Brian Eno, Stewart Brand and Alexander Rose discuss the origins and goals of the Long Now Foundation. This was recorded in collaboration with Gresham College, in London, U.K., on February 1, 2010.
Long Finance is an initiative begun in 2007 to establish a World Centre Of Thinking On Long-Term Finance. The initiative began with a question — "When would we know our financial system is working?" — which challenges a system that can’t provide today’s 20-year-olds with a reliable financial retirement structure. The aim of the Long Finance Institute is "to improve society’s understanding and use of finance over the long-term."
The research project proposals range from theory versus practice or fiscal versus monetary to sustainability versus robustness. The iconic project for Long Finance is the Eternal Coin, with the objective of starting a global debate about society’s values over the long-term.
This is the second event that Gresham College has co-hosted, where learning from the sister Long Now organization and its 10,000 Year Clock Project.
Stewart Brand is a co-founder and managing director of Global Business Network, founded and runs the GBN Book Club, and is the president of The Long Now Foundation. Brand has been a member of the Board of Trustees of the Santa Fe Institute, an interdisciplinary center studying the sciences of complexity, since 01989. He was a founding member of the Board of Directors of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an organization which supports civil rights and responsibilities in electronic media, and is an acting adviser to Ecotrust, Portland-based preservers of temperate rain forest from Alaska to San Francisco.
Brian Eno is a musician, composer and producer of audio and visual landscapes. Eno’s synthesizer work and electronic manipulation of audio textures was first featured during the early 1970’s as a founding member of Roxy Music. His solo and collaborative musical compositions with John Cale, Robert Fripp and David Bowie have been in circulation world-wide over the last 25 years.
Alexander Rose is the director of the Long Now Foundation, where he has facilitated projects such as the 10,000 Year Clock with Danny Hillis, the Rosetta Project, Long Bets, Seminars About Long Term Thinking, Long Server and others. Rose shares several design patents on the 10,000 Year Clock with Danny Hillis, the first prototype of which is in the Science Museum of London.
