Hoping for the long-term

An interview with Alexander Rose.

Time is money. Move fast and break things. Crunch time. We hear these idioms repeated, and to many, they become true. You can live your life by these sayings if you like.

I prefer:

“Time is a fluid condition which has no existence except in the momentary avatars of individual people. — Virginia Woolf”

Woolf seemed to recognize the spectrum on which time exists — its fluidity. Importantly, that time centers around humanity, because we track it. We frame it in terms of its past, present, and future. We observe its passage.

My preference doesn’t mean I don’t need a calendar. I desperately do. But some days I wish I didn’t. 🙂 Time is something I’ve been thinking about quite a bit these days. As AI seems to be moving quite quickly, my children have grown into near-adults, and as I age, things seem to be moving faster. They’re not, but they seem to be.

If you’ve ever been in a car accident, time seems to slow down, while spending time with good friends can seem to move quickly. Temporal perception should feel familiar to everyone. There are numerous papers on this topic; this one provides a good breakdown, but this video by David Eagleman is less dense. Eagleman experiments with time and proves that time doesn’t slow down, but your memory, triggered by your amygdala, captures the novelty of traumatic events “to attend to the situation at hand.” Memories are created in a kind of second memory system that you may need in the future to avoid or deal with the trauma at hand. So your brain has more memories to draw from, and you perceive time as elongating. Neuroscience is neat. Watch the video; his explanation is better than mine.

Depending on where you grew up, your cultural understanding of time may also differ.

“In general, Monochronic cultures view time as linear and separable, capable of being divided into units, and therefore emphasize doing ‘one thing at a time’. In contrast, Polychronic cultures view time as naturally recurring, and therefore emphasize doing ‘many things at one time.” Nonis, Teng, Ford 2005

The above definition is based on Edward T. Hall’s 1959 book, The Silent Language. Even though these binary stereotypes aren’t universal, studies support the assertion that place plays a role in how you perceive time, despite the difficulty in measuring these differences and their dependencies on context. (Fulmer, Crosby, and Gelfand — 2014)

One context is the work you do. Your job affects your sense of time. I imagine that Paramedics and Quarterbacks likely think in seconds and minutes. If a patient goes into cardiac arrest, there seems to be an immediacy of action that other jobs lack.

The technology people that I’ve spent my career with…Product Managers and Software Developers, think in terms of weeks, sprints, and quarters. Our planning cycles contain deadlines, iterations, and launches. Even the CEO’s I’ve worked with often keep their time scales in shorter cycles as the technology can change quickly.

Urban Planners and Architects think in longer terms — years and decades. The scale of the work they do requires more time, and therefore, they have longer-term perspectives. The new Eastern span of the Bay Bridge in the SF Bay area took over a decade to complete and several years in planning since the impetus was the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake.

Few people think in centuries or millennia, but among them are Historians, Archaeologists, and Climate Scientists. Problems like the Climate Crisis, which affect us all, suggest that humanity has to step away from the numerous constructs that have affected the way we think about time and collectively shift to thinking more long-term.

This conclusion led me to wonder how many people I knew take a long-term view, and the answer was very few. Then I thought of Alexander Rose, who has spent his career thinking about the long-term.

I met Rose at Burning Man in 1999. His part of our camp was called Antarctica. He’d brought an 18-wheeler freezer truck out to the desert, and the idea was to crank up the air conditioning, have a DJ play music, and serve hot chocolate in this mobile club. It was delightful. He’d joined the Long Now Foundation in 1997 and worked there till 2024. He’s Director Emeritus at the Foundation and continues to consult on the Clock project, but he’s currently the Director of Long-term Futures at Automattic. That’s almost 30 years where his efforts had been focused entirely on long-term thinking, AND doing so by engaging in or starting numerous projects. The Rosetta Project, for instance, is a global collaboration of language specialists and native speakers working to build a publicly accessible digital library of human languages. The Manual for Civilization is a set of 3500 books that would help restart civilization (in case things go awry). I’ve attended numerous talks at the events they set up, and visited the Interval, a lovely bar they built that serves as both a place for drinks and a community space.

All of these projects are impressive individually, but together they form a collective to support the idea that we humans need to think about the long-term.

Among these projects is The Clock of the Long Now. What is that? Well, it’s a clock designed to function for 10,000 years (or more) that is, “An immense mechanical monument, installed in a mountain, designed to keep accurate time for the next ten millennia. The 10,000-year clock is hundreds of feet tall, engineered to require minimal maintenance, and powered by mechanical energy harvested from sunlight.” Its purpose? The official answer is: “The Clock provides a rare invitation to think and engineer at the timescale of civilization. It offers an enduring symbol of our personal connection to the distant future.”

