We’ve recently returned from Long Now’s Nevada Bristlecone Preserve, a mountain habitat of the world’s oldest living trees. Time feels different up there at 11,000 feet, nestled among these ancient organisms that have borne witness to centuries of comings and goings.
It was an ideal place to reflect on the founding of The Long Now Foundation as a community where memory, imagination, and the long view could be fostered over millennia. Foremost on our minds is what it takes to be a long-lived institution — the passages between generations and the liminal spaces of possibility that open up in between.
As we turn the corner on our first quarter century and find ourselves in an electrifying first generational transition, we dare to imagine there will be hundreds more to come, but this one, this is our very first.
And we’re here in this moment with all of you — an extraordinary community bound by curiosity and commitment — together creating what Long Now cofounder Brian Eno calls scenius, the collective intelligence and intuition of a cultural scene. Thank you for being on this adventure with us.
A time for shared leadership
Here, at the dawn of our second quarter century, we’re thrilled to announce our next generation leadership: Rebecca Lendl as Executive Director & Patrick Dowd as Board President.
Rebecca Lendl has been leading Long Now as Interim Executive Director since early 02023. Under her leadership, Long Now has taken on the ambitious work of reimagining the institution — distilling the learnings of our founding era, reorienting to the present moment, and modeling a generational transition for many more to come. We reimagined our home for long-term thinking with The Interval Decennial, published our first annual print journal Pace Layers, explored arboreal timekeeping in Centuries of the Bristlecone, and programmed an extraordinary upcoming season of Long Now Talks. Rebecca has spent her career supporting visionary ideas and new ways of thinking across art, culture, and technology at the Center for Humane Technology, Creative Commons, Headlands Center for the Arts, and Creative Time.
Patrick Dowd comes to Long Now as a longtime member, friend, and a trusted advisor. Most recently, Patrick served as a curatorial advisor on the relaunch of Long Now Talks, expanding our frame around themes like the Majority World, interspecies ecologies, and neural media. Throughout his career, Patrick has been driven by a personal mission to help big things be good and good things get big, all grounded in intellectual curiosity, community building, and an adventurous spirit. His Millennial Trains Project was a national exercise in scenius, taking young creators on a series of intercontinental train journeys to explore America’s new frontiers. He runs the creative studio Stellar, served as Head of Brand Innovation at PayPal, was Editor-at-Large for National Geographic Traveler, and a Fulbright scholar in India.
As Rebecca and Patrick refine our shared vision for all that’s ahead, we are attentive to things we’ve learned from our community of long-term thinkers —
Long-term thinking is a planetary imperative — Challenges that feel impossible to tackle within a single human lifetime become conceivable when you have a longer timescale to work with. This has always been true. But today, in our age of compounding global crises and pathologically shrinking time horizons, the call to deepen our imaginative capacity grows ever stronger. We are here to build collective capacity to think and act wisely together over the long term.
This moment calls for shared leadership — Working on longer timescales means that our best ideas require an institutional champion. This is a collaboration across generations, far bigger than any one of us. More than ever since our founding, we are focused on the full breadth of our scenius here with all of you: staff, board, fellows, speakers, thinkers, advisors, members, supporters, partners, community. We’re eager to hear from you, learn with you, and co-create with you.
Long Now is a rare institution — There are very few places one can go to think, wrestle with ideas, and orient ourselves, to make disagreement useful and to make sense of the moment within the context of a longer now. Long Now is a rare home for civilizational-scale thinking and being. We will fiercely protect Long Now’s singular place in the ecosystem — ever experimental, radical, and driven by wild imagination.
Launching our second quarter century
Looking back, we see a remarkable first quarter century built on audacious projects that ignite cultural imagination like 10,000-year clocks, a language archive on the moon, the community that formed around a Talks series that connected over 400 civilization-scale thinkers with millions around the globe, and our newly reimagined home for long-term thinking at The Interval at Long Now in San Francisco.
It’s time to bring that 10,000-year library into being.
Like a traditional library, a 10,000-year library might include books, magazines, and access to tools and media resources. It might serve as a space for working, studying, gathering, as well as visiting exhibits and attending events. But unlike a traditional library, the 10,000-year library can be imagined as expansively as possible. A collection of resources that may include even people — “check out” a fellow, take an immersive geographical expedition to experience deep time, or curl up with a new idea. Imagine a single metaphorical roof over everything Long Now has to offer, tightly curated and made easily accessible as a library for the future.
We’ve already broken conceptual ground on certain instantiations of these 10,000-year libraries. The Interval at Long Now, redesigned this year to feature an exhibition about long-term thinking, is one vision of a physical outpost of the library. The first volume of Pace Layers, our new annual journal of long-term thinking, is a compendium of some of the best of our first quarter century of thought and writing, and a compelling reminder of the power of the printed word to store ideas over time. Possibilities abound.
Welcome. You have arrived with us at a new beginning.
Our doors are open. Visit us soon and often at The Interval at Long Now. Join us for our newly relaunched Long Now Talks. Subscribe to our videos and podcasts and get connected to a whole world of long-term thinking. Send us your thoughts and ideas. All of us are a part of this lineage — artists, builders, technologists, teachers, parents, entrepreneurs, scientists, researchers, makers, all free thinkers and hungry learners — and we’re made better by being here in community with all of you. Stay tuned for more of the unexpected from Long Now.
All of this is a call to adventure
This work will take all of us. An aspiration as big as fostering long-term thinking across millennia will require a community that collaborates across many generations. A community supported by an institutional champion. A community like you. An institution like The Long Now Foundation.
Let’s get started.
Rebecca Lendl
Executive Director
Patrick Dowd
President, Board of Directors
