Stewart Brand's Blog, page 20

David Byrne Launches New Online Magazine, Reasons to Be Cheerful

In his Long Now talk earlier this summer, David Byrne announced that he would soon launch a new website called Reasons to Be Cheerful. The premise, Byrne said, was to document stories and projects that give cause for optimism in troubles times. He was after solutions-oriented efforts that provided tangible lessons that could be broadly utilized in different parts of the world.

“I didn’t want something that would only be applied to one culture,” Byrne said.

Reasons to Be Cheerful has now officially launched. Here is Byrne on the project from the press release:

It often seems as if the world is going straight to Hell. I wake up in the morning, I look at the paper, and I say to myself, “Oh no!” Often I’m depressed for half the day. I imagine some of you feel the same.

Recently, I realized this isn’t helping. Nothing changes when you’re numb. So, as a kind of remedy, and possibly as a kind of therapy, I started collecting good news. Not schmaltzy, feel-good news, but stuff that reminded me, “Hey, there’s positive stuff going on! People are solving problems and it’s making a difference!”

I began telling others about what I’d found.

Their responses were encouraging, so I created a website called Reasons to be Cheerful and started writing. Later on, I realized I wanted to make the endeavor a bit more formal. So we got a team together and began commissioning stories from other writers and redesigned the website. Today, we’re relaunching Reasons to be Cheerful as an ongoing editorial project.

We’re telling stories that reveal that there are, in fact, a surprising number of reasons to feel cheerful — that provide a more optimistic and, we believe, more accurate depiction of the world. We hope to balance out some of the amplified negativity and show that things might not be as bad as we think. Stop by whenever you need a reminder.

Learn More

Byrne also released a trailer for the website, which you can watch below:







Watch David Byrne’s Long Now talk here.

AI analyzed 3.3 million scientific abstracts and discovered possible new materials

A new paper shows how AI can accelerate scientific discovery through analyzing millions of scientific abstracts. From the MIT Technology Review:

Natural-language processing has seen major advancements in recent years, thanks to the development of unsupervised machine-learning techniques that are really good at capturing the relationships between words. They count how often and how closely words are used in relation to one another, and map those relationships in a three-dimensional vector space. The patterns can then be used to predict basic analogies like “man is to king as woman is to queen,” or to construct sentences and power things like autocomplete and other predictive text systems.

A group of researchers have now used this technique to munch through 3.3 million scientific abstracts published between 1922 and 2018 in journals that would likely contain materials science research. The resulting word relationships captured fundamental knowledge within the field, including the structure of the periodic table and the way chemicals’ structures relate to their properties. The paper was published in Nature last week.

MIT Technology Review

Mariana Mazzucato on the Economics Behind the Apollo Moon Landing

Getting to the moon and back again required unprecedented innovation across different sectors of the United States economy. Economist Mariana Mazzucato on the economics behind the Apollo 11 moon landing.

From the Long Now Seminar, “Rethinking Value” by Mariana Mazzucato. Watch the full talk here.

Neal Stephenson on the Ending of Game of Thrones

Author Neal Stephenson discusses the controversial ending to Game of Thrones and why endings are generally so hard to nail in works of fiction.

From the Neal Stephenson Conversation at the Interval, “Fall, or Dodge in Hell.” Watch the full video here.

Brian Eno’s Soundtrack for the Apollo 11 Moon Landing

50 years ago, the Apollo 11 moon landing was televised live to some 600 million viewers back on planet Earth. One of them was future Long Now co-founder Brian Eno, then 21. He found himself underwhelmed by what he saw. 

Footage from the television transmission of the moon landing.

Surely, there was more gravitas to the experience than the grainy, black and white footage suggested. In the months that followed, the same few seconds of Neil Armstrong’s small steps played on an endless loop on TV as anchors and journalists offered their analysis and patriotic platitudes as a soundtrack. The experts, he later wrote, “[obscured] the grandeur and strangeness of the event with a patina of down-to-earth chatter.”

In 01983, Eno decided to add his own soundtrack to the momentous event. His ninth solo album, Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks was produced to accompany a documentary, Apollo, that consisted solely of 35mm footage from the Apollo 11 mission, with no narration. The first iteration of the film was too experimental for most audiences; it was recut with commentary from Apollo astronauts when it was eventually re-released as For All Mankind in 01989. 

The remastered and extended edition of Brian Eno’s Apollo album will be released on July 19.