Clock face of the Clock of the Long Now. Credit: Rolfe Horn, courtesy of the Long Now Foundation https://blog.sciencemuseum.org.uk/the-clock-of-the-long-now/

It reminds me to take a longer view of things. Not all things, of course, but for those things that require long-term thinking, the clock is a persistent reminder that some things take a long time. Like the Redwoods I planted in my backyard — inset pictured above.

Also, it’s arguably the equivalent in terms of human achievement to Stonehenge or the Pyramids. Wow!

I reached out and had a lovely conversation with Rose.

Dave: Tell me about your background.

Rose: I grew up on the Sausalito waterfront in what was literally a junkyard with a bunch of hippies and artists. I grew up building things and basically wanted to be an inventor, but inventor schools don’t exist, so I thought Architecture was the way to go. I realized it wasn’t for me, and found Industrial Design at Carnegie Mellon. It’s one of the oldest programs in the country, and when I joined, I was very much looking forward to it being hands-on. When I started, they’d hired a new Dean who was very much into rhetoric, so after arguing with him on a relatively constant basis, he bumped me forward a year, and my degree took three years. I graduated in 1994. Afterwards, I moved back to the Bay Area and worked for LucasArts and Chrysler.

Dave: Me too. I also have an Industrial Design degree, but started working on web stuff when I moved to the Bay Area. What got you into the Long Now work?

Rose: I had been through a few cycles of the game development, and the days were long, but then we’d ship, and then nothing. They don’t need you at all, like a movie production. So I reached out to Stewart Brand, whom I knew growing up, and he told me about the conversations he was having around Long-term Thinking. That we’re living in a world that has long-term consequences like climate change, hunger, education…you name it…but our mechanisms aren’t set up to handle them. Strangely, benevolent dictators do this better, but those are few and far between.

Dave: Super few of those on the benevolent front, yeah. 🙂

Rose: Yes, and Democracy, with its four-year election cycle, is particularly bad at this. How do you incentivize lawmakers to care about something 20 years from now when they won’t get the credit for it? Stewart introduced me to Danny Hillis, who started Thinking Machines…

Dave: I worked for Brewster Kahle, who worked for Danny!

Rose: Right, so that’s how you ended up with our mutual friend at Burning Man in ‘99.

Dave: That’s right. 🙂

Rose: So Danny Hillis is a computer scientist out of MIT, and he wrote an article for Wired in 1995. In it, he outlined his idea for the clock. He and a number of people had been cooking up the Long Now Foundation through the Global Business Network. Steward set me up with several interviews, one that eventually led to the game company Blizzard, and the other was with his own newly founded project, Long Now. Even though the gaming industry offered more money, I really liked the idea of a 10000-year clock. I joined in 1997.

Dave: I know the Long Now Foundation has worked on a bunch of things, and not just the clock, but can you give me a brief background on the clock?

Rose: We built the first prototype that we took to TED. It debuted on New Year’s Eve 2000 in the Presidio at the Internet Archive offices, and then we shipped it to the Science Museum in London. Then we built two more, one at the Interval in San Francisco and one for Nathan Myhrvold. I’d met Jeff Bezos at TED after he funded another one of our projects called Long Bets in 2001, and then he and Danny became friends. He was scouting sites for Blue Origin and came to our Nevada site for the clock, and we hiked together, and we all became friends. Bezos offered to fund the full-scale clock at a site he had in Texas, as the site we were looking to use in Nevada had several environmental challenges around access and elevation. Concurrently, many other projects were happening at Long Now. The Rosetta project, The Interval I mentioned, all the talks we’ve had. So now, we’re close to finishing many aspects of the clock, and I realized I didn’t want to administer a non-profit or raise money for the rest of my life. So I started doing research into how to hand off this first generation of work and create something multi-generational.

Dave: I read the 2024 Hillis FAQ on the Clock. Where are you now?

Rose: Well, everything is installed. The clock is made up of modules stacked up 500 feet high, and while each module worked, we hadn’t had the whole thing assembled, so that’s what’s happening now. There are still some details to be dealt with, which we will hopefully be able to talk about soon.

Dave: Hillis mentions in the FAQs that it’s a work in progress.

Rose: Yeah. There are a couple of things that will be left undone on purpose, but we’ve provided a kind of API, as it were. There are these anniversary chambers that are driven by the clock…an annual, a decade, a century, a millennium, and a ten-millennium one. The first has been commissioned, and we will hopefully do the decade one, but we’ll leave the others for future generations.

Dave: That’s really interesting. I read recently that the best way to think about the future is to establish institutions that will address the future, and yet our current regime is trying to dismantle the future as fast as it can.

Rose: The pendulum of justice usually swings in the right direction. 🙂

Dave: The moral arc of the universe…

Rose: We have these times that are tough to live through for sure, and they can take a very long time, but we hope that’s not the case. We might lose some stuff along the way, and then we’ll have to recreate those things.

