Customer Reviews

Clock of the Long Now: The Ideas Behind the World's Slowest Computer

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1 star:		(1)

 

 

Stewart Brand definitely has a knack for presenting a cross-current of ideas in a way that is simultaneously engaging and thought provoking. While some will find the actual project of the Clock and the Library far fetched, it does form a very effective backdrop for "[forcing] thinking in interesting directions; among other things, toward long-term responsibility."

This is definitely a book to read more than once. I found new thoughts forming as I re-read chapters that were now framed by concepts presented in later chapters. Yet, the chapters are nice and short and self-contained so I could easily pick up the book, re-read some chapter that caught my fancy, and feel satisfied contemplating some aspect of the entirety -- like being able to savor a snack instead of having to eat an entire meal.

I dog-eared "The Order of Civilization" chapter which for me really crystallized analogous concepts concerning the construction of robust "organic" information systems (what I'm supposed to be doing for a living). I loved the concept of layers operating at ever slower paces maintaining the resilience of the overall system. I also found "Ending the Digital Dark Age" very interesting. I highly recommend this book to anyone designing systems that could have an impact on the world for any significant length of time.

Incidentally, the half-past chimes sounded on my century clock while I was reading this book. Maybe that is one of the reasons I liked it so much. Perhaps you have to be "over the hill", riding at ever increasing speed toward the future of your children to really be turned on by these ideas.

There are two kinds of books that make you feel smart. The first kind is so laughably awful that you put it down thinking "I'm WAY smarter than that guy." The second, and better, kind is a book that leaves you with a couple dozen exciting new ideas whizzing around your head, firing your imagination and inspiring thoughts you would never otherwise have had. This book is the second kind. With solidly-documented ideas and examples drawn from a hundred sources, Brand demonstrates that our relationship to time, and the models we use to think about it, are no longer useful and need to be changed. The new models for thinking about it are included at no charge.

This book examines the topic of thinking and planning for the long term - and the author definitely means the LONG term. The book focuses on two nascent projects headed up by the author and the "Long Now Foundation" - the effort to build a 10,000 year clock and a 10,000 year library. This projects are intended to help shift humanity's concept of "now" to a much longer time frame. And with this shift in the concept of now, it is hoped that a new concept of responsibility for our individual and group behavior will emerge.

This book and the thinking behind it represent an excellent counterpoint to the prevalent and destructive view of "now" as beeing some extremely short term time frame - today, this week, or (for many corporations) this quarter. One can only hope that it is widely read. If the ideas behind this book and its associated project change only a small segment of our population's view about stewardship and care for the long-term health and longevity of our planet and our race it will be well worth the effort.

While I thought the book was generally very well-written, and presented many, many thought-provoking points, some of the ideas seem to have been rather poorly thought out and gave the impression of having been simply tossed in to the mix. At one point a potential role of the 10,000 year library as a repository of both sides of important debates is described - an excellent idea, but the objective is described as allowing future generations to know who to "blame" if things go wrong. Going to all this trouble just so our descendants can engage in blaming someone for something seems rather silly. Fortunately, there are loftier goals for this project, and many are very well described throughout the book.

This book has strongly impacted the way I think about the future. I highly recommend it.

The Long Now Foundation has done some great work since this book was published back in 1999. The group's basic goal of alleviating humanity's destructively short attention span is a great one, and anyone who feels that the world is on the wrong course would find great enlightenment in the group's works. But interested persons would be better served to check out what the Long Now Foundation has accomplished since this very preliminary book was published. Stewart Brand merely compiled a not very robust collection of undeveloped musings and rhetorical questions that merely hint at the potential of the Long Now worldview. Also, I don't think any other reviewers caught the irony of a series of short and largely self-contained essays (averaging around 4-5 pages) collected in a book that's trying to increase humanity's attention span. Granted, there are many great insights in here, particularly how digitized information storage actually leads to the disappearance of more knowledge, and how humanity's worst problems are long term and are misunderstood with typical short term thinking. Once again, the Foundation's got incredible ideas. But this particular book, from early in the group's existence, shows only fragmented hints of a philosophy that hadn't yet come together. [~doomsdayer520~]

I confess to being dumb. Although I know and admire the author, who has spoken at my conference, when the book came out I thought--really dumb, but I mention it because others may have made the same mistake--that it was about building a cute clock in the middle of the desert.

Wrong, wrong, wrong (I was). Now, three years late but better late than never, on the recommendation of a very dear person I have read this book in detail and I find it to be one of the most extraordinary books--easily in the top ten of the 300+ books I have reviewed on Amazon.