This year, on the occasion of the moon landing’s 50th anniversary, Eno has revisited the Apollo project. He reunited with original producers Daniel Lanois and Roger Eno to remaster the album and record 11 new instrumental compositions. The album, Apollo: Extended Edition, will be released on July 19. A new music video for the album’s most well-known track, “An Ending (Ascent)” has also been released with visuals from a 02016 Earth overview.

A new music video for Brian Eno’s “An Ending (Ascent).”

To celebrate the album’s release and the moon landing anniversary, Long Now will be hosting a Brian Eno album listening event at The Interval on the evenings of July 23, 24, 30, and 31. 

The album will be played on our Meyer Sound System, accompanied by footage of the Apollo missions as well as a special mini menu of cocktails inspired by the album. Tickets are $20 and are expected to go quickly. 

The Apollo missions have always been a point of inspiration for Long Now over the years, both for the Big Here perspective they provided as well as for the long-term thinking they utilized. Below are links to some of our Apollo-related blog posts and articles:

“Digital Recovery of Moon Images” by Kevin Kelly (02009)“The Apollo Goodwill Disc” by Alex Mensing (02012)“Jeff Bezos Recovers Apollo 11’s F-1 Engines” by Charlotte Hajer (02013)“Whole Earth Psychology” by Charlotte Hajer (02013)“Spaceship Earth” by Charlotte Hajer (02013)“Apollo 17 Digital Archive” by Andrew Warner (02016)
“Overview: Earth and Civilization in the Macroscope” by Ahmed Kabil (02018)

The Global Tree Restoration Potential

Earlier this month, a study appeared in Science that found that a global reforestation effort could capture 205 gigatons of CO2 over the next 40-100 years—two thirds of all the CO2 humans have generated since the industrial revolution:

The restoration of trees remains among the most effective strategies for climate change mitigation. We mapped the global potential tree coverage to show that 4.4 billion hectares of canopy cover could exist under the current climate. Excluding existing trees and agricultural and urban areas, we found that there is room for an extra 0.9 billion hectares of canopy cover, which could store 205 gigatonnes of carbon in areas that would naturally support woodlands and forests. This highlights global tree restoration as our most effective climate change solution to date. However, climate change will alter this potential tree coverage. We estimate that if we cannot deviate from the current trajectory, the global potential canopy cover may shrink by ~223 million hectares by 2050, with the vast majority of losses occurring in the tropics. Our results highlight the opportunity of climate change mitigation through global tree restoration but also the urgent need for action.

Via Science.

Scientific American unpacked the study and its potential implications:

The study team analyzed almost 80,000 satellite photo measurements of tree cover worldwide and combined them with enormous global databases about soil and climate conditions, evaluating one hectare at a time. The exercise generated a detailed map of how many trees the earth could naturally support—where forests grow now and where they could grow, outside of areas such as deserts and savannahs that support very few or no trees. The team then subtracted existing forests and also urban areas and land used for agriculture. That left 0.9 billion hectares that could be forested but have not been. If those spaces were filled with trees that already flourish nearby, the new growth could store 205 gigatons of carbon by the time the forests mature.

After 40 to 100 years, of course, the storage rate would flatten as forest growth levels off—but the researchers say the 205 gigatons would be maintained as old trees die and new ones grow. There would be “a bank of excess carbon that is no longer in the atmosphere,” Crowther says.

Via Scientific American.

Long-Lived Institutions

The Sagrada Familia Catholic Church in Barcelona, Spain. The Catholic Church is one of the longest-lived institutions in human history.

The Long Now Foundation was founded in 01996 with the idea to build a 10,000 year clock — an icon to long-term thinking that might inspire people to engage more deeply with the future. We have been prototyping and designing the Clock since then, and are now in the installation phase of the monument scale version in West Texas.

It was acknowledged at the inception of Long Now that while designing and building a mechanical device to last 10,000 years would involve difficult engineering, designing the institution to last along side it was the truly challenging project. We have human-made artifacts from tens of thousands to even millions of years ago, but there are vanishingly few human organizations and institutions that have lasted longer than even a single millennia. Even more concerning is the trend that organizations are lasting for shorter and shorter lengths of time, even though the challenges such organizations must address — whether they be climate change, education, ecosystem viability — are only increasing in terms of temporal significance.

As we stand at the edge of a generational shift as an organization, it became clear that we needed a generational unit of time — 25 years — to use for our planning. There are four hundred 25 year generations in 10,000 years, and we are just closing the very first one. So if the “Long Now Quarter” is 25 years, and we spent our first quarter building the Clock and our community, it is now time to start planning our second quarter in which we are thinking seriously about how to create a very long-lived organization.

