Guide Training for the Clock of the Long Now
I’ve been following The Long Now Foundation for some time, starting with the essay in Wired Magazine in 1995 which inspired it. Its mission is to inspire long-term thinking in a world with an increasingly short time horizon. They organize around several projects, but their signature effort is to build a clock that will run for 10,000 years.
They’ve purchased a mountaintop in Nevada to house the clock. Stuart Brand described their progress in this 2004 TED talk. Last spring they issued a a call for guides. I answered.
About 40 of us spent the weekend in Nevada, becoming familiar with the mountain and making infrastructure improvements to the base camp. We also spent a lot of time getting to know one another. This self-selected group was an interesting bunch. Over the campfire one night, Stuart called us the clock’s first docents.
They’re holding an unconference about long-term thinking in June, and I’ll be back to help.
