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Stuart Candy at Long Now London
Stuart Candy, of the Hawaii Center for Future Studies and Fellow of Long Now Foundation was speaking this evening at a Long Now London meetup.
The Clock of the Long Now is not so much about building a clock as building a culture around the clock.
The story goes that Long Now co-founder Stewart
Brand was under the influence of LSD on top of a building in San Francisco in the 60s, and thought he saw
the tops of the buildings diverging (an effect of the curvature of the earth). The next
day he had badges produced: "Why haven't we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet?". From this the Whole Earth Catalog and the WELL (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link) were born.
The Long Now is doing for time what Whole Earth did for space.
We
are programmed for continuity while living through discontinuity.
"Building bridges across the experiential gulf", the gulf between the
way we project (our feelings about) the future and how we experience it
when it happens.
Guerrilla futures: ad-hoc incursions into future
worlds, and finding ways to manifest future worlds in the present,
whether people want them or not.
"Better to be surprised by a simulation than blind-sided by a reality."
Bruce Sterling asked 'What would happen if you changed "guerrilla" interventions into a "regular standing army"?'
"Ambient foresight" foresight as an emergent property; implicit, incidental, enabling.
- Nutrition facts on food
- Pictures of lung cancer on cigarette packs
- Carbon facts on products
Q&A
A cranial osteopath, cites Susan Greenfield, and says she used to have children coming to her with colic and asthma, but now it's all that they can't sleep. Even in the womb their mothers are getting so stimulated that babies don't "just sleep" like they used to.Vicissitudes of institutionalising foresight: government initiatives start up and do good work for a while, but then the government changes and doesn't want to hear certain things.