Dave: A super smart Designer I know, Bob Baxley says, “Look, they’ll destroy and the younger generation will build,” so he’s got a really hopeful view.

Rose: If there’s one lesson that I got out of Long Now and studying long-term thinking, it’s that the very best way to think long-term is to give more optionality to the future. That you’re trusting the future to have more information on their present than you could project onto them from the past. They are going to make better decisions unless you have taken away their ability to make a decision. If you chop down all the old-growth redwoods, no one ever gets to decide about old-growth redwoods again for a thousand years. This is why the Pace Layers diagram is really good. If you’re chopping down these Redwoods and you’re doing it on the commercial layer. In that case, you’ve skipped Governance and Culture (and of course Nature — SIDE NOTE: If you’re unfamiliar with Pace Layers, go check it out. Rose drew the diagram we’re all familiar with as an expression of Brands and many others’ thinking.)

https://longnow.org/ideas/pace-layers/

Dave: Does trust play a role here?

Rose: Absolutely. It’s about trusting the future, but it’s not what’s happening in our legislature right now. The Bill of Rights (the first ten amendments to the US Constitution) is excellent because they’re short. They’re principles to follow, rather than the 1000 pages of laws that no one reads.

(for example, the First Amendment — Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.)

Dave: They’re almost memetic representations. It’s a shame that some folks have boiled down the Second Amendment to “Don’t take my guns,” and it’s an easy thing to repeat.

Rose: It’s a good example because they (the founders) should have left it more open to the principle and not about the object — the people should be allowed to defend themselves and leave that open to interpretation because what they didn’t know is that there’d be, you know, ICBMs and tanks. A lot fewer people would be dead.

Dave: That’s true, and that mentality just seems so hopeless. You touched on this a moment ago, but do you think Designers should have hope? For instance, in a hopeless scenario where the clock, situated in Texas, gets lost because Texas becomes a battleground…have you thought about that? Are you hopeful that it gets found again?

Rose: We designed it to be lost and found for sure, both in the way that it keeps time and has power that it can harvest from the temperature difference. It does more things when people are there, but when they’re not there, it conserves that energy of showing you the time and chiming and things like that. Some of the most successful stories of things lasting a long time are things that are lost, like the Dead Sea Scrolls. If they’re not lost, their chances of surviving sometimes go down. We chose its location based on it being far from human populations, so it is out of the path where humans may destroy and rebuild on a regular basis. We also put it where it’s nowhere near minerals that people would find valuable.

Dave: I hope to visit someday. How has your thinking about time generally changed over the course of your career?

Rose: I’m always kind of looking for a long-term angle on just about anything that I work on and that I think about. In some cases, it’s also discerning what doesn’t need to be thought about long-term and what should be ephemeral. Not everything needs to be long-term. Art and fashion need a lot of space to be ephemeral and playful. On the other hand, organizations like the WHO, which have been around for 40–50 years, have just gone through their first modern global pandemic, but they don’t seem to be well-positioned to provide all the data gathered and lessons learned for another one. They seem highly politicized and defunded. It’s sad, too, that the CDC is getting decimated. We’re in a position for the first time where we can share information instantly and broadly, and redundantly. We have the ability to gather data and collect data even when people are locked down, which didn’t happen during the Black Plague.

Dave: Or even the 1918 Flu Pandemic.

Rose: Right. Neither situation had the means to understand what was going on globally. Even worse, is that we have European numbers on deaths but little information on African lives lost.

Dave: Switching gears a bit, can you talk about AI and its potential to help with long-term thinking?

Rose: The first time I remember it coming up was in a digital preservation conference we had back in ’98. It was actually Jaron Lanier who said, “You know what would be a great use for AI is basically little agents that exercise boring data. Everyone’s preserving all the video games because they’re fun, but who’s preserving WordPerfect 2.0 and knowing if it’s not working on a current system?”

I don’t think that AI is going to be as destructive as many think. I think it’s going to cause a lot of differences, but I’m certainly not a big doomsayer about it.

Dave: If we’re engaged with spectral thinking, AI exists on that spectrum. There will be bad actors who do horribly evil things, there’ll be some really, really cool advancements for humanity and society, and everything in between. It will take some jobs and create other jobs. There will be a shift.

Rose: When people started freaking out about AI taking jobs was exactly when AI could start taking journalist jobs. Automation has been taking jobs for a long time…a dishwashing machine in a restaurant took a dishwasher’s job. Dishwashers are like the first robots, but no one cared because doing dishes was a chore, and dishwashers had no agency. But the day that ChatGPT could write an article better than about 75% of writers, the journalists all freaked out, and then they wrote a bunch of articles. When DALL-E came out, I saw real problems coming for the illustration market.

