a cure for outrage overload: the slow long now

Whenever I get too upset with current events, I find it comforting to step back, to change perspective, and to take a good, long, slow view of things.

My favorite Slovenian industrial metal band’s song, Kingdom of God, reminds me we won’t be here forever.0292-laibach_02

The John Cage As Slow As Possible Project involves a performance lasting over  639 years. Don’t laugh. They’re already almost nine years in. cage5

And, now, at long last, I’ve found this:  The Long Now Foundation.

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Talk about a gifted group of slow learners! The Long Now board includes Stewart Brand (remember Whole Earth Catalog?), Chris Anderson  of Wired Magazine, Brian Eno (yes, the composer, producer, superstar) and a whole gaggle of other legendary hot geeks.

The Long Now Foundation boasts the world’s slowest computer,  uses five digit dates (02009), supports a 10,000 year clock, hosts seminars in long-term thinking, offers some geeky thing called a long server, and supports the Rosetta Project, the “largest collection of linguistic data on the Net.