As The Long Now Foundation steps into its second quarter century, I find myself reflecting on what an extraordinary moment we're living through and how grateful I am for our community.
The rapid emergence of artificial intelligence, the compounding realities of ecological crises, and the evolving ways we create and preserve knowledge — all of these call us to think differently about our place in time and how we frame the future.
They also invite us to be more present to the joys of remaining curious, nurturing friendships, and embracing imagination that Long Now provides us amidst all our present day issues.
At its heart, Long Now has always been about bringing people together to explore big ideas, preserve wisdom across generations, and demonstrate long-term thinking in action.
These things are worth our time, and, in fact, make our time more worthwhile.
As Long Now’s new Board President, I'm honored to help nurture our remarkable community, curate the conversations that shape our collective understanding, and secure the resources that sustain our mission.
It’s About Time
The practice of reframing how we think about time has been woven into Long Now's DNA since our inception, and yet long-term thinking is still not common.
The frames our community uses for thinking differently about time are useful tools for building better futures and they deserve to be more widely shared.
Remember that extra zero we add before years? It's such a simple thing, yet it opens our minds to the vast expanse of time ahead. Stewart Brand's pace layers framework helps us see the different rhythms that make up our society — from the quick pulse of fashion, to the slow beat of culture, to the glacial pace of geological time. And then our 10,000-year clocks remind us just how precious our time really is.
These frames help us to expand our perspectives, learn from the deep past, and embrace the possibilities of the future.
And here's what's beautiful about these frames: they change not just how we think, but how we feel about time. When you start seeing the world through the lens of centuries rather than quarters or election cycles, something shifts. The anxiety of the immediate begins to dissolve into a larger sense of possibility. In this way, long-term thinking isn't just an intellectual exercise — it's a form of emotional and perhaps even spiritual practice.
The range of big thinkers reframing how we think about time is exciting indeed: while Jenny Odell's exploration of deep attention challenges our obsession with linear progress, Dipesh Chakrabarty’s work on anthropocene time helps us grasp the intersection of human history and geological time. Vandana Shiva's vision of cyclic time and Anna Tsing's insights into multispecies temporalities expand our understanding even further. The only thing more exciting than this flourishing of ideas is how I see our community engaging with them, testing them, and bringing them to life in art, tech, commerce, and other forms of creativity.
Dancing with Ideas
As a curator and host of Long Now Talks, I look forward to helping our community continue its quarter century tradition of exploring new frames for how we view our place in time.
I have always felt that our talks possess a unique alchemy that few other events can replicate — not because of any single voice, but because of the robust dialogue between our speakers and our community.
Looking ahead to 02025, we're bringing together an extraordinary lineup of voices to explore how we might transform our thinking to address planetary-scale challenges. From Benjamin Bratton's insights on planetary computation and sapience to Stephen Heintz and Kim Stanley Robinson's discussion of new logics for international relations, and from Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson's investigations of abundance to Sara Imari Walker's explorations of the physical origins of life itself — these conversations are just the beginning.
Our programming evolves with our community's dialogue — and your voice matters in shaping it. The magic happens not just in the presentations but in the conversations that follow, when members bring their own perspectives and experiences to the table. Whether in The Interval's intimate setting or our larger gatherings, our most profound insights often emerge from the dialogue between members who bring diverse frames of reference from technology, academia, arts, governance, and countless other domains.
And people keep coming back, because long-term thinking feels good. It's the opposite of crisis-mode thinking, offering a pathway to hope and a healthy foundation for lasting relationships.
In a world that often feels fragmented and accelerated, our gatherings provide a rare space to slow down, zoom out, and connect with others who share this broader perspective.
And speaking of The Interval — when was the last time you stopped by?
With its updated exhibits on long-term thinking, it’s a better reflection of our community than ever before: not just a critically acclaimed bar and café but a true gathering place for some of the most interesting conversations in the Bay Area.
I love describing the way our community interacts and welcomes newcomers to The Interval as 'intellectual samba' — a joyful, open exploration where you're invited to dance with ideas without any pressure to make them your own.
One moment you might be discussing ecology and deep time over a rare tea, the next you're debating existential risk over a craft cocktail, or simply gazing at the Golden Gate Bridge and pondering what the world might look like thousands of years from now.
The beauty lies in the freedom to engage, question, consider, and then move on to the next fascinating conversation.
A Bay Area Institution
Our deep roots in the San Francisco Bay Area's countercultural movements provide us with a unique vitality.
The region we call home has repeatedly served as a wellspring for transformative ideas — from the birth of the personal computer to the development of the internet to the Whole Earth Catalog's pioneering vision of sustainable living.
Nowadays, it’s as dynamic as it's ever been, and while we take pride in our history, we are equally excited about the here and now.
The density of local research institutions like Stanford, Berkeley, and SLAC, combined with the wealth of funding being invested in deep technology projects and the strength of our cultural institutions, creates an environment where transformative ideas can and do rapidly evolve from conception to reality. As Long Now board member Patrick Collison has shown with his pioneering Fast Grants, there are ample opportunities for our community to reimagine institutional structures that can accelerate scientific and cultural progress.
What makes this ecosystem truly special is its paradoxical culture of thinking big while remaining pragmatic — a combination that resonates deeply with Long Now's mission. This is a place where people routinely work on challenges so vast they stretch beyond traditional human timescales, while maintaining a practical focus on tangible progress. It's a rare alchemy that continues to yield breakthrough thinking.
