Aug 20 2007
Brian Eno Wants To Alter Your Concept of “Now”
Brian Eno wants you to think about time. Not in terms of the three minute pop song, the 30 second TV spot, a day in the life, or fame’s fleeting fifteen. He wants to change your concept of “now” by stretching your notion of time. To that end, consider the date of this post to be August 20, 02007. Like a lonely zero at the far left of an automobile odometer that patiently waits to turn every 100,000 miles, the leading zero in the year 02007 gives life to the expectation that we will need that extra digit. And, like a car we expect to drive for 220,000 miles, if we want to use that fifth date year digit, we’d better take care of the maintenance.
When Brian Eno first moved to New York City in 1978, he felt that the words “here” and “now” carried different meanings for New Yorkers than for himself. “Here” meant “this room” and “now” meant “this five minutes”; connotations that felt confining to Eno compared to his European experiences where “here” minimally meant neighborhood. He observed that New York’s obsession with the latest news, the newest fashion, the next corporate earnings report and the speed of life itself indicated a mindset that produced an ever shortening perception of “now.” It seemed that this shrinking “now” exacerbated the contracting perception of “here” which was in turn leading people to care less about the things that existed outside of their personal here and now bubbles.
He dubbed these Amercian perceptions the “Small Here” and the “Short Now” and began to consider that the opposite of the Short Now –and perhaps it’s antidote– was the “Long Now.” Eno posits that as a product of the past and a progenitor of the future, “now” is an important moment that must be conscious of both the past and future. The extent of our ability to reach both forward and back defines the length of our Now.
From Eno’s The Big Here And Long Now essay:
The longer your sense of Now, the more past and future it includes. It’s ironic that, at a time when humankind is at a peak of its technical powers, able to create huge global changes that will echo down the centuries, most of our social systems seem geared to increasingly short nows…
Meanwhile, we struggle to negotiate our way through an atmosphere of Utopian promises and dystopian threats, a minefield studded with pots of treasure. We face a future where almost anything could happen… Our astonishing success as a technical civilisation has led us to complacency –to expect that things will probably just keep getting better…
If we want to contribute to some sort of tenable future, we have to reach a frame of mind where it comes to seem unacceptable - gauche, uncivilised - to act in disregard of our descendants.
How long is Eno’s Now? It extends 10,000 years into the future. Yes. Ten thousand years.
In the 01990’s (to use Long Now date nomenclature), a group of people coalesced around the idea of the Long Now, recognizing that our expectations for the future are defined by our actions in the present. They established the Long Now Foundation.
From a talk Eno gave at a Long Now Foundation Seminar in November 02003:
Now I suppose one of things about the Long Now idea is that we want to suggest that if we think long term we will think about building up cooperative relationships. If we think we’re all going to be here together for quite a long time, it might reward us to think differently about the types of relationships that we have…
We seem to have very little connection now with our possible descendants and our ancestors and we seem to not be able to make any good assumptions about how to make their world better. We’ve lost the ability of thinking long term, and it’s not surprising because the future changes so quickly. So we in the Long Now Foundation believe that these are issues that could somehow be dealt with.
The Foundation’s board is an impressive list, including Esther Dyson (multiple “ati” personality; literati, digerati, spacerati(?), etc.), Danny Hillis (inventor, pioneer in parallel supercomputing and past Disney Imagineer), Stewart Brand (co-founder of The WELL), Mitchell Kapor (creator of Lotus 1-2-3 and co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation), Kevin Kelly (founding executive editor of Wired magazine) and Brian Eno (musician and artist). The Long Now Foundation encourages us to look back 10,000 years to man’s first efforts at civilization: nascent technology use and the establishment of human settlements, and then asks us to reflect that time period forward beyond our present to 10,000 years into the future. This enormous “now” view places us at the midpoint of a 20,000 year cycle (a blip in geologic time!); setting the stage for “slower/better” thinking –for taking time to consider our actions and to proceed not as if we know the future, but that we expect the future to come.