Dave: Yeah, I teach over at California College of the Arts, and the Illustration Department in particular is very upset about AI. But it’s just one perspective. When Paula Scher, a Pentagram Partner, is willing to train an AI with an illustration style to generate hundreds of icons for Performance.gov, I appreciate her efforts to embrace the new tools, although she took a lot of shit for it. I think it’s going to be a bit of a roller coaster ride for a while.

Listen, thanks very much for your time. I realize how valuable it is.

Rose: Happy to speak to you. Thanks.

After we spoke, I dug up the earliest reference to what would become the Long Now Foundation and the clock in an article by Hillis.

Several things struck me:

Conception

Hillis talks about conceiving of the clock, and he says,

“My friends who get it all have ideas that focus on a particular aspect of the clock. My engineering friends worry about the power source: solar, water, nuclear, geothermal, diffusion, or tidal? My entrepreneurial friends muse about how to make it financially self-sustaining. My writer friend, Stewart Brand, starts thinking about the organization that will take care of the clock. It’s a Rorschach test — of time. Peter Gabriel, the musician, thinks the clock should be alive, like a garden, counting the seasons with short-lived flowers, counting the years with sequoias and bristlecone pines. Artist Brian Eno felt it should have a name, so he gave it one: The Clock of the Long Now.”

That’s a really good list of people to speak with about an endeavor like this.

Execution

Hillis talks about what it means to build such a clock and its longevity. Corrosion and power sources were actually less of a concern to him than people, as the real problem. What if, for instance, it lasted 500 years but was lost? Those who found it cared more about the metal that it was made of and scrapped it for parts.

“In the universe, pure information lives the longest. Bits last.”

People’s construct of time has lasted a great deal longer than most clocks. It’s the ideas (bits) that last. Hillis is friends with Teller (of Penn and Teller), who suggested that Hillis film a documentary, establish the idea that the clock exists, but never really build it. Teller’s career was built on misdirection, but it’s an interesting take on longevity. Create the idea, not the actual clock.

Hope

What struck me the most was how Hillis ended the article:

“I cannot imagine the future, but I care about it. I know I am a part of a story that starts long before I can remember and continues long beyond when anyone will remember me. I sense that I am alive at a time of important change, and I feel a responsibility to make sure that the change comes out well. I plant my acorns knowing that I will never live to harvest the oaks. I have hope for the future.”

I’m with Hillis on this. I planted Redwood trees in my backyard, and I know I’ll never live to see them grow huge, but we have to have hope for the future, despite how bleak things look right now. Earlier in the article, Hillis talks about what the future might hold.

“The end of everything we know. The beginning of something we may never understand.”

Certainly, no one foresaw the place we’ve arrived at in this, our future. The English expression (misattributed to an ancient Chinese curse) — May you live in interesting times — seems especially significant.

And yet, I still have hope for the future. I hope you do too.

References:

Tse, P.U., Intriligator, J., Rivest, J. et al. Attention and the subjective expansion of time. Perception & Psychophysics 66, 1171–1189 (2004). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03196844

Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman — Does time really slow down when you’re in fear for your life? (2023) — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-H4MKJSRXs —

Nonis, S. A., Teng, J. K., & Ford, C. W. (2005). A cross-cultural investigation of time management practices and job outcomes. International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 29(4), 409–428. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijintrel.2005.05.002

The Silent Language — Edward T Hall (1959) https://www.worldofbooks.com/products/the-silent-language-rare-book-e-t-hall-1632224712BWO?sku=1632224712BWO

Cross-cultural Perspectives on Time — Fulmer, Crosby, and Gelfand (2014) https://www.researchgate.net/publication/273382690_Cross-cultural_Perspectives_on_Time

Eastern span of the Bay Bridge — https://mtc.ca.gov/operations/programs-projects/bridges/san-francisco-oakland-bay-bridge

Alexander Rose website — https://rosefutures.com/

The Clock of the Long Now — David Rooney (2013) https://blog.sciencemuseum.org.uk/the-clock-of-the-long-now/

Carnegie Mellon — School of Design — https://www.design.cmu.edu/about-our-programs/undergraduate-degrees

https://automattic.com/ — making the web a better place

Danny Hillis — https://longnow.org/people/danny0/ SEE ALSO https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking_Machines_Corporation

The many projects of the Long Now Foundation- https://longnow.org/projects/

Article about Steward Brand and a documentary about him called: We Are As Gods — https://www.wired.com/story/backward-looking-futurism-stewart-brand/

Brewster Kahle — https://archive.org/

https://www.wired.com/1995/12/the-millennium-clock/ — Danny Hillis article from (1995)

Jaron Lanier — https://www.jaronlanier.com/

Paula Scher — https://www.pentagram.com/about/paula-scher SEE ALSO https://www.performance.gov/

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