Rating: 
Summary: Truly Extraordinary--Core Reading for Future of Earth- Man
Review:
I confess to being dumb. Although I know and admire the author, who has spoken at my conference, when the book came out I thought--really dumb, but I mention it because others may have made the same mistake--that it was about building a cute clock in the middle of the desert.
Wrong, wrong, wrong (I was). Now, three years late but better late than never, on the recommendation of a very dear person I have read this book in detail and I find it to be one of the most extraordinary books--easily in the top ten of the 300+ books I have reviewed on Amazon. At it's heart, this book, which reflects the cummulative commitment of not only the author but some other brilliant avant guarde mind including Danny Hillis, Kevin Kelly (WIRED, Out of Control, the Rise of Neo-Biological Civilization), Esther Dyson, Mitch Kapor (Lotus, Electronic Frontier Foundation) and a few others, is about reframing the way people--the entire population of the Earth--think, moving them from the big now toward the Long Here, taking responsibility for acting as it every behavior will impact on the 10,000 year long timeframe. This book is in the best traditions of our native American forebears (as well as other cultures with a long view), always promoting a feedback-decision loop that carefully considered the impact on the "seventh generation." That's 235 years or so, or more. The author has done a superb job of drawing on the thinking of others (e.g. Freeman Dyson, Esther's father) in considering the deep deep implications for mankind of thinking in time (a title popularized, brilliantly, by Ernest May and Richard Neustadt of Harvard), while adding his own integrative and expanding ideas. He joints Lee Kuan Yew, brilliant and decades-long grand-father of Asian prosperity and cohesiveness, in focusing on culture and the long-term importance of culture as the glue for patience and sound long-term decision-making. His focus on the key principles of longevity, maintainability, transparency, evolvability, and scalability harken back to his early days as the editor of the Whole Earth Review (and Catalog) and one comes away from this book feeling that Stewart Brand is indeed the "first pilot" of Spaceship Earth. It is not possible and would be inappropriate to try to summarize all the brilliant insights in this work. From the ideas of others to his own, from the "Responsibility Record" to using history as a foundation for dealing with rapid change, to the ideas for a millenium library to the experienced comments on how to use scenarios to reach consensus among conflicted parties as to mutual interests in the longer-term future, this is--the word cannot be overused in this case--an extraordinary book from an extraordinary mind. This book is essential reading for every citizen-voter-taxpayer, and ends with an idea for holding politicians accountable for the impact of their decisions on the future. First class, world class. This is the book that sets the stage for the history of the future.
Rating:
Summary: Truly Extraordinary--Core Reading for Future of Earth- Man
Review:
I confess to being dumb. Although I know and admire the author, who has spoken at my conference, when the book came out I thought--really dumb, but I mention it because others may have made the same mistake--that it was about building a cute clock in the middle of the desert.
Wrong, wrong, wrong (I was). Now, three years late but better late than never, on the recommendation of a very dear person I have read this book in detail and I find it to be one of the most extraordinary books--easily in the top ten of the 300+ books I have reviewed on Amazon. At it's heart, this book, which reflects the cummulative commitment of not only the author but some other brilliant avant guarde mind including Danny Hillis, Kevin Kelly (WIRED, Out of Control, the Rise of Neo-Biological Civilization), Esther Dyson, Mitch Kapor (Lotus, Electronic Frontier Foundation) and a few others, is about reframing the way people--the entire population of the Earth--think, moving them from the big now toward the Long Here, taking responsibility for acting as it every behavior will impact on the 10,000 year long timeframe. This book is in the best traditions of our native American forebears (as well as other cultures with a long view), always promoting a feedback-decision loop that carefully considered the impact on the "seventh generation." That's 235 years or so, or more. The author has done a superb job of drawing on the thinking of others (e.g. Freeman Dyson, Esther's father) in considering the deep deep implications for mankind of thinking in time (a title popularized, brilliantly, by Ernest May and Richard Neustadt of Harvard), while adding his own integrative and expanding ideas. He joints Lee Kuan Yew, brilliant and decades-long grand-father of Asian prosperity and cohesiveness, in focusing on culture and the long-term importance of culture as the glue for patience and sound long-term decision-making. His focus on the key principles of longevity, maintainability, transparency, evolvability, and scalability harken back to his early days as the editor of the Whole Earth Review (and Catalog) and one comes away from this book feeling that Stewart Brand is indeed the "first pilot" of Spaceship Earth. It is not possible and would be inappropriate to try to summarize all the brilliant insights in this work. From the ideas of others to his own, from the "Responsibility Record" to using history as a foundation for dealing with rapid change, to the ideas for a millenium library to the experienced comments on how to use scenarios to reach consensus among conflicted parties as to mutual interests in the longer-term future, this is--the word cannot be overused in this case--an extraordinary book from an extraordinary mind. This book is essential reading for every citizen-voter-taxpayer, and ends with an idea for holding politicians accountable for the impact of their decisions on the future. First class, world class. This is the book that sets the stage for the history of the future.