The Foundation administers a number of projects designed to inspire people to stretch their own perception of now, consider the future, and act responsibly toward future generations. The projects include:
THE LONG NOW CLOCK (aka “the world’s slowest computer”)
Imagine a clock that ticks once a year, has a century hand advancing once every one hundred years and a cuckoo that appears each millennium. Imagine it operating for 10,000 years. Danny Hallis did just that in this 01995 essay. Later, Brian Eno devised an algorithm to produce over 3.5 millions melodic variations to a 10 note chime sequence that would provide a unique daily utterance from the clock during it’s 10,000 year lifespan. The Long Now Clock is to be monumental in size, longevity and mythology.
Such a clock, if sufficiently impressive and well engineered, would embody deep time for people. It should be charismatic to visit, interesting to think about, and famous enough to become iconic in the public discourse. Ideally, it would do for thinking about time what the photographs of Earth from space have done for thinking about the environment. Such icons reframe the way people think. [Long Now Foundation]
Destined for a limestone tomb in a Nevada mountaintop, the prototype is 8 feet tall; made of monel, stainless steel and brass; and currently held in the Science Museum in London. Pictures, Plans, and conceptual drawings can be found here.
The Rosetta Disk is a 15,000 page compendium designed to preserve knowledge about 2500 world languages; the majority of which are expected to disappear by the year 02100. Microscopically etched in nickel, these pages require simple optical magnification to be read –eliminating the fundamental problems of decoding 1’s and 0’s, obsolete data formats and deteriorating media. The disk carries a message in eight major world languages that reads: “Languages of the World: This is an archive of over 1,000 human languages assembled in the year 02002 C.E. Magnify 1,000 times to find over 15,000 pages of language documentation.” The message text begins at a font size readable by the naked eye and quickly spirals inward to nano sized type, providing a clue to future readers who may not understand one of the eight languages by tempting them to magnify the text and reveal the contents. The Rosetta Disk has fascinating historical precedents. Like its namesake, the disk offers distant generations the opportunity to unlock potentially valuable information; perhaps bridging the divide of a future Dark Age.
The stated purpose of the Long Bets Foundation is simply “to improve long term thinking.” A registered user can publish a prediction and wait for challenger to supply propose the amount of the wager. Once all terms are agreed upon, the Long Bets Foundation promises to hold the money and disburse the winnings to charity at the conclusion of the bet, be it two years away (the minimum) or two thousand years in the future (there is no maximum term).
Bets currently placed include:
- Jim Griffin (CEO, Cherry Lane Digital; founder, Evolab) bets $1000 in 02002 that: “A profitable video-on-demand service aimed at consumers will offer 10,000 titles to 5 million subscribers by 02010″
- Mitchell Kapor bets $10,000 that “By 02029 no computer - or “machine intelligence” - will have passed the Turing Test” (futurist Ray Kurzweil bets against him).
- Esther Dyson bets $5,000 that “By 02012, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times will have referred to Russia as “the world leader in software development” or words to that effect.”
- A $1000 bet: “At least one human alive in the year 2000 will still be alive in 2150″
- A $400 bet: “By 02025 the scientific evidence of a hither-to-unknown large bi-pedal great ape will be sufficient to convince at least 50% of primatologists that a yeti/bigfoot-like creature exists.”
- A $400 bet: “By 02025, the states will have voted on at least one constitutional amendment to cede US federal power to a global government.”
Predictions waiting for bettors include:
- By 02025 at least 50% of all U.S. citizens residing within the United States will have some form of technology embedded in their bodies for the purpose of tracking and identification.”
- By 02050, at least two pan-regional currencies, modeled on the Euro, will be used in the world.
- By 02070, at least six countries will have officially implemented a 4-day working week.
- By 02063, There will be only three significant currencies used in the world. More than 95 % of the countries in the world will use one of them.
- By 02150, over 50% of schools in the USA or Western Europe will require classes in defending against robot attacks.
- “The Long Bets Foundation will no longer exist in 02104.
and…
01984 and Y2K - FAINT MEMORIES
Perhaps you’re old enough to remember when two dates of great cultural significance stood on the horizon: 01984 and 02000. For a long time one held fear; the other hope. 01984 passed and, seemingly unshackled and not too closely observed, we began to look toward the millennium. Hope turned into reconstituted World War II bomb shelters, powdered milk and freeze dried space food. Did we return to hope when fear fizzled at 12:01 AM on January 1, 02000?. Seems not. What new time mark is on your horizion? As a society, have we stopped looking at/for a particular future date with universal cross cultural significance? Does the year 02100 seem so impossibly far away that we don’t even put it on our personal horizon? What furture date do we look to? We don’t. And that’s the point of the Long Now. Learning to look forward again. In a way that goes beyond our our Small Here and Short Now time marks like retirement, getting the kids through college, TGIF, or watching the Super Bowl, to concepts of time and the future that are communal, cooperative, responsible, and hopeful.
