Very rough notes from Stuart’s talk:

Long Now London
stuart candy
16.3.09

designs on a longer now

q: what drew you into the long now?

(the hope is) this group is a group of early adopters of an idea which can get into the broader culture eventually?

stewart brand: why haven’t we seen a picture of the whole earth yet?

made a hundreds of badges the next day with this on
echoing bucky: people don’t think about their impact on the whole earth as a system as they cannot see it

Apollo program picture ‘blue marble’ had the mainstream impact needed for this

Long now is trying to do the equivalent for time as the blue marble did for space

a cultural change in attitudes towards time

(shows protos of the LN clock and mt washington in nevada where the clock is to be built)

but – it’s not really the clock that is the central object – it’s designing culture around the clock… the clock is a catalyst for that.

manifesting futures in the present: ‘found futures’

why: because physiologically, neurally, culturally we all programmed for continuity while living through discontinuity (accelerating change)

building bridges across this] experiential gulf

project: hawaii2050: workshopping with 600 ppl, 4 different versions (scenario) of 2050
continued growth / discipline / collapse / transformation

project: art objects from a 2108 Hawaii: found objects from a future scenario

problem: not everyone you want to reach is attending these things (self-selecting)

solution?: guerilla futures : ad-hoc incursions into futures.
manifest futures in the present whether people have requested it or not

project: postcards from different scenarios printed and sent to the most powerful people in the state of Hawaii at their home addresses one a day without explanation

project: simulated urban gentrification takeover : used vacant lots and filled them with fake posters of multinational brands moving into a chinatown. ‘save chinatown’ group went out and lobbied passers by. unintended consequence: ppl annoyed that they had been ‘hoaxed’

projects: scenario where relationship between Hawaii and china supplants that of the usa, and a bird flu scenario of 2016, played out in wall plaques and street signs (backwards)

Future Shock-therapy

bruce sterling asked: what would happen if you changed ‘guerilla’ interventions into a regular standing army?

got candy thinking: a 2nd strategy: ‘ambient foresight’

foresight as an emergent capacity – instead of being deliberately disorienting and interventionist – it’s more subtle and day-to-day. implicit, incidental

‘what kind of practice do we need to be thinking about the future day to day, for it to be woven into culture’

cf. paul hawken: ‘sustainability should be as easy as falling off a log’

ambient foresight examples: lung pictures on cigarette packets? nutrition facts (!)

carbon/energy facts: jamais’s cheeseburger footprint

aim: ‘social capacity for foresight’ (richard slaughter)