The Clock of the Long Now

  • Stewart Brand
Weidenfeld & Nicholson: 1999. 190pp.£12.99

Daniel Hillis, developer of the Connection Machine parallel computer and founder of The Thinking Machines Corporation, has a new project: a gigantic mechanical clock, perhaps as large as Stonehenge, to be built in the American desert. This fantastic clock is designed to record time for 10,000 years, by ticking, (or is it tocking?) once each year, bonging once a century, with the cuckoo coming out on the millennium. The very idea of this clock is to force people's thinking towards long-term awareness and responsibility. As described by Stewart Brand in this provocative volume on long-term responsibilities, “Such a clock ⃛ would embody deep time for people”.

The Clock of the Long Now is dedicated to the notion that human civilization has locked itself into a dangerously short attention span. Originating with the ever-accelerating pace of technological change, coupled with the quarterly-report mentality of financial markets and the next-election priorities of democracies, some type of redressing of this pathological imbalance is desperately needed. The story told here is an attempt to correct that short-term mentality by teaching us to take the long view — where ‘long-term’ is measured in decades and centuries.

In a series of 25 short chapters, none of which is longer than about eight pages, Brand takes us on a whirlwind tour of futuristic technology and philosophical enquiry into our relationship to time. All this is focused on how we might re-orientate our view of time to produce a robust and adaptable civilization. To this end, the author proposes six significant levels of pace and size in the way such a society would work. These levels, from fast to slow, are: fashion/art, commerce, infrastructure, governance, culture and nature.

Brand argues that, in a healthy society, each level is allowed to operate at its own pace, protected from below by slower levels and kept invigorated by those faster levels above. So, for instance, if governance changes suddenly instead of gradually, you get the disasters of the French and Russian Revolutions. But if it changes slowly, you have the more benign American Revolution. By the same token, the job of fashion and art is to be quick, engaging and self-absorbed. In short, the fast layers innovate; the slower layers stabilize. And the whole combines learning and creativity with continuity. This is way things should work.

A good deal of Brand's book is about The Clock of the Long Now, which, together with its associated 10,000-Year Library, could help us direct our thinking to these various layers of time. In many ways, I found the 10,000-Year Library even more fascinating than Hillis's Clock, perhaps because I write books and don't design computers. Brand gives an exciting account of what such a library might be good for. It would provide, embody even, the long view of things. Such a library would conserve the information that's needed from time to time for a renaissance. It would help make the world safe for rapid change, since it would give assurance that everything that might need to be remembered is being collected and stored. So if we head down a blind alley or get lost, we can always go back to where we started and try again.

The final chapter of Brand's call-to-the-future centres on James Carse's distinction between a finite and an infinite game — and rightly so, since finite games focus on how they end, while infinite games focus on how they continue. And it's continuation we're interested in when we take the long-term view of things. Continuity is king, not revolution. Infinite games are corrupted by inappropriate finite play, for example when governance (infinite) is disabled when factional combat (finite) becomes the whole point, instead of a basis for constructive debate and alternative modes of power. Similar arguments can be applied to situations when one culture tries to eradicate another, or when nature is disrupted by commercial competition. The horrors of Kosovo or the logging of the Amazonian rainforest are specific instances of these general dictums.

In one way or another, everyone has a stake in the future. This well-written, interesting, intelligent book is about as good an operating manual as you'll find on how to ensure that that future doesn't slip away through misadventure, miscalculation, or just plain neglect.