Great stuff here JM! I expected you to reference Music for Airports or Here Come the Warm Jets so was pleasantly surprised by the Long Now inclusion. Although not quite as well stated, John Cage and Cornelius Cardew pre-dated Eno on this sense of here and now. Best case in point was John’s “Organ 2″ which is as far as I know the longest concert work in history still being performed in Germany. Guess that European aesthetic does a better job of dealing with time than us quick fix Americans, eh? Nice to see your writing licks! best ,jdr
So many of the world’s, and certainly our country’s problems are the result of short-sightedness. Any effort to prolong now would seem to be a step in the right direction.
It does make me wonder if some of The Long Now Foundation’s members are too future-centric. Are we only interested in prolonging “this” now forward? Are traditionalists and historians ahead of the game by connecting the past to now and the future?
And to James’ point (that fugu-eating madman), I expected a reference to Eno’s Discreet Music, in which he takes Pachelbel’s Canon and slowly devolves the piece by assigning longer and longer note values to the various instruments.
One last anecdote- I recently read an article by Oliver Sacks in the New Yorker that explored the connections between the neuropsychological effects of Catatonia and Tourette’s Syndrome and the experience of time. Catatonics are apparently the masters of the long now, whereas sufferers of Tourette’s Syndrome, some experts believe, are experiencing time faster than they can properly filter. Amazing stuff…
Getting into Eno’s music and how it relates to concepts of time would be a great followup –and likely as daunting as a dissertation (grad students, anyone?). Terry Riley, Steve Reich, La Monte Young, Philip Glass, etc. all deserve mention as does Erik Satie when getting into music and stretching perceived time or throwing out any cares about time and focusing on process (Of course Satie’s Furniture Music is a pre-echo of Music for Airports, et al). Satie’s Vexations can take nearly 24 hrs to perform its 840 repetitions depending upon the tempo. I listened to part of a performance of it years ago. You have to get to a point where you let go and just get lost in the repetition and then you start to hear variations within the cycles and slowly a larger view comes into focus.
Cultural perceptions of time is a subject that goes WAY beyond the differences between New Yorkers and Europeans. My recent experience working with Native Americans introduced me to the idea that because there’s an endless supply of time stretching far off into the distant future, there’s no need to worry about getting something done by a certain date –it will eventually get done because there’s no such thing as “running out of time.” Hard to explain to construction contractors and project installers, but the serene delivery of the concept by a tribal member leaves one rather speechless. OK, my work is finished and has been waiting for two years to be delivered. I guess I’ve got the time! The Long Now Foundation projects take a similar view: there is no deadline; there’s plenty of time; it will get done.
Thanks for reading!
Brilliant as always, JMcD.
I’m fascinated with the idea of the Long Now. I would localize however to the Long Week. You know, like “there are 07 days in this week. I’ve got plenty of time to get that project done. Wait a minute what day is it now? Aw, 0crap.”
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The sense of now is interesting on many levels. Research shows we are actually “clocked” beings, and while our clock rate averages 117bpm, it not only varies across individuals +/- 10%, but over each individual’s life. A individual’s clock runs at a higher rate as a child than that as an adult, and as a senior it slows even more. Perceptually this affects our point of view: time literally moves slower for kids, with their faster frame rate capturing more details “in the moment”, while older folks better-perceive the interconnectedness of people and find patience easier thanks to their slower frame rate and longer exposures. Literally.
In addition to projects like the ones above, a “CityCam” project was started wherein a fixed camera takes a single exposure each day of a city from an overlook. This creates an even record of mutation and change. The application of this data is unknowable, but certain to be of value. Similarly, there’s a photo technique evolving in architecture for revealing the guts and surface of a building at once through repeated multiple exposures of a single frame - it renders the structure of buildings visible, within an equally visible facade. Spooky but cool expression of time through architecture (which seems static from our normal point of view).