Tags: longnow

Chimes at Midnight—Asterisk

It’s been an idea for over three decades. How did the clock that will run for 10,000 years become a reality?

The Weather Out There - Long Now

I really liked this short story.

The race to save our online lives from a digital dark age | MIT Technology Review

For many archivists, alarm bells are ringing. Across the world, they are scraping up defunct websites or at-risk data collections to save as much of our digital lives as possible. Others are working on ways to store that data in formats that will last hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of years.

Whole Earth Index

Here lies a nearly-complete archive of Whole Earth publications, a series of journals and magazines descended from the Whole Earth Catalog, published by Stewart Brand and the POINT Foundation between 1970 and 2002. They are made available here for scholarship, education, and research purposes.

Shining a Light on the Digital Dark Age - Long Now

A false sense of security persists surrounding digitized documents: because an infinite number of identical copies can be made of any original, most of us believe that our electronic files have an indefinite shelf life and unlimited retrieval opportunities. In fact, preserving the world’s online content is an increasing concern, particularly as file formats (and the hardware and software used to run them) become scarce, inaccessible, or antiquated, technologies evolve, and data decays. Without constant maintenance and management, most digital information will be lost in just a few decades. Our modern records are far from permanent.

Envisioning Our Shared Storm with Andrew Dana Hudson - Long Now

This observation feels spot-on to me:

The shift that I noticed, totally anecdotally, is literary writers are starting to write more dystopian climate futures and science fiction writers are starting to write about climate solutions.

Fandom Relics and the Enthusiastic Past - Long Now

Not much stays in one place for one long, especially when it comes to digital artifacts. When the Yahoo Groups archive was summarily deleted by parent company Verizon just a few years ago, fandom suffered massive losses, just as it had during the Livejournal purges of the late 02000s, and during the Tumblr porn ban in 02018. Fandom preservation, then, ties into the larger issue of digital preservation as a whole, and specifically the question of how individual and group emotions and experiences — which make up so much of what it means to be a fan — can be effectively documented, annotated, and saved.

How to Imagine Climate Futures - Long Now

The best climate fiction can do more than spur us to action to save the world we have — it can help us conceptualize the worlds, both beautiful and dire, that may lie ahead. These stories can be maps to the future, tools for understanding the complex systems that intertwine with the changing climates to come.

A Long Bet on Link Rot is Resolved, but Questions About the Durability of the Web Still Remain - Long Now

The Long Now foundation has a write-up on my recently-lost long bet:

On February 22, 02011, Jeremy Keith made a prediction that he hoped would be proven wrong.

“Dune,” “Foundation,” and the Allure of Science Fiction that Thinks Long-Term — Blog of the Long Now

Comparing and contrasting two different takes on long-term thinking in sci-fi: Dune and Foundation.

In a moment of broader cultural gloominess, Dune’s perspective may resonate more with the current movie-going public. Its themes of long-term ecological destruction, terraforming, and the specter of religious extremism seem in many ways ripped out of the headlines, while Asimov’s technocratic belief in scholarly wisdom as a shining light may be less in vogue. Ultimately, though, the core appeal of these works is not in how each matches with the fashion of today, but in how they look forward through thousands of years of human futures, keeping our imagination of long-term thinking alive.

The Flickr Foundation

A non-profit foundation dedicated to long-term digital preservation.

Imagine if we could place ourselves 100 years into the future and still have access to the billions of photos shared by millions of people on Flickr, one of the best documented, broadest photographic archives on the planet.

The Flickr Foundation represents our commitment to stewarding this digital, cultural treasure to ensure its existence for future generations.

Its first act is the renewal of the Flickr Commons.

Letters to the future

On one hand, it shows optimism, hope and compassion for the future of the planet. On the other hand, it shows the ever lasting detriment of our actions when it comes to single-use plastic.

