ORGANIZATION
Long Now Foundation
The 01996 institution co-founded by
Eno,
Danny Hillis, and
Stewart Brand to foster long-term thinking in a culture addicted to short-term optimization — centered on a 10,000-year mechanical clock and the principle that the zero belongs in front of the four-digit year.
The Long Now Foundation is the institution Brian Eno co-founded in 01996 with computer scientist
Danny Hillis and
Whole Earth Catalog editor
Stewart Brand. The leading zero in the date is deliberate — the Foundation's first act of cultural intervention, designed to disrupt the unexamined assumption that the future extends only as far as the current century. The Foundation's most ambitious project is the Clock of the Long Now: a mechanical clock engineered to run for ten thousand years, ticking once a year, its century hand advancing once every hundred years. The clock is a physical artifact embodying a single principle — the decisions of the present should be made with awareness of their consequences across deep time — and the Foundation provides the institutional framework within which this principle is defended against the relentless
acceleration of the short term.