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 | The Long Now Approach |
For Stewart Brand, it all started back in the loose, free-thinking
1960s. In those days, many of his friends, fresh from their liberal arts educations, were looking to reinvent civilization. However, Brand found that these liberal arts educations did not give his friends the practical backgroundin areas like planting crops and building thingsthat they needed to start their own civilization.
In an effort to remedy this situation, he created The Whole Earth Catalog, which he called a compendium of basically everything. This turned out to be the start of a visionary career. He went on to become a self-described "serial co-founder," starting organizations that are tuned in to watching for future trends and preparing humanity for what's ahead. He has done this repeatedly with organizations like the Long Now Foundation, WELL, and the Global Business Network (GBN).
Now, he is planning to bring his version of the future and the librarian's role in it (a pivotal one) to New York for SLA's annual conference. Here he takes time to talk about the future, the past, and the importance of the librarian.
LS: Can you tell me a little bit about The Whole Earth Catalog?
SB: It was 1968, and many of my friends were starting communes. In their view, they were restarting civilization, and they were doing it with college liberal arts educations. This did not fit them well for building new buildings and gardening. The spirit was willing, but the skills were weak. The catalog was initially conceived as a way to build in all of the skills for creating a civilization. It offered the tools for making a basket or a guitar. It also had things about the world and the future. It was a compendium of basically everything. It turned out that a lot of people other than people in communes wanted to know that stuff. I still talk to people who say that their life was changed by The Whole Earth Catalog.
LS: Where did you get all of this information?
SB:I started with the things I knew about and could find out about pretty easily. It was very much set up as a customer-generating system. There are many things on the Net that function like that now, like Google. I credited and paid people who suggested things and reviewed them. It was only $10, but it was their name in print. We would second-guess everything to find out if it was really wonderful. Sometimes it really was not, but sometimes it was more wonderful than the reviewer thought. The wide range of people who worked on this project helped it become very comprehensive.
A similar thing is going on now at the Long Now Foundation with our Rosetta project, which was initially just a project to collect a thousand languages and micro-etch them on nickel disks as an example of the kind of hardcopy that is available to the world now. Jim Mason, the anthropologist and artist who is running that project, put the material online as we got it, adding to the ability for linguists and translators to improve it. It's a collaboration engine. It's now this massive collection of the world's languages, which is being improved by users.
LS: When did librarians first start taking note of your work?
SB: I first started getting invited to librarian conferences in the late 60s and early 70s because of The Whole Earth Catalog. They noticed that more than two-thirds of the products in the Catalog were books. Ever since then, I've found that librarians have adopted me as one of their own, which is a tremendous honor.
I did another book called The Media Lab, which librarians had a great interest in. This was in 1987, when the media lab was pushing in new directions with information technology. I think librarians are the most open to all the new information technologies. What I found is that personal computer people are only interested in personal computers, and telecommunications people are only interested in telecommunications. But the librarians are interested in everything. My theory at the time was that they are less interested in the commercial potential of these technologies, which tends to focus people into being very specialized. Instead, they are concerned with how this technology will help citizens manage their information better. They tend to be much more integrative with all these new technologies. In a sense, the media lab and the book about the media were also doing that. There was a real convergence there. More recently, I did a book called How Buildings Learn, which came out early in the 90s. There are a number of library stories in there, because libraries have the famous problem of their collections expanding while their space typically is not. I went out and found some cases where this was well managed, like with the Boston Athenaeum, and very poorly managed, like the Library of Congress. It was probably the most library-driven book I have ever done because I spent much of six years in the stacks going though photographs of buildings over time. Most of that came from libraries.
The Global Business Network, which specializes in scenario planning, turned out to be of interest to librarians because they are having to plan further ahead in many cases than many other professions.
There is also a book, which Peter Schwartz co-wrote, called The Art of the Long View. Increasingly, I have been involved with the long view, with the 2,000-year clock we are building.
LS: What was the common thread for all of these libraries that successfully managed their space?
SB: The successful libraries were private libraries. The London Library and Boston Athenaeum seemed to have a more direct connection with their customers and had spaces that they are free to be highly innovative with, whereas more public-type libraries like the Library of Congress had to go through these tremendous lags of getting Congress's attention, and by then they are vastly overflowing their space and way behind in managing their collection. It's a tremendous national treasure that is not acknowledged as such by Congress or as well-funded as it should be.
