In 1996, writer Stewart Brand founded The Long Now Foundation with the aim of promoting long-term thinking as an antidote to the accelerated culture of our civilization. This project is intended to fight the short-term perspective, brief attention spans, planned obsolescence and fast consumerism that make things last only a few years.

At The Long Now Foundation, projects are planned in terms of centuries and patience is a value that pays off. These are a few outstanding projects of this organisation: 10,000 Year Clock, a clock intended to work with precision for ten thousand years, a prototype of which is exhibited at the Science Museum of London and a scale model is about to be completed in Texas; Long Bets, a forum to make long-term predictions about the future; the Rosetta Project, a digital library of human languages; or PanLex, the largest lexical database in the world, that could be used to create a translation machine for thousands of languages.

Long Now also organises conferences and seminars in order to provide tools that make long-term thinking something natural and not extraordinary.

This session will be presented by Alexander Rose, creative director of The Long Now Foundation.