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Absolutely amazing.
The crowd was incredible - I think there were half again as many people as they could let in due to fire code restrictions. It was a nice mix of people - some upwardly mobile 20somethings, lots of Burning Man types, a lot of greyhaired folk (at least a quarter of the audience seemed to be over 50). I doubt I was the only person taking notes, but I didn't see anybody else in my vicinity with a notepad and pen...
Eno was very droll, much more so than I'd expected. He started out talking about music in the 70's - what he was listening to and what he was creating - and how his ideas about time in music (getting away from a narrative structure towards something more like a landscape, and changing a listener's experience of time) and living in New York led to ideas about living in a Big Here and a Long Now.
He kind of glossed over how The Long Now Foundation came into being, other than to say that a group of people converged on the idea and that he didn't start the group. He went on to discuss peoples' reactions to talking about the future (especially on a 10,000 year scale!) and how they fell into 4 basic categories - Realist, Pessimist, Eternal Optimist, and Designer; and how those reactions kind of miss the point of just having the longer perspective.
There was a short bit about how civilization has been around for approximately 10,000 years and what happens to your mindset if you reflect that forward onto the next 10,000 years - it is an odd feeling to consider that I'm in the middle of a period that stretches out over 20,000 years! Another short bit dealt with the evolution of cooperation, how cooperation usually occurs when you have repeated interactions (and know that you will continue to have interactions with the same folk).
He shifted to talking about the Clock of the Long Now - how it's an icon of a long future and how responses to the Clock initiate engaging with that long future - the point of the exercise. The Clock needed Longevity, Maintainability, Transparency, Evolveability, and Scalability; there was a little on how each of those qualities were addressed in the Clock project and the observation of how actually making something real/physical is so different from just sitting around a table and talking about it - automatic changes in thought processes and perspectives...
He shifted from talking about the clock (and his project on bells - January 07003, for sale in the lobby) to talking about what the Long Now is about. It's not just about the future, but about long-term memory as well; not just about attempting to avert tragedy but to celebrate making art that extends well past a lifetime...
The closing line to the lecture was, "We are building the future on a daily basis, we can do it with our backs to the future or we can look at what we're doing."
There was a Q&A session after that, but I was pretty saturated by that point, have scattered soundbites as notes. He referenced a couple of books, and I'm going to stick them here at the end simply because it was too damn awkward to work them into the text above: The Evolution of Cooperation, Axelrod; Stewart Brand's book about the Clock of the Long Now; and a projected book by Eno that already has a publisher lined up but isn't finished yet - 250 Projects for a Better Future. |
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The last time I heard about the project was ages ago, when they were talking about the Clock Of The Long Now -which I found fascinating as an idea -so I'd be interested to know what's going on with them now.