Long Now Foundation

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.