In February, we held a small charrette at The Interval to broaden our thinking about building long-lived institutions. The group consisted of Long Now staff, board members, and outside experts.

Scenario Planning for the Long-term

The event opened with Peter Schwartz, a founding board member of Long Now and author of The Art of the Long View, giving an overview of his work in scenario planning for organizations.

A map from 01701 depicting California as an island that Schwartz used to exemplify the limited nature of our mental maps.

Schwartz discussed how organizations are often limited by mental maps in the choices they make about the future. Effective scenario planning helps organizations build a broader set of mental maps so that they are better prepared for a changing future. The test of a good scenario, Schwartz argued, is not whether or not it is accurate. Rather, it’s about whether or not the leadership of an organization is influenced to make better decisions in light of that scenario.

Intellectual Dark Matter

Following Schwartz, Samo Burja, a researcher specializing in how civilizations function, introduced the idea of intellectual dark matter, which he defines as“knowledge we cannot see publicly, but whose existence we can infer because our institutions would fly apart if the knowledge we see were all there was.”

Burja used the Bessemer steel process to illustrate his idea of tacit knowledge, “knowledge that is not transmitted in written form.”

Burja explored how civilizations have historically lost knowledge, information, and in some cases even the foundations of their entire societies. In so doing, he was able to highlight many areas that any organization aspiring for long-term survival must avoid.

The Data of Long-Lived Institutions

Following Burja, I gave an overview of some of my research into what type of organizations last, what they have in common, and which elements and strategies they developed that have contributed to their survival. Unfortunately, some of the longest-lived organizations, such as the Catholic church or a temple building company in Japan, have some of the least portable lessons for us. Their success is too singular, and the result of highly specific circumstances that will never apply to another organization.

Kees Van Der Heijden’s “strangely prophetic” business idea for Long Now from 01997.

As we delve into the stories of the world’s longest lived organizations more deeply, we are looking for mechanisms that we can borrow and put into practice as cultural institutions, companies, and governments. In so doing, we hope to extend the lifespan of many more organizations so that they are better able to address issues facing humanity that need more than a few years to solve. Imagine if the World Health Organization had been around for a millennia or two, with all their health data intact, how valuable of a resource this would be. It seems that it is our duty to make sure the resources are available for some version of the WHO and its data can last at least that long in to the future.

The Longevity of Nature

To broaden our thinking about the mechanisms of long-term systemic success, we heard from complexity researcher Dr. Eric Berlow, who has been mapping ecological systems to see how robust or fragile they may be. Berlow’s detailed studies of these complex systems are used to create beautiful and informative visuals that clearly map how dependencies in a system combine to create the whole.

A visualization by Berlow showing the shapes of dependency chains in certain ecosystems.

The recurring theme in nature, Berlow said, is that everything is connected, but not equally connected or randomly connected. “The non-randomness in the patterning of the architecture of nature,” Berlow concluded, “is where the library of information about longevity exists.”

Language, Meaning, and Culture

In the afternoon, the director of our own Rosetta Project, Dr. Laura Welcher, a PhD linguist, discussed one of the longest lived human systems — language itself. While language has been with us for a very long time, it is an evolving and changing system. Welcher pointed out the drastic difference between preserving information vs meaning.

Generational Transitions and Governing Systems

The last talk of the day came from one of Long Now’s board members, Katherine Fulton. Fulton emerged as a leading thinker on impact investing and the future of philanthropy, and has worked for many companies and foundations as they transition from one generation to the next.

Fulton argued that the key lesson for a company surviving from the first generation to the next is to have enough structure, but not too much.

Fulton pointed out that generational change, and how it is handled, is often one of the most critical moments in any organization that hopes to last more than a decade or two. In times of generational change, much of the ability for a successful transition comes from the founding DNA and governing systems that were set up at the organization’s inception.

This is just the beginning of our inquiry into understanding how organizations last. Key questions remain: How do we create best practices for governing systems? How do we develop a culture that is attuned to the nuances of systemic robustness? Fundamentally, this is a systems design question. For a system to last, it needs to have ways of adapting to a changing world, and be able to fail in small ways, and recover from those failures without having the whole system crash. I suspect that as we learn more about specific examples of long-lived organizations, we will hear about several instances in which they almost failed, only to recover and become stronger as a result. As we continue our learning, we hope to create the beginning of a knowledge base that is applicable not only to Long Now, but to any organization aiming to thrive across generations.