LS: When did you become focused on looking into the future?
SB: Well, I am trained as a biologist. I was called that back in the Catalog days. I never knew why I was then, but I guess I am a professional futurist, being paid by the GBN to do that. The Long Now approach, where we are taking the next 10,000 years very seriously, is a futuristic activity.
LS: Do you like the word "futurist"? It seemed as though you paused when you mentioned it the first time.
SB: I have no problem with it. I wrote a chapter about it in The Clock of the Long Now. I think there is a form of futurism that is almost a sectarian belief system that is in low repute. What I detected drives futurism is where people basically have an agenda, and they use their idea of future studies as a way to push that agenda. But that is usually wrong, because our desires don't decide things.
There is something called "fate," where things occur outside of people's fears and desires.
The kind of futurists I am interested in are the ones who may have an agenda on the side, but this does not interfere with the way they think and talk about the future. Herman Kahn, who was a friend, was a very strong conservative, but he loved being surprised by events. He loved surprising his audiences and making them think. He could do this with a liberal audience or a conservative audience, or anybody.
LS: Why did you chose 10,000 years as a frame of reference?
SB: It's actually geological. It's the period of time when the ice receded in the northern hemisphere. Not coincidentally, it's when humans began domesticating animals and plants, and started using agriculture. Then they started towns, and that is where civilization happens. The customer we're serving with the Long Now Foundation is civilization. Since, in broad terms, civilization is 10,000 years old, we figure we are in the middle of the story. If we mirror forward 10,000 years, that is "the long now."
LS: What do you mean by "taking the next 10,000 years seriously"?
SB: I mean you should take them as seriously as next week. On the one hand, this is very serious, but on the other hand, who knows what's going to happen next week? We are encouraging people to take the long term seriously and personally.
LS:Does this lead to predictions about the future or ways of preserving things for future generations?
SB: You think about consequences of actions. One of the things that emerges is that you don't want to tell the future what to do. Typically, the utopian schemes, including those that have been played out in the real world, like the Thousand-Year Reich and the Soviet ideas, do not work. If you try to tell the future what is good for it, it will not work. But if you try to reserve as many options as possible for the future, it turns out to work quite well.
It's just like talking to a kid who is deciding whether to go to college or not. It can be kind of a nuisance and expensive, but you can tell them there will be many more things they can do with a college education under their belt. You can say the same thing for civilization. Having a good climate, a good ozone layer, and a wide selection of species are things you will be glad to have if you keep your options open.
This is a good way to look at the future, because it does not force anything. It acknowledges that if you enjoy the freedom of options, your descendents probably will as well.
LS: But it does take into account that you will have to make decisions now?
SB: It is definitely a framing of present actiona way to get past the immediate stuff to the crucial stuffto the concerns that will really bite you. It gives you permission to take on things like digital preservation, for example.
Digital preservation is not an issue to most people, certainly not in the high-tech world. Most digital stuff takes about 10 years to disappear. But if you are handling knowledge and data, having it all evaporate in 10 years is really bad. Taking the long-term future seriously gets you past the first level of thinking about digital preservation. This gets you past the silver bullets, because they're part of the problem. This is something we'll have to bear down on for several decades. You think about how much money you allocate for digital preservation. If you're forward-thinking, you'll allocate more, and the future will thank you. We're glad a few monasteries kept 10 percent of the classics from ancient Greece and Rome.
LS: With this future orientation, do you become involved in political issues?
SB: Long Now is an organization that takes no sides. Having longevity as an organization requires that. In the long now, I think many situations take on a different light. One of the great limitations of democracy is that many things are thought of in terms of the next election, and when you have a two-year cycle for Congress and four for the presidency, it almost forces a short attention span in major portions of your government. But you need to be sure the other parts of the government are taking the long term into mind. I love working with the National Park Service, because it is mandated to provide these portions of the continent to future generations. They refer to their customer as future generations. That clarity gives them a frame in which to make their decisions and budget allocations, which are pretty benign.