Yet while Silicon Valley often measures success through exponential growth and market share, we see things a little differently. For us, success is measured in time, not scale.
This orientation towards longevity over rapid expansion makes us uniquely countercultural in a region that often prioritizes growth at all costs.
Majority World
While we're proudly rooted in California, we think in planetary terms and draw inspiration and wisdom from the Majority World — those regions often called "developing" but which represent most of humanity.
This concept, coined by photographer and activist Shahidul Alam, informs how we think about global futures. As a frame, it raises questions about whose futures we imagine, whose knowledge we preserve, and whose voices shape our understanding of time and progress. From emergent phenomena in global megacities to Indigenous approaches to multi-generational thinking, from Asian traditions of cosmic cycles to Latin American concepts of ecological stewardship, the Majority World offers rich traditions of long-term thinking that must inform our imagining of planetary futures.
As anthropologist Wade Davis powerfully reminded us in a memorable Long Now Talk: "Other parts of the world are not less developed versions of us."
This simple truth revolutionizes how we think about progress, time, and the future. It suggests that the path forward isn't about everyone becoming more like the West, but about weaving together diverse ways of knowing and being in time.
While many parts of the Majority World are driving new waves of high-tech innovation, other elements have long recognized what Western science is only beginning to understand: that human knowledge is just one part of a vast tapestry of intelligence that surrounds us.
CoEvolution Quarterly, wholeearth.info & The Internet Archive
Interspecies Ecologies
As we expand our frames beyond Western human perspectives, we must also embrace the intelligence and agency of more-than-human life.
All around us, a hidden world of intelligence is coming into view. We're discovering how forests communicate through intricate fungal networks, watching ravens solve puzzles that challenge our assumptions about reasoning, observing octopi as they navigate complex problems, and learning how plants remember and adapt to their environments. These revelations of nature's sophistication arrive at a critical moment, as our ecological crises deepen. Together, they invite us to reimagine our place in a web of interspecies intelligence.
Building on Wangari Maathai's vision of ecological restoration as a multi-generational project, our approach recognizes that long-term thinking must embrace these overlapping ecologies of intelligence. As Robin Wall Kimmerer has shown through her work bridging Indigenous wisdom and botanical science, and as Leslie Carol Roberts has explored through her Ecopoesis gatherings at California College of the Arts, understanding more-than-human intelligence requires us to radically reconsider our temporal and spatial frames.
The convergence of these developments — our growing appreciation of biological intelligence, accelerating ecological collapse, and the emergence of artificial intelligence — calls us to fundamentally reconsider intelligence, consciousness, and time itself.
Since the start, Long Now Talks have explored multiple ways of knowing and being in time — from the swift neural firings of insects to the slow growth of ancient trees, to the distributed intelligence of fungal networks, and the emergent capabilities of artificial minds.
The wisdom of diverse ecologies, encoded in everything from the adaptive strategies of microorganisms to the collaborative networks of forest ecosystems, offers crucial lessons for navigating our long-term future.
Neural Media
The question of media — how to capture, store, and transmit understanding across time and space — is a hallmark of our past and an important area of focus for our future.
Our Long Now Talks and thought-provoking long-term projects like our 10,000-year clocks designed by Danny Hillis and our Rosetta Project have pioneered powerful forms of immersive media — a format that traces its lineage to Stewart Brand's transformative Trips Festivals of the 01960s. Our YouTube channel has found a global audience of millions in the realm of networked media.
Today, we find ourselves increasingly engaged with what interdisciplinary artist and technologist K Allado-McDowell terms "neural media" — technologies that operate through high-dimensional networks inspired by biological brains. These new media don't simply broadcast or connect: they appear to think, reason, and create.
As Allado-McDowell observes, they challenge our understanding of intelligence and consciousness itself, presenting both opportunities and complexities for framing and sharing knowledge across time. Just as previous media revolutions transformed how humanity processes information and creates meaning, neural media will fundamentally reshape how we think about thinking.
The Long Now Foundation's role in this transformation is clear: we must help develop frameworks for using these powerful new tools responsibly in service of long-term thinking and civilizational wisdom.
Combining these and other diverse frames — from Majority World perspectives to ecological intelligence and neural media — is an essential practice for navigating the transformational era that we are now living through. As technological change accelerates and ecological systems approach tipping points, our ability to think and act across longer timescales and wider frames becomes not just valuable but vital for our collective futures.
An Invitation to Engage
Whether you're a technologist grappling with AI, an artist exploring new forms of expression, a scientist probing the fundamentals of existence, or simply someone who feels the pull of longer timescales — your perspective adds to our collective understanding.
The Long Now Foundation has always been about creating spaces where different worldviews enrich rather than conflict with each other. This is something to cherish and nurture.
Through our Long Now Talks, our forthcoming 10,000-year library initiative, our fellowship program, and the launch of our new Advisory Council, we're building both the intellectual frameworks and the human networks needed to foster responsibility over civilizational timescales.
You are invited to be part of all this: attend a Talk, become a member, visit The Interval, support our fellowship program, or partner with us in building the 10,000-year library.
Many of our most engaged members tell me they initially joined out of simple curiosity, only to discover unexpected ways their own experiences could contribute to these crucial conversations about humanity's future.
In an age of accelerating change, we feel good about creating spaces for slower, deeper thinking. Together, we're building the intellectual and cultural infrastructure needed for civilization to thrive — not just for the next quarter or year, but for generations to come.
Want to reframe the future?
The first step is dancing with ideas — and that’s what we’re here to do.
