Long Now

30 Oct 2021 02:15 - 16 Dec 2022 12:22
Open in Logseq
    • A unique and strange organization started by Stewart Brand and Danny Hillis, which operates a bar in San Francisco and is building a 10000-year mechanical clock in the southwestern desert. I'm a member.
    • Brand has always been a big-picture thinker and this organization allows him to do that on a massive scale, with interesting partners.
    • It's interesting that other branches of the sixties counterculture focused on the idea that past and future didn't really exist, and one should strive to Be Here Now. Omniorthogonal: Moment of Totality is a post about one of my sojurns to hippieland and includes an encounter with that attitude:
      • On another occasion, I was getting water from a public spigot and a couple of old hippies started chatting me up and informed me that the past and future were illusions and only the present moment was real (spontaneous metaphysical conversations are a common thing at such gatherings). This seemed extra-dumb considering we were in the midst of a festival organized around a phenomenon that had been precisely predicted years before it actually was to happen. But – it's a fairly common belief among}} mystics and it was the topic of an early Grateful Dead song, so there's that. As is my practice, I tried to find an interpretation or state of mind in which that statement would feel true.