Another thing that emerges is that if you take the short time frame, a lot of large and important problems seem insoluble. You can't solve world hunger or whatever in two years. But you can say this one will take 30 or 40 years to solve, but if we bear down on it for 30 or 40 years, it can actually get solved. It can be difficult, but it is not impossible. The difference between difficult and impossible is enormous. With impossible, you give up; with difficult, you bear down. The only thing that changed in changing this attitude was the time frame. Some things are 40-year problems, so you can't get too enthusiastic. But you can't give up on them either, if we're going to solve them in our lifetime.
LS: You're involved in a lot of projects. What is your motivation for doing this?
SB: I am a serial co-founder. I have often indulged in starting things, and I have learned that it often goes better if you get other people involved. Things like the Global Business Network, WELL, and the Long Now Foundation I started with other people. Someone recently asked what I really did, and I said, "I found things and I find things." In some ways, I'm just seeking good stuff.
LS: What is the purpose of the Global Business Network?
SB: In 1987, a number of us had been working for Royal Dutch Shell. Shell had taken scenario planning to a very effective level in the 1980s. It was one of the largest and most decentralized corporations in the world. Scenario planning was a way for that company to organize its behavior very effectively in the face of quite a lot of fluctuation in the oil market. Thanks to scenario planning, Shell survived a phase of deep flux in the market: While Shell was going up, all of its competitors were going down. This was a brand new idea to a lot of people. GBN was this outfit that was purveying scenario planning, and we were also purveying the Internet as something that was important. All of that became part of the package that GBN brought to its corporate members. We also work for various parts of governmentlike DARPA, the Department of Energy, and the Central Intelligence Agencyand for other organizations, like the Sierra Club.
LS: I know digital preservation is important to you. What role do you see librarians playing in this?
SB: I think they will play a crucial role, because librarians and archivists are the ones who are most aware of keeping data fit for use over longer periods of time. Because digital storage is cheap and easy, people assume that digital preservation must be easy, too. Of course, it's the opposite. The easier storage is, the harder preservation is. This is the opposite of the way it used to be back when clay tablets were kind of a nuisance to write, but they're still good. Now its easy to store and make copies but hard to keep stuff preserved.
Librarians are in the thick of that. The Library of Congress is mandated by Congress to get its act together, because it's responsible for a lot of material that is born digitaland there's even more material that is being reborn digital. It's fine for the first few years, and then there's a real rapid deterioration of this stuff. Librarians are leading the way on this.
LS: We know many of the problems with digital preservations, such as outdated systems for reading the information or the deterioration of digital material. What solutions do you see to these problems?
SB: There is no silver bullet. There are a series of stages that we will have to go through. One is realizing that there is a problem. The second one is taking the problem seriously. The third is deciding to do something about the problem. The fourth is setting about doing something. This could mean migrating something from one platform to the next or working with emulation. However, some groups try to keep you from emulating this.
I think there is an answer, but what needs to be set in motion is a very fundamental architecture of how repositories work and are accessed, are protected from attack and wrongful access, and are redundant (so if you lose one you don't lose everything that is in it), and how metadata will be used. It is now possible to store everything. There is a new set of priorities that need to be sifted through when managing this stuff. I don't think there's going to be a solution; there are going to be stages of solutions. The Library of Congress is stepping up to this issue, and Long Now and the Global Business Network are in the thick of it. I don't want to anticipate what will happen now, but we expect to have some pilot projects in the next two years of how digital preservation can work. Once you find good examples of that, it will be relatively easy to use. I don't think preservation will be without costs, but I think we can reverse the trend of preservation becoming harder and more expensive, which has been the trend for the past 30 years. Once you get that reversal of attitude and more people do it, then we are starting to get it covered.
LS: What do you plan to cover at the conference in New York?
SB: It's far enough from now that I think there will be much more to report on digital preservation. Part of this is an ongoing story, though. I think libraries and librarians are the pillars of civilization. Civilization is a 10,000-year-old story and it has at least 10,000 more years to go, so what is correct "pillar behavior" under that frame of mind? I think some of what I talk about in June will be very timely and some will be out of the present. But I think they will be relatedstuff you do in the short now, based on taking the long now seriously. 
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