Rating:
Summary: Take Some Time With This One!
Review: A great book -- thought-provoking, frightening, inspiring. The need for a longer term view on life is widely accepted, but never implemented. This forces such a broadening of the view that we're forced to consider a seven generation view easily implementable. Take some time and cogitate on this one!
Rating: 
Summary: Thought-provoking book on thinking long-term
Review: Brand, author of The Whole Earth Catalog, is part of a team that is endeavoring to build a clock that will last for ten thousand years. In here, he comments on the lessons to be learned from that effort and the result. These days time seems to be getting ever shorter, our subjective "now" shrinking from generations to years or less. People need to think on the longer term, for the sake of earth and civilization. Brand broods on how to accomplish this with a series of short, themed articles addressing everything from a visit to Big Ben to a commentary on how the digital age has made things more impermanent rather than less. (Want to try to run a Commodore 64 program? Well, you might almost as well forget it.) He provides a list of levels of paces, from fashion (the quickest) through commerce, infrastructure, governance, culture, and (the slowest) nature. He points out the twentieth century phenomenon of organizations and movements devoted to historical preservation, both a luxury that earlier ages would have found it hard to afford and perhaps a need to be filled in our fast-paced age. A fascinating and thought-provoking read.
Rating: 
Summary: Facile Yet Ultimately Specious
Review: I wanted to like this book -- big fan of the Whole Earth Catalogs, "How Buildings Learn," Brian Eno and hard science fiction -- but the text kept chasing me away. In the end I had to conclude it was an attractive but rather poorly thought out book. The idea of 'deep' or 'geological time' is hardly new, but arguing that a 10,000 year view of history is beneficial is simply fatuous. Brand somehow manages to miss the obvious First Nations concept of stewarding land for future generations rather than owning it, and the Inuit concept of making decisions based on what's best for the seventh generation to follow. And by doing so he misses the larger lesson contained therein - that such long views are always eclipsed and subsumed by more powerful, shorter views with more immediate returns. Brand is also hampered by recurring (and surprising) technical errors - a supposed 15-year lifespan for optical media, a four-digit date for computer dating, sufficient digital storage for all the information in the world(!), etc. His "Long Now Foundation" -- a dodge for attracting short now investors -- envisions a huge mechanical clock built into a mountain somewhere, which completely ignores the lessons of long history that he claims to revere. We still have a few 10,000 year clocks that our predecessors left us, but having lost the owner's manuals, Stonehenge and the pyramids at Cheops have become all but useless. Documentation is everything - and documentation is ephemeral. That's why his proposal for a 10,000 year library brought guffaws - daily newspapers? Books on computer programming? How long does he think 10,000 years is? I was reminded of Rudy Rucker's "Saucer Wisdom" which imagines itself (with a good deal more humor) still popular in the year 4004 - and that's less than halfway there!!! Ray Kurzweil's "The Age of Spiritual Machines" is much more mind-boggling, and he had the good taste to look forward only100 years. John Lennon as usual summed up everything pertinent when he said, "Life is what happens to you when you're making other plans."
