While we discount on a sliding scale both the future and the past, the Clock does neither. Far future and near future are the same; distant past and recent past have equal value. In times of turbulence the Clock emanates calm. In calm times it reminds us that no equilibrium is stable for long.

Civilizations with long nows look after things better. In those places you feel a very strong but flexible structure which is built to absorb shocks and in fact incorporate them.”

Brian Eno proposed “the long now” as what we are aiming to promote. Peter Schwartz suggested 10,000 years as the appropriate time envelope for the project: 10,000 years ago was the end of the Ice Age and beginning of agriculture and civilization; we should develop an equal perspective into the future.

Brian Eno observes, “I had a large house once. Effectively it had infinite cheap storage. I’ve never been so miserable as when I found myself living among the unselected heaps of crap that I’d accumulated. I favor savage selection, but everyone making their own. That way you get a myriad of perspectives instead of one and instead of an undifferenti

Starting anew with a clean slate has been one of the most harmful ideas in history. It treats previous knowledge as an impediment and imagines that only present knowledge deployed in theoretical purity can make real the wondrous new vision.

“At this singularity,” writes the Cambridge mathematician Stephen Hawking, “the laws of science and our ability to predict the future would break down.”

How do they manage change, and how do they absorb and incorporate shocks? The answer appears to lie in the relationship between components in a system that have different change rates and different scales of size. Instead of breaking under stress like something brittle these systems yield as if they were malleable.

“We are moving from a world in which the big eat the small,” remarked Klaus Schwab, head of the World Economic Forum, “to a world in which the fast eat the slow.”

How long is now, usually? In the Clock discussion Esther Dyson suggested, “On the stock exchange it’s today, on the Net it’s a month, in fashion it’s a season, in demographics a decade, in most companies it’s the next quarter.” The shortest now is performed in a poem by the Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska: When I pronounce the word Future, the first