile government
Published on: 13 Feb 17 in Stewart Brand – Medium
by Stewart Brand
Whole Earth Discipline, an eye-opening book by the legendary author of the National Book Award-winning Whole Earth Catalog, persuasively details a new approach to our stewardship of the planet. Lifelong ecologist and futurist Stewart Brand relies on scientific rigor to shatter myths concerning nuclear energy, urbanization, genetic engineering, and other controversial subjects, showing exactly where the sources of our dilemmas lie and offering a bold, inventive set of policies and design- based solutions for shaping a more sustainable society. Thought- provoking and passionately argued, this is a pioneering book on one of the hottest issues facing humanity today.
Using the designing and building of The Clock of the Long Now as a framework, this is a book about the practical use of long time perspective: how to get it, how to use it, how to keep it in and out of sight. Here are the central questions it inspires: How do we make long-term thinking automatic and common instead of difficult and rare? Discipline in thought allows freedom. One needs the space and reliability to predict continuity to have the confidence not to be afraid of revolutions Taking the time to think of the future is more essential now than ever, as culture accelerates beyond its ability to be measured Probable things are vastly outnumbered by countless near-impossible eventualities. Reality is statistically forced to be extraordinary; fiction is not allowed this freedom This is a potent book that combines the chronicling of fantastic technology with equally visionary philosophical inquiry.
photos by Anthony ThorntonMuch of Pinker’s talk was devoted to showing how most of the things than humans care about (except climate) have been getting drastically better over the last few
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Mann titled his talk “The Edge of the Petri Dish.” He explained, “If you drop a couple protozoa in a Petri dish filled with nutrient goo, they will multiply until
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photo by Evan SpilerThanks to the growing human domination of natural systems on Earth, people say we are entering an Anthropocene Epoch, Grinspoon began, but what if the term “epoch” understates
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photo by Evan SpilerIF WE FIND, anywhere in the universe, one more instance of life besides what evolved on Earth, then we are bound to conclude that life is common throughout
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photo by Evan SpilerHE BEGAN, “Hi, I’m Nicky Case, and I explain complex systems in a visual, tangible, and playful way.” He did exactly that with 207 brilliant slides and clear
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photo by Gary WilsonGLEICK BEGAN WITH H.G. WELLS’S 1895 BOOK The Time Machine, which created the idea of time travel. It soon became a hugely popular genre that shows no sign
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photo by Gary WilsonWEST FOCUSSED ON CITIES in his discussion of the newly discovered exponential scaling laws that govern everything alive. “We live,” he said, “in an exponentially expanding socio-economic universe.”
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photo by Gary WilsonIN ONE OF LONG NOW’S MOST MOVING TALKS, Ostaseski began: “I’m not romantic about dying. This is the hardest work you will ever do. It is tough. It’s
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photo by Gary WilsonLOMBORG OPENED WITH A PHOTO FROM HAITI, showing a young girl dressed for school wading through the muck and garbage of a slum, with pigs in the muck
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photo by Gary WilsonPAHLKA QUOTED: “EFFICIENCY IN GOVERNMENT IS A MATTER OF SOCIAL JUSTICE.” (Mayor John Norquist) It is at the often maddening interface with government that the inefficiency and injustice
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A fine thread on the @Ryanphelan6 Long Now talk. https://twitter.com/longnow/status/1643437224263028744
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Live tonight. Streamable at the link. https://twitter.com/Revive_Restore/status/1643284118707269632
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RT @ThePlanetaryGuy: This is the largest volcano in the Solar System. Named Olympus Mons, it’s 650 kilometres across and its summit stands 22 km above the surrounding plains. If you stood at the top, you wouldn’t be able to see the base because it would extend beyond your horizon.
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An appropriately quiet cheer for us Silents. https://twitter.com/vpostrel/status/1642716068438507520
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This is what it looks like to me. https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/1642678737677197313
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RT @lhwilkinson: Maps can be misleading. Explore the world as it actually is: “The True Size,” an interactive tool that let’s one compare the real scale of any two countries. @thetruesize (Plus- Ponce de Leon) Muse on measurement: https://roughlydaily.com/2023/04/02/being-so-many-different-sizes-in-a-day-is-very-confusing/
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About time we had a picture of smiling Neanderthals. https://twitter.com/trungtphan/status/1642016479217614848
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RT @Grady_Booch: I like what @nxthompson has to say here. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/note-staff-ai-nicholas-thompson/
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RT @nils_gilman: The way I read this is that the seditionists are really upset that they’re unable to foment their domestic information warfare objectives unmonitored and unimpeded https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/guide-understanding-hoax-century-thirteen-ways-looking-disinformation
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RT @CharlesCMann: New Science paper argues horses came to the Americas earlier than previously thought—a conclusion that, if it holds up, rewrites the history of the N. American West. Strikingly, the article is from a team of archaeologists, geneticists, and Lakota researchers and elders. 1/15
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DALL-E on Bing is still troubled by hands. I asked for “hands high-fiving” and got high-fouring at most.
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So, my wife’s doing a show next week at a beloved theatre in San Francisco’s North Beach for Long Now. https://twitter.com/revive_restore/status/1640761110558113803
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RT @AgBioWorld: BREAKING NEWS: Commercial development of gene-edited food now legal in England! Viva la England, thanks #Brexit! 😊The Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish governments have not permitted the commercial use of gene editing 😠 https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-64596453
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Ethan it looks like “Creative” can still deliver the goods. Here’s what I got to my request: “Analyze Stewart Brand’s writing style and tell me four of its distinctive features.” Creative Bing replied: https://twitter.com/emollick/status/1639112955085332481
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Wolfram’s whole discourse here is outstanding. How to enhance GPT to do ever more wondrous and useful things. Thanks Grady. https://twitter.com/Grady_Booch/status/1639096779466743808
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Uh oh. Bing Chat is being dumbed down by “instructions and rules.” On March 12 it made the following 4 points about “Stewart Brand’s writing style” I thought they were pretty good and wanted to quote them in an email. So I asked the same question of Bing today and got pap. https://twitter.com/stewartbrand/status/1634978319505694720
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RT @kevin2kelly: Rolf Potts @rolfpotts, the legendary author of Vagabonding, and I talk about my own vagabonding, and my obsession with a vanishing Asia, and why we should travel, on this podcast. https://rolfpotts.com/podcast/kevin-kelly-future/
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This fallacy is a fine example of failure to think in long-now terms. Decisions of the past were not made in the past. They were made in the deciders’ now with our later now in mind. https://twitter.com/nils_gilman/status/1639011144110313472
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RT @nils_gilman: Good news: taking advantage of the record number of atmospheric rivers, California is flooding farmlands to recharge depleted aquifers; this is a model for how the state can become more resilient as climate change unleashes more intense dry spells & floods https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2023-03-21/california-looks-to-farmland-to-recharge-groundwater
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RT @bfcarlson: In 1966, media futurist Marshall McLuhan envisioned a form of digital research eerily similar to the customized queries now answered by AI. Then he makes a surprising admission about why he studies technological change—with a lesson I think many need to hear. https://t.co/yEBJv95GvP
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It’s worth noting that Whole Earth Discipline only discusses the lower-right quadrant (external, collective) of Wilber’s four-quadrant model . Issues such as consciousness and culture (left quadrants) are outside its scope. Also, inasmuch as there is any form of consensus of viewpoints about proposed solution, some of the proposed solutions in this book might be considered to be outliers.