Holistic thinking

We offer civilization-scale ideas from the ancient past and distant future of the present moment through our Long Now Talks lecture series, Long Now Ideas digital publication, and Pace Layers print journal, all out of The Interval at Long Now, our award-winning bar, café, and exhibit space, and event venue in San Francisco.

Humanity has a remarkable ability to ignore time costs.

[...] And that as the Internet grows, and as our ability to be linked up, like—I mean, you and I coulda done this through e-mail , and I never woulda had to meet you, and that woulda been easier for me. Right? Like, at a certain point we’re gonna have to build up some machinery, inside our guts, to help us deal with this. Because the technology is... See more

“given to us by people who do not love us but want our money.”

probably each generation has different things that force the generation to grow up. Maybe for our grandparents it was World War Two. You know? For us, it’s gonna be that at, at a certain point, that we’re either gonna have to put away childish things and discipline ourself about how much time do I spend being passively entertained? And how much... See more

One of the luckiest breaks of my life was figuring out what work I wanted to do ~20 and feeling a deep sense of fulfillment from investing.

I didn’t appreciate it then. I do now.

Finding your direction professionally can be the difference between moving through the world with clarity and moving through it with a low-grade hum of anxiety that never... See more

Breaking into startups: three practical examples

I would suggest this is considered through the lens of a Complex Adaptive System (CAS) for the mechanisms of coordination; a concept grounded in Systems Thinking and Cybernetics.

A CAS is a system that exhibits emergent and adaptive behaviour. CASs are composed of agents following local simple rules leading to collective dynamics that yield emergent... See more