The Dangerous Ideas of “Longtermism” and “Existential Risk” ❧ Current Affairs

I should emphasize that rejecting longtermism does not mean that one must reject long-term thinking. You ought to care equally about people no matter when they exist, whether today, next year, or in a couple billion years henceforth. If we shouldn’t discriminate against people based on their spatial distance from us, we shouldn’t discriminate against them based on their temporal distance, either. Many of the problems we face today, such as climate change, will have devastating consequences for future generations hundreds or thousands of years in the future. That should matter. We should be willing to make sacrifices for their wellbeing, just as we make sacrifices for those alive today by donating to charities that fight global poverty. But this does not mean that one must genuflect before the altar of “future value” or “our potential,” understood in techno-Utopian terms of colonizing space, becoming posthuman, subjugating the natural world, maximizing economic productivity, and creating massive computer simulations stuffed with 10⁴⁵ digital beings.

Notes, links, etc | There’s water in the hedgerows

How do you keep knowledge alive over centuries? Stuff that seems big enough for a group of people to worry about at the time, but not so big it makes world news. Not the information that gets in all the textbooks, but just the stuff that makes the world gently tick over.

Why Civilization Is Older Than We Thought – Palladium

When we find remains of beavers, we assume they built beaver dams, even if we don’t immediately find remnants of such dams. The beaver dams are part of what biologists would call the animal’s extended phenotype, an unavoidable necessity of the ecological niche that the beaver occupies. When we find Homo sapiens skeletons, however, we instead imagine the people naked, feasting on berries, without shelter, and without social differentiation.

My 3 Greatest Revelations - Issue 102: Hidden Truths - Nautilus

Caleb Scharf:

Wait a minute. There is no real difference between the dataome—our externalized world of books and computers and machines and robots and cloud servers—and us. That means the dataome is a genuine alternative living system here on the planet. It’s dependent on us, but we’re dependent on it too. And for me that was nerve-wracking. You get to the point of looking at it and going, Wow, the alien world is here, and it’s right under our nose, and we’re interacting with it constantly.

I like this Long Now view of our dataome:

We are constantly exchanging information that enables us to build a library for survival on this planet. It’s proven an incredibly successful approach to survival. If I can remember what happened 1,000 years ago, that may inform me for success today.

The Long Now Foundation is dedicated to long-term thinking. I’ve been a member for quite a few years now …which, in the grand scheme of things, is not very long at all.

One of their projects is Long Bets. It sets out to tackle the problem that “there’s no tax on bullshit.” Here’s how it works: you make a prediction about something that will (or won’t happen) by a particular date. So far, so typical thought leadery. But then someone else can challenge your prediction. And here’s the crucial bit: you’ve both got to place your monies where your mouths are.

Ten years ago, I made a prediction on the Long Bets website. It’s kind of meta:

The original URL for this prediction (www.longbets.org/601) will no longer be available in eleven years.

I made the prediction on February 22nd, 2011 when my mind was preoccupied with digital preservation.

One year later I was on stage in Wellington, New Zealand, giving a talk called Of Time And The Network. I mentioned my prediction in the talk and said:

If anybody would like to take me up on that bet, you can put your money down.

Matt was also speaking at Webstock. When he gave his talk, he officially accepted my challenge.

So now it’s a bet. We both put $500 into the pot. If I win, the Bletchly Park Trust gets that money. If Matt wins, the money goes to The Internet Archive.

As I said in my original prediction:

I would love to be proven wrong.

That was ten years ago today. There’s just one more year to go until the pleasingly alliterative date of 2022-02-22 …or as the Long Now Foundation would write it, 02022-02-22 (gotta avoid that Y10K bug).

It is looking more and more likely that I will lose this bet. This pleases me.

The Long Now Foundation: “Nadia Eghbal Talk”

This is a great talk by Nadia Eghbal on software, open source, maintenance, and of course, long-term thinking.

We Are As Gods

A forthcoming documentary about Stewart Brand (with music by Brian Eno).

The Cuneiform Tablets of 2015 [PDF]

A 2015 paper by Long Tien Nguyen and Alan Kay with a proposal for digital preservation.

We discuss the problem of running today’s software decades,centuries, or even millennia into the future.