We would like to thank all those who participated in the workshop:

Stewart Brand — President of The Long Now Foundation and founder of the Whole Earth CatalogPeter Schwartz — Board Member at Long Now and Senior VP of Strategic Planning at SalesforceKatherine Fulton — Board Member at Long Now and former President of the Monitor InstituteSamo Burja — Researcher at Bismarck AnalysisAlexander Rose — Executive Director of The Long Now FoundationLaura Welcher — Director of Operations and the Long Now LibraryDanica Remy — President of B612 FoundationMarty Krasney — Executive Director of the Dalai Lama FellowsEric Berlow — Ecological Network Scientist, Co-founder of Vibrant Data Inc.Lawrence Wilkinson — Chairman of Heminge & Condell and Vice Chairman of Common Sense MediaAbby Smith Rumsey — Writer and HistorianJim O’Neill — Managing Director Mithril Capital ManagementNicholas Paul Brysiewicz — Director of Development at The Long Now FoundationDaniel Claussen — Research Fellow at The Long Now FoundationJames Cham — Partner at Bloomberg BetaFrances Winter — Chair of English Department at Massbay Community CollegeDavid Lei — Co-founder of the Chinese American Community FoundationZhan Li — Researcher at the Gottlieb Duttweiler InstituteLulie Tanett — WriterFrederick Leist — Information Technology Consultant, Medieval LinguisticsDavid McConville — President of the Buckminster Fuller InstituteErik Davis — Author and JournalistGary Yost — Founder of Wisdom VR, Filmmaker and Software DesignerHannu Rajaniemi — Science Fiction AuthorTim Chang — Partner at Mayfield Fund

Revive & Restore Releases Ocean Genomics Horizon Scan

Revive & Restore has released a 200-page report providing the first-of-its-kind assessment of genomic and biotech innovations to complement, enhance, and accelerate today’s marine conservation strategies.

Revive & Restore’s mission is to enhance biodiversity through the genetic rescue of endangered and extinct species. In pursuit of this and in response to global threats to marine ecosystems, the organization conducted an Ocean Genomics Horizon Scan – interviewing almost 100 marine biologists, conservationists, and technologists representing over 60 institutions. Each was challenged to identify ways that rapid advances in genomics could be applied to address marine conservation needs. The resulting report is a first-of-its-kind assessment of  highlighting the opportunities to bring genomic insight and biotechnology innovations to complement current and future marine conservation.

Our research has shown that we now have the opportunity to apply biotechnology tools to help solve some of the most intractable problems in ocean conservation resulting from: overfishing, invasive species, biodiversity loss, habitat destruction, and climate change. This report presents the most current genomic solutions to these threats and develops 10 “Big Ideas” – which, if funded, can help build transformative change and be catalytic for marine health.

Read the full report here.

How We Spend Time

Earlier this year, Craig Mod set out on a 620 mile walk across Japan to see if he could develop a more mindful relationship with his smartphone. Along the way, he discovered the benefits of boredom, the “experience of time,” and the enriching details we miss when we remain always-on:

A month ago, when I started walking, I decided to conduct an experiment. Maybe even a protest. I wanted to test hypotheses. Our smartphones are incredible machines, and to throw them away entirely feels foolhardy. The idea was not to totally disconnect, but to test rational, metered uses of technology. I wanted to experience the walk as the walk, in all of its inevitably boring walkiness. To bask in serendipitous surrealism, not just as steps between reloading my streams. I wanted to experience time.

via WIRED.

Long-term Thinking in a Start-up Town

Long Now’s Executive Director Alexander Rose recently appeared on the Freakonomics podcast in Episode 381, “Long-term Thinking in a Start-up Town.” The podcast was recorded before a live audience in a variety show format. In addition to Rose, the show featured the co-founder of Lyft, a pioneer in male birth control, a specialist in water security, and a psychology professor who is also a puppy. 

Rose spoke about the 10,000 Year Clock; the benefits and pitfalls of long-term thinking; and the Interval, which Rose called “one of the top first-date bars in San Francisco.”

Speaking about the Clock, Rose said:

The idea is to challenge your thoughts about time, and there’s a lot of ways you could do that. We could have a white paper that talks about this. But what we were trying to do is create something on a mythic scale that’s kind of the Grand Canyon but for time. A large art piece in the desert that is a monument to long-term thinking.

Listen to the podcast in full here.