March 8th, 2010
We Are All Distracted
The 11,500 year old Gobekli Tepe temple near Sanliurfa, Turkey. [photo: Berthold Steinhilber]
“Civilization is revving itself into a pathologically short attention span. The trend might be coming from the acceleration of technology, the short-horizon perspective of market-driven economics, the next-election perspective of democracies, or the distractions of personal multi-tasking. All are on the increase.” – The Long Now Foundation.
We no longer consider the future. We apparently don’t have time for that. The Long Now Foundation and its 10,000 Year Clock project should at least make us find the time to again consider the future.
As Michael Chabon wrote about the Clock in his wonderful book of essays, Manhood For Amateurs, “…the Clock may accomplish its greatest task before it is ever finished, perhaps without ever being built at all. The point of the Clock Of The Long Now is not to measure out the passage into their unknown future of the race of creatures that built it. The point of the Clock is to revive and restore the whole idea of the Future, to get us thinking about the Future again, to the same degree we used to, if not in quite the same way, and to reintroduce the idea that we don’t just bequeath the future – though we do, whether we think about it or not.”
How many of us even consider the future of 500 years from now, of only about 6 future generations of our families from today? And then consider 10,000 years. As Chabon points out, that’s about as long a time span as separates us from the first makers of pottery….11,500 years ago some people built the Gobekli Tepe temple near Sanliurfa, Turkey.
We all have, and have had, the future in our hands – just yesterday for instance – yet by definition the future doesn’t exist. Some of you reading this post, when you consider technology and how we now expect new developments in technology to bring us the “future,” may consider the iPad the future; it’s coming soon after all. And with that example, let’s consider the outpouring of rage from the Flash developer community over the iPad’s lack of Flash… they chose to ignore that the iPad will change the way people interact with computers in the future, instead they got all hysterical over the lack of a multimedia platform on the device; short term thinking in other words.
It’s interesting to note that one of the Long Now’s founding board members, Brian Eno, seemed to suggest that the lack of long term future thinking was an American problem. When he moved to New York City, he found that “here” and “now” meant “this room” and “this five minutes” as opposed to the larger here and longer now that he was used to in England. Because of that, he wanted the Long Now foundation to focus on stretching out what people consider as now.
I’m not sure what year it was when Eno considered the “here and now” issue, but I don’t actually believe it’s an American problem, it’s a global problem. We can see it when humans get all worked up about saving the Earth, without realizing that humans haven’t been on Earth long enough for the planet to care. We may or may not be destroying the atmosphere via global warming, but either way, when the Earth is truly done with us it will rid itself of us. We may not be around to witness the Clock Of The Long Now in 10,000 years; we need to be ok with that.
Here’s the Long Now guidelines for a long-lived, long-valuable institution:
Serve the long view
Foster responsibility
Reward patience
Mine mythic depth
Ally with competition
Take no sides
Leverage longevity
And here’s some food for thought; the Future, as considered over just the last few decades, was not all shiny bright advances in technology that improved our lives. It also brought the fear of Armageddon, of destruction by nuclear weapons. Chabon again – “…the Future…can be unremittingly and wryly bleak..”