As we stand at the gateway of a new year, we’d like to look back at what we’ve accomplished here at Long Now over the course of 02022.
Conversation
This year, we continued our mission of the past 25 years: fostering long-term thinking. Our work encourages imagination at the timescale of civilization — the next and last 10,000 years — a timespan we call the long now.
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The Long Now Talks, now in its 20th year of production, reached millions of people globally this year, offering free public lectures on topics including the threat of space debris and the 10,000-year-old history of alcohol in human society.
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Here are some of the highlights from this year’s full series of Talks.
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We began the year with a set of Talks that included science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson on Climate Futures, a reflection that looked beyond 02022 and into the future of collective action against climate change. youtu.be/oUYr89QbFQ0
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In April, author and professor spoke to us about how to become a long-term thinker within your own life — applying big picture ideas on a personal scale.
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In the summer, founder spoke to us on the need for long-term thinking in addressing the entrenched problems of poverty and lack of opportunity in our society. youtube.com/watch?v=7rSQCN
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In the fall, joined us for a conversation with and on social media, democracy, and how they will shape the next cycle of history. youtu.be/SbUViuFITTI
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AI, Regulating Social Media, & Accelerating Change | Jonathan Haidt
Social Psychologist Jonathan Haidt discusses how technological tools and sociological insights can be used to solve the problems present in current social media platforms.
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We ended the year with the launch of our exhibition of ’s sculpture This Present Moment in partnership with , an exploration of the power art has in fostering long-term thinking. youtu.be/g5gVHmH3U2c
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In addition to our Talks, Long Now also published more than two dozen feature length articles, interviews, poems, and short stories this year that capture different facets of the world of long-term thinking.
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. & traveled to a church in Halberstadt, Germany to witness an ongoing performance of John Cage’s ORGAN2/ASLSP (As SLow aS Possible), a 639-year long endeavor that they’ve begun to document as a meditation on long-term thinking.
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Laura Buszard-Welcher, a long-time leader in Long Now’s language preservation efforts, wrote a guide to preserving linguistic data into the long-term future — a process that requires technical and social expertise.
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. explored how fandom communities recall and forget their own histories, and how these fan communities reflect broader challenges to knowledge preservation.
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. delved deep into human evolutionary history, investigating how and why we as a species developed our “acorn brains” and our capacity for long-term thinking.
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Urbanist & futurist Johanna Hoffman asked us “What if the Best Times are Still to Come?,” using collective imagination and hope to sketch out what the cities of the future may hold.
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Investigative journalist Andrew brought us to Zimbabwe for a real-time look into how climate migration is reshaping the ecosystems of the country -- and how local organizations are responding.
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Paul Constance peered into the Invisible Present, investigating how Long-term datasets and nature apps that allow everyone to make research-grade observations are expanding our ecological attention span into the long now.
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We finished the year with poems from and James Steck and short stories from and , each taking an artistic lens to long-term thinking.
longnow.org/ideas/conseque
longnow.org/ideas/four-poe
longnow.org/ideas/the-mamm
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Our work at Long Now is entirely supported by our donors and members. To all of our supporters: thank you for keeping our work going into our next year and our next quarter century of operations. Here’s to many more years of fostering long-term thinking.
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