Long Now’s annual print journal explores the ancient past and distant future of the present moment through essays, interviews, fiction, poetry, and visual art. The journal takes its name and shape from Long Now cofounder Stewart Brand’s pace layers framework — a tool for thinking about how civilizations work.
Essays from Blaise Agüera y Arcas, K Allado-McDowell, Benjamin Bratton, and Sara Imari Walker consider how to define and differentiate intelligence, computation, and identity in the face of synthetic minds, while a new piece by Josh Berson focuses on very human conceptions of meaning and taste.
Long Now Talks by Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson, Roman Krznaric & Kate Raworth, and Stephen Heintz & Kim Stanley Robinson chart new roadmaps to economic and geopolitical consensus.
Artworks and essays from Jonathon Keats, Ian van Coller, and Anne Heggli explore the intersection of art, science, and climate stewardship at 11,000 feet at Long Now’s Nevada Bristlecone Preserve.
Stunning visuals from photographer and adventurer Christopher Michel, Long Now’s Artist-in-Residence, illuminate humanity’s relationship with time, capturing the fragility and resilience of civilization.
An excerpt from Long Now cofounder Stewart Brand’s new book, Maintenance: Of Everything, Part One, reminds us to pay heed to Pete Seeger’s wise words: “You should consider that the essential art of civilization is maintenance.”
Life, Intelligence, and Consciousness: A Functional Perspective
by Blaise Agüera y Arcas
by Ezra Klein, Derek Thompson, & Michael Pollan
Why the Physics Underlying Life is Fundamental and Computation is Not
by Sara Imari Walker
Am I Slop? Am I Agentic? Am I Earth?
by K Allado-McDowell
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 a glimpse into our plans for our second quarter-century.
Stewart Brand opens the 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.
Elements of a Durable Civilization
by Stewart Brand
How Our Economic Stories Shape the World
by Denise Hearn
by Paul Constance
by Allegra Rosenberg
— Stewart Brand Elements of a Durable Civilization
Pace Layers carries forward a publishing lineage that began in 01968 with the Whole Earth Catalog and includes CoEvolution Quarterly and WIRED. Each issue is made in conversation with that legacy — and as a contribution to future generations.
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