The Long Now Foundation, by Scott Beale; Creative Commons Licence – no commercial use.
The Long Now Foundation “hopes to provide a counterpoint to today’s accelerating culture and help make long-term thinking more common”.
Inspired by a recognition that our time horizons, whether personal, democratic or financial, are becoming ever shorter, the Long Now Foundation was set up to realise practical cultural projects that encourage people to reframe how we think about time and develop responsibility for the long-term, through, for example, a clock “powered by seasonal temperature changes. It ticks once a year, bongs once a century, and the cuckoo comes out every millennium.”
The large-scale version of the clock is being built in inside a mountain in western Texas, and the prototype is on loan to the Science Museum in London.
The foundation is also behind The Rosetta Project, “a global collaboration of language specialists and native speakers working to build a publicly accessible digital library of human languages.” Another example under development is PanLex, which acts to preserve and use almost 7,000 languages through an open-source database that allows users to “express any lexical concept (such as “democracy”, “elongate”, “à la carte”, or “Africa”) in any language” so that “linguistic diversity may persist and promote diverse ideas, values, and local knowledge, while permitting rich global interaction.”
