It has been over 25 years since a handful of pragmatic idealists with a penchant for audaciousness started The Long Now Foundation. It was 10 years before the iPhone. Two years before Google. The human genome was about halfway sequenced. Danny Hillis kept telling his friends about a 10,000-year clock. This always led to great conversations about time and civilization and humanity. An institution began to take shape around them. Brian Eno gave it a name and Stewart Brand wrote the book: The Clock of the Long Now.
As we launch our second quarter-century, we are thrilled to announce Pace Layers, a new annual journal that takes its name from one of the core concepts in The Clock of the Long Now.
Pace Layers was conceived as a bridge between our founding concepts and where we find ourselves today. Each annual issue will provide a snapshot of The Long Now Foundation as it evolves — and a platform for the extraordinary long-term thinkers who join us in reimagining our world together over the long now.
Inside Issue 1
Our inaugural issue is a 282-page compendium of ideas, art, and insights from the remarkable community that has formed around Long Now over the past quarter-century, as well as glimpse into our plans for our second quarter-century.
Stewart Brand opens this first issue with “Elements of a Durable Civilization,” an essay that revisits the pace layers concept, which describes how civilization’s layers — from the swiftly changing Fashion at the top to the enduring, stabilizing core of Nature at the bottom — work in concert to shape our world.
These layers — Fashion, Commerce, Infrastructure, Governance, Culture, and Nature — function as the organizing principle for the journal’s contents.
FASHION explores the ephemeral space where creativity and innovation converge to drive cultural transformation, featuring artwork by Brian Eno and Alicia Eggert, speculative fiction on the bioengineered future of fashion, a first look at the newly-redesigned Interval, and a history of multimedia events that bridge the worlds of art and technology.
COMMERCE interrogates economic narratives, environmental commodification, and intergenerational responsibility against the backdrop of climate change and with an eye towards building sustainable, resilient systems for future generations.
“When we are bound in a system of reciprocity, not return on investment, we will be closer to being the kind of ancestors future people need.”
FORREST BROWN
INFRASTRUCTURE explores humanity’s efforts to maintain and reimagine essential infrastructure for the future, from our Rosetta Disk language archive landing on the moon to interventions in food systems, education, urban living, and beyond.
“Our survival on this planet depends on creating nimble responses to accelerating scales, scopes, and speeds of change. By creating containers for collective imagination of what the future can bring, speculative futures help us create those responses together.”
JOHANNA HOFFMAN
GOVERNANCE examines models of leadership and collaboration that embrace long-term thinking in a planetary age, from city-based global governance to innovative policies fighting poverty and inequality.
“If we want to imagine the long-term future of humans on this planet, then we need to get away from the idea that the structures we have now are immutable constraints on those possibilities.”
NILS GILMAN
CULTURE considers how language, time, and intergenerational rituals shape humanity’s understanding of itself, with pieces on the 10,000-year clock, the maintenance of ancient geoglyphs, speculative futures of resistance and imagination, and more.
“Maybe the point isn’t to live more in the literal sense of a longer or more productive life, but rather to be more alive in any given moment — a movement across rather than shooting forward on a narrow, lonely track.”
JENNY ODELL
NATURE focuses on ecological time, interspecies relationships, and planetary stewardship, and includes a first look at Centuries of the Bristlecone, a new collaboration between Jonathon Keats, Long Now, and the Center for Art +Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art.
Join us
Whether you are new to our community or a long-time supporter, we hope you will see this journal as an invitation and guide to making long-term thinking a deeper part of your life and work.
Until the end of 02024, new Long Now Members get a copy of Pace Layers included with their membership while supplies last — Join Long Now
You can also help shape future editions:
- Have thoughts about what we should be covering for future editions? Send us your ideas at ideas@longnow.org.
- Interested in writing for us? Refer to our pitch guide.
- Why does long-term thinking matter to you? Are you involved in any long-term thinking projects or initiatives? Let us about it at ideas@longnow.org.
