Seminars About Long-term Thinking


A Monthly Seminar Series, Hosted by Stewart Brand.   + About this Series  |  Subscribe to the Podcast


The Long Now Foundation's monthly Seminars were started in 02003 to build a compelling body of ideas about long-term thinking; to help nudge civilization toward our goal of making long-term thinking automatic and common instead of difficult and rare.

Rick Prelinger

“Lost Landscapes of San Francisco, 6”

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Rick Prelinger, a guerrilla archivist who collects the uncollected and makes it accessible, presents the 6th of his annual Lost Landscapes of San Francisco screenings. You'll see an eclectic montage of rediscovered and rarely-seen film clips showing life, landscapes, labor and leisure in a vanished San Francisco as captured by amateurs, newsreel cameramen and studio filmmakers.

7:30pm to 9:00pm PST

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This talk was given at The Castro Theater in San Francisco, California on Thursday December 8, 02011

Video is available to Members. Membership starts at $8/month.

Rick Prelinger

Held at the historic Castro Theater, almost 1,400 enthusiastic San Francisco history buffs packed in to partake of guerrilla archivist Rick Prelinger’s annual ritual. The audience learned from, laughed at, quizzed and heckled the lovingly curated footage of their city’s past.

New material this year (presented for the first time in HD) included San Francisco's lost cemeteries in color, unique drive-through footage of the Produce Market (now Embarcadero Center and Golden Gateway), rides along the now destroyed Embarcadero Freeway, back streets in working-class North Beach, the sand-swept Sunset before its dunes were covered, wild automobile rides through downtown in the 1920s, newly-rediscovered Kodachrome Cinemascope footage of Playland and the Sky Tram, and much more.

-- by Long Now
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• 2 months, 1 week ago

Extraordinarily powerful presentation. Well done Rick. Very memorable.

Upcoming Seminars

  • Wednesday Feb. 22
  • Jim Richardson
  • “Heirlooms: Saving Humanity's 10,000-year Legacy of Food”
  • Tuesday March 6
  • Mark Lynas
  • “The Nine Planetary Boundaries: Finessing the Anthropocene”
  • Monday April 23
  • Charles Mann
  • “Living in the Homogenocene: The First 500 Years”

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Previous Seminars

02012 Catalog

02011 Catalog

  • Geoffrey B. West
  • “Why Cities Keep on Growing, Corporations Always Die, and Life Gets Faster”

02010 Catalog

  • Ed Moses
  • “Clean Fusion Power This Decade”
  • David Eagleman
  • “Six Easy Steps to Avert the Collapse of Civilization”
  • Wade Davis
  • “The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World”

02009 Catalog

  • Paul Romer
  • “A Theory of History, with an Application”
  • Daniel Everett
  • “Endangered languages, lost knowledge and the future”

02008 Catalog

  • Paul Ehrlich
  • “The Dominant Animal: Human Evolution and the Environment”
  • Craig Venter
  • “Joining 3.5 Billion Years of Microbial Invention”
  • Paul Saffo
  • “Embracing Uncertainty: the secret to effective forecasting”

02007 Catalog

  • Alex Wright
  • “Glut: Mastering Information Though the Ages”
  • Brian Fagan
  • “We Are Not the First to Suffer Through Climate Change”
  • Vernor Vinge
  • “What If the Singularity Does NOT Happen?”
  • Philip Tetlock
  • “Why Foxes Are Better Forecasters Than Hedgehogs”

02006 Catalog

  • Philip Rosedale
  • “'Second Life:' What Do We Learn If We Digitize EVERYTHING?”
  • Orville Schell
  • “China Thinks Long-term, But Can It Relearn to Act Long-term?”
  • John Rendon
  • “Long-term Policy to Make the War on Terror Short”
  • Jimmy Wales
  • “Vision: Wikipedia and the Future of Free Culture”
  • Kevin Kelly
  • “The Next 100 Years of Science: Long-term Trends in the Scientific Method.”

02005 Catalog

  • Sam Harris
  • “The View from the End of the World”
  • Clay Shirky
  • “Making Digital Durable: What Time Does to Categories”
  • Robert Fuller
  • “Patient Revolution: Human Rights Past and Future”
  • Roger Kennedy
  • “The Political History of North America from 25,000 BC to 12,000 AD”
  • James Carse
  • “Religious War In Light of the Infinite Game”

02004 Catalog

  • Jill Tarter
  • “The Search for Extra-terrestrial Intelligence: Necessarily a Long-term Strategy”
  • Daniel Janzen
  • “Third World Conservation: It's ALL Gardening”
  • George Dyson
  • “There's Plenty of Room at the Top: Long-term Thinking About Large-scale Computing”

02003 Catalog