At it's heart, this book, which reflects the cummulative commitment of not only the author but some other brilliant avant guarde mind including Danny Hillis, Kevin Kelly (WIRED, Out of Control, the Rise of Neo-Biological Civilization), Esther Dyson, Mitch Kapor (Lotus, Electronic Frontier Foundation) and a few others, is about reframing the way people--the entire population of the Earth--think, moving them from the big now toward the Long Here, taking responsibility for acting as it every behavior will impact on the 10,000 year long timeframe.

This book is in the best traditions of our native American forebears (as well as other cultures with a long view), always promoting a feedback-decision loop that carefully considered the impact on the "seventh generation." That's 235 years or so, or more.

The author has done a superb job of drawing on the thinking of others (e.g. Freeman Dyson, Esther's father) in considering the deep deep implications for mankind of thinking in time (a title popularized, brilliantly, by Ernest May and Richard Neustadt of Harvard), while adding his own integrative and expanding ideas.

He joints Lee Kuan Yew, brilliant and decades-long grand-father of Asian prosperity and cohesiveness, in focusing on culture and the long-term importance of culture as the glue for patience and sound long-term decision-making. His focus on the key principles of longevity, maintainability, transparency, evolvability, and scalability harken back to his early days as the editor of the Whole Earth Review (and Catalog) and one comes away from this book feeling that Stewart Brand is indeed the "first pilot" of Spaceship Earth.

It is not possible and would be inappropriate to try to summarize all the brilliant insights in this work. From the ideas of others to his own, from the "Responsibility Record" to using history as a foundation for dealing with rapid change, to the ideas for a millenium library to the experienced comments on how to use scenarios to reach consensus among conflicted parties as to mutual interests in the longer-term future, this is--the word cannot be overused in this case--an extraordinary book from an extraordinary mind.

This book is essential reading for every citizen-voter-taxpayer, and ends with an idea for holding politicians accountable for the impact of their decisions on the future. First class, world class. This is the book that sets the stage for the history of the future.

This easy to read yet intellectually stimulating book describes the need for mankind to consider the long-term, and presents the Clock of the Long Now project - a clock that will record time for some 10,000 years, as well as its accompanying 10,000-Year Library. Design considerations of a clock that could run for 10,000 years are discussed. The importance of culture and libraries are discussed, as well as the short lifespan of digital information for a variety of reasons, often due to the introduction of newer technologies making older representations obsolete. It is put forth that a 10,000-Year Library would make the world safer for rapid change, and the possible collections of such a library are discussed.

Brand, author of The Whole Earth Catalog, is part of a team that is endeavoring to build a clock that will last for ten thousand years. In here, he comments on the lessons to be learned from that effort and the result.

These days time seems to be getting ever shorter, our subjective "now" shrinking from generations to years or less. People need to think on the longer term, for the sake of earth and civilization. Brand broods on how to accomplish this with a series of short, themed articles addressing everything from a visit to Big Ben to a commentary on how the digital age has made things more impermanent rather than less. (Want to try to run a Commodore 64 program? Well, you might almost as well forget it.) He provides a list of levels of paces, from fashion (the quickest) through commerce, infrastructure, governance, culture, and (the slowest) nature. He points out the twentieth century phenomenon of organizations and movements devoted to historical preservation, both a luxury that earlier ages would have found it hard to afford and perhaps a need to be filled in our fast-paced age.

A fascinating and thought-provoking read.

This book by Stewart Brand is an excellent read for any organization, be it profit or non-profit. I particularly enjoyed the "techno-rapture" explanation. I couldn't help but imagine this being the next Y2K issue that will plague the business world's imagination.

Several years ago I worked on a modest IS project. We spent a majority of the project effort on migrating data from the legacy system to the new system. To comprehend the enormous task of migrating 10,000 years of information ranks up their with comprehending "God" and "infinity".

I hope to pass this book on to many of my peers and friends to help them really understand what the "long now" really means.

This book offers great perspectives on time, our future and "progress". Forget megaflops, think about building the worlds slowest computer, something that will last 10,000 years, or a post office that will deliver after a millennium! The chapter on "Digital dark age" is a must for any librarian or archivist ("Digital storage is easy ... digital preservation is hard"). The building of a clock to last 10,000 years may be a partial antidote to a society with attention deficit disorder (See for example Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything by James Gleick). I would have been interested in more specifics on keeping the clock running, and how to retain the organization over time. Will someone in 2,000 years still have the cultural context to be able to read this book or keep the clock going? I don't know if this clock and library will ever be built, but I hope so.

A fantastic bit of summarising of humanity's position both past and present. I feel in a better position to understand what's going on around me having read it. Instant wisdom. We've got to get more people seeing the world through the eye's of the Long Now Foundation. We'd be a lot happier for it I'm sure.