Rating:
Summary: Easy to read and pleasantly thought provoking
Review: Stewart Brand definitely has a knack for presenting a cross-current of ideas in a way that is simultaneously engaging and thought provoking. While some will find the actual project of the Clock and the Library far fetched, it does form a very effective backdrop for "[forcing] thinking in interesting directions; among other things, toward long-term responsibility." This is definitely a book to read more than once. I found new thoughts forming as I re-read chapters that were now framed by concepts presented in later chapters. Yet, the chapters are nice and short and self-contained so I could easily pick up the book, re-read some chapter that caught my fancy, and feel satisfied contemplating some aspect of the entirety -- like being able to savor a snack instead of having to eat an entire meal. I dog-eared "The Order of Civilization" chapter which for me really crystallized analogous concepts concerning the construction of robust "organic" information systems (what I'm supposed to be doing for a living). I loved the concept of layers operating at ever slower paces maintaining the resilience of the overall system. I also found "Ending the Digital Dark Age" very interesting. I highly recommend this book to anyone designing systems that could have an impact on the world for any significant length of time. Incidentally, the half-past chimes sounded on my century clock while I was reading this book. Maybe that is one of the reasons I liked it so much. Perhaps you have to be "over the hill", riding at ever increasing speed toward the future of your children to really be turned on by these ideas.
Rating:
Summary: THOUGHT PROVOKING ... and very necessary
Review: The LONG NOW is an philosophy, a way to look at the world and at history that is finding its symbolic expression in a extraordinary, creative and novel clock to be designed and built over the next few years. The people involved in this project to me are some of the most thoughtfull and creative minds of our civilsation.
Rating:
Summary: Access to important ideas
Review: There are two kinds of books that make you feel smart. The first kind is so laughably awful that you put it down thinking "I'm WAY smarter than that guy." The second, and better, kind is a book that leaves you with a couple dozen exciting new ideas whizzing around your head, firing your imagination and inspiring thoughts you would never otherwise have had. This book is the second kind. With solidly-documented ideas and examples drawn from a hundred sources, Brand demonstrates that our relationship to time, and the models we use to think about it, are no longer useful and need to be changed. The new models for thinking about it are included at no charge.
Rating:
Summary: A unique view of our responsiblity for the future
Review: This book examines the topic of thinking and planning for the long term - and the author definitely means the LONG term. The book focuses on two nascent projects headed up by the author and the "Long Now Foundation" - the effort to build a 10,000 year clock and a 10,000 year library. This projects are intended to help shift humanity's concept of "now" to a much longer time frame. And with this shift in the concept of now, it is hoped that a new concept of responsibility for our individual and group behavior will emerge. This book and the thinking behind it represent an excellent counterpoint to the prevalent and destructive view of "now" as beeing some extremely short term time frame - today, this week, or (for many corporations) this quarter. One can only hope that it is widely read. If the ideas behind this book and its associated project change only a small segment of our population's view about stewardship and care for the long-term health and longevity of our planet and our race it will be well worth the effort. While I thought the book was generally very well-written, and presented many, many thought-provoking points, some of the ideas seem to have been rather poorly thought out and gave the impression of having been simply tossed in to the mix. At one point a potential role of the 10,000 year library as a repository of both sides of important debates is described - an excellent idea, but the objective is described as allowing future generations to know who to "blame" if things go wrong. Going to all this trouble just so our descendants can engage in blaming someone for something seems rather silly. Fortunately, there are loftier goals for this project, and many are very well described throughout the book. This book has strongly impacted the way I think about the future. I highly recommend it.
Rating:
Summary: A unique view of our responsiblity for the future
Review: This book examines the topic of thinking and planning for the long term - and the author definitely means the LONG term. The book focuses on two nascent projects headed up by the author and the "Long Now Foundation" - the effort to build a 10,000 year clock and a 10,000 year library. This projects are intended to help shift humanity's concept of "now" to a much longer time frame. And with this shift in the concept of now, it is hoped that a new concept of responsibility for our individual and group behavior will emerge. This book and the thinking behind it represent an excellent counterpoint to the prevalent and destructive view of "now" as beeing some extremely short term time frame - today, this week, or (for many corporations) this quarter. One can only hope that it is widely read. If the ideas behind this book and its associated project change only a small segment of our population's view about stewardship and care for the long-term health and longevity of our planet and our race it will be well worth the effort. While I thought the book was generally very well-written, and presented many, many thought-provoking points, some of the ideas seem to have been rather poorly thought out and gave the impression of having been simply tossed in to the mix. At one point a potential role of the 10,000 year library as a repository of both sides of important debates is described - an excellent idea, but the objective is described as allowing future generations to know who to "blame" if things go wrong. Going to all this trouble just so our descendants can engage in blaming someone for something seems rather silly. Fortunately, there are loftier goals for this project, and many are very well described throughout the book. This book has strongly impacted the way I think about the future. I highly recommend it.
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