At midnight on New Year鈥檚 Eve 1999, Stewart Brand鈥榮 clock will chime twice. He鈥檚 sure to be listening because the clock will not strike three until midnight on 31 December 2999. And if anyone is still around to listen, 12 chimes will sound on 31 December 11 999. Building a clock that will last about as long we鈥檝e been vaguely civilised is ambitious, but in The Clock of the Long Now Brand lays out an even bigger agenda. He and his cronies-musician Brian Eno and maverick computer scientist Daniel Hillis among others-hope the clock might kindle a sense of responsibility toward the distant future by encouraging people to think on a scale of thousands of years. The group also plans a 10 000-year library to survive any coming Dark Ages as a start-up kit for civilisation. For Brand, it鈥檚 the culmination of a wild career. Trained as an ecologist in the late 1950s, he sold badges asking: 鈥淲hy Haven鈥檛 We Seen A Photograph of the Whole Earth Yet?鈥� So of course he went on to found and produce the Whole Earth Catalog with the now-famous photograph of just that-the whole Earth-on its cover. From instructions for making a solar panel to how to roll an elegant joint, it became a must-have source book for world cool. For the past 11 years, he has made a comfortable living as co-founder of the Global Business Network, which advises top multinationals such as IBM and Monsanto on long-term thinking. So, great visionary of technology? Or ageing hippy playing mindgames? Bob Holmes visits San Francisco to find out.
快猫短视频: The big risk of your project is that it鈥檚 going to be irrelevant. Are you running on faith, or do you have reasons to think it will work?
Stewart Brand: We dare not count on instant popularity. It ain鈥檛 there. But about one out of ten or twenty people light up. Those who like the idea like it a lot and really want it to happen. The ones that don鈥檛 mostly continue to be baffled at why otherwise productive people are wasting their time at this thing.
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Fortunately, I鈥檝e had experience with this. Nobody from NASA thought that the photograph of the Earth from space would make a difference. Jacques Cousteau was the only environmentalist who thought that being in space at all had any use. But in 1969, we got good colour photographs from Apollo. The first Earth Day was in 1970. The fact it was called Earth Day suggests a pretty strong connection.
The Earth photograph gave people a large frame of reference which was compelling enough that everything else was reframed in terms of it, and it reached a kind of iconic depth and breadth. The two icons of the 20th century were the mushroom cloud and the photograph of the whole Earth. They duked it out, and the photograph of Earth won-we鈥檝e gone from a really blank pessimism to a little more optimism. The idea of the clock is to do for time what the photograph of Earth did for space.
If the clock becomes iconic in the public discourse, it would help frame discussions so thinking longer-term doesn鈥檛 feel stupid or corny. We want policymakers to be able to ask what is the 200-year impact and not have other people at the table roll their eyes and say where鈥檚 he coming from.
But shallow icons promote lip service, not real change. What makes you think the clock will go deeper than that?
To have any mythic depth, the clock has probably got to spend a while going in and out of fashion. The clock really doesn鈥檛 demonstrate long-term thinking until it鈥檚 gone long term. But we鈥檝e seen very clearly that thinking 20 years ahead makes corporations behave better.
Sceptics question whether you can ever build something that will last for ten thousand years?
It鈥檚 a valid question, and I love it when people step up to it because it means we鈥檝e already succeeded. As soon as they raise that question, they鈥檙e taking seriously the long term. The weasel answer is we don鈥檛 care. In a sense, all we鈥檙e trying to do is to foster responsibility right now, so all the clock has to do is look plausible. In a sense, the clock and the library and the Long Now Foundation are nice, semi-serious, personally felt models of thinking long-term. It鈥檚 a game in that sense. Without investing anything real, you can invest some thinking in planning ahead. It is a time machine where you get to cast your mind forward and think about what kind of institution would last ten thousand years. None have so far.
You distinguish between two concepts of time, kairos and chronos-roughly, the moment and the long march of time. Could you explain?
One of the things that becomes apparent is that younger people are very much in a kairos frame of mind-rightly so-and older people tend to get off on chronos, on duration, on things across generation. They鈥檙e not interested in fashion, they are interested in culture whereas young people are not interested in culture, they are interested in fashion. So the pace changes. I think one of the most profound things that will come with life extension, when you have people living 150 years, is that you may have a real emergence or re-emergence of the sense of the long.
Now thanks to science we have a sense of large processes that we鈥檙e a part of. Climate change would be the classic one, biodiversity another. We are an important part of dynamics that take centuries to unfold, and we have responsibilities because of that which now embrace centuries. The time to get used to that idea is now.
The elders of the tribe used to think of time pretty much as cyclic, except that there was a better time long ago. Their sense of chronos was a very pessimistic one. There used to be a golden age, then a silver age, then a tin age, then a shit age. I think it鈥檚 possible to have an optimistic version of chronos which is long-term hopeful. You see signs of it today. The new institute of exobiology that NASA is setting up-that is one of the most thrilling things I鈥檝e seen in science for a long time. That is such a forward, deep, broad, there鈥檚-life-out-there-and-we鈥檙e-going-to-be-part-of-it frame of mind. That is optimistic chronos right there.
Should all our thinking be long-term?
No. You don鈥檛 have a healthy civilisation unless a lot of stuff is moving right along-fashion, commerce, that鈥檚 where your learning and your shock absorption鈥檚 going on. But likewise if you don鈥檛 have the slow stuff, when you go out and learn the wrong lesson, there鈥檚 no school to go back to. Quick learners make mistakes.
Hence the value of the library?
Yes. The Renaissance in European history is a classic case of going back and mining the tailings of what was left of classical civilisation and coming up with the Enlightenment. Wow! The Responsibility Record is my notion of building in slow, accurate feedbacks into civilisation. When there is a debate about an important issue such as the safety of genetically modified foods, very accurate records are kept of that debate, and the participants put them into a library and assign them 鈥渨ake-up鈥� times. Those records 鈥渨ake up鈥� and call attention to themselves and ask, what happened? Ideally, when you get a collection of those kinds of records, you can begin to understand what is the best way to discuss issues with long-term consequences.
As an advisor to Monsanto, what鈥檚 your guess on the future of GM foods?
My personal opinion is that genetically modified foods-and humans and bacteria-will become commonplace. There will be problems, some of them scary, but the benefits will outweigh them. (That could apply equally to the Internet.) The important issue is keeping long-term benefits and costs in mind, as well as short-term ones. That justifies caution, very careful surveillance, and some local bans. This would be an ideal subject for a responsibility record archive.
Where will the clock be this 31 December?
We don鈥檛 know yet. Somewhere fun. We鈥檝e had invitations from people like MTV that would like to cover it at the moment. Your readers may have suggestions on where it should be this December.