How To Keep Your Lifeboat Safe  

The Long Now blog has a post on an old Bruce Sterling speech, looking at threats to the longevity of their planned clock, and some techniques for overcoming them - The Ten-Thousand-Year Clock and Library. Go read the whole thing - it made me laugh.

John Ruskin died in January 1900. When the architect Henry Wilson heard the news, he said, “Is Ruskin dead? Thank God! Give me a cigarette!”

That was an expression of sheer psychic relief, you see. This is what that reaction would sound like in our own context: “Hey man == the Long Now clock is dead.” “What happened to it?” “I guess it got too popular. Noone went there any more. They had to shut it down.”

So, “Thank God, give me a cigarette,” you know? Thank God that this strange scheme of these dated New Age elders, these obsolete Silicon Valley digital Californians, is not going to be there any more, ticking, ticking, spinning, spinning, all through our own twenty-first century, like some kind of terrible reproach! If I’d known it would feel this good to have old Ruskin die, I’d have killed him myself!

So this is a serious threat, and if our beloved gizmo is going to survive it, it’s going to require some cultural realpolitik. This is not a monument or library == yet. If it comes into being, it will be generally perceived as a bizarre novelty built by a cabal of gizmo-obsessives. Visionary people, the kind of people who put up with science fiction writers as dinner entertainment.

I’m optimistic about this part. This is much to its secret benefit == the strange reason why it’s coming into being. Pop gurus and pop stars and pop fiction people, getting together with librarians and archivists and thinking seriously about ten millennia. There is considerable oxymoronic cultural power there. A good contradiction gives a social idea great strength. We might yet succeed in doing something useful and practical, if we keep our heads about it, and don’t get all carried away by our own press. Disposable, trendy, pop culture people are a hundred times lot more likely to get away with a thousand-year project than Albert Speer was.

It’s a good thing to do; I’m an enthusiast about it. I think it’s good for us whether it works out in ten thousand years or not. I think it’s well worth doing even if it fails swiftly and completely in some deeply humiliating way. As members of a virtual intelligentsia, we are trying to recognize and heal some of our own clear inadequacies as thinkers and culturati, and that is the proper spirit in which to do something like this. It’s an act of Emersonian self-improvement, a giving-back, almost a penance. It’s a good project, a worthy gesture. It’s not senseless or cranky, it’s responsible and wise.

The problem is that pop-culture really does date quickly and badly. This project can never be allowed to smell rancid. To survive, it needs mythic proportions and great seriousness. It needs profundity and sublimity. It can’t be too cute, too neat, too sexy, too well-engineered. It has to be born with a beard.

Now I want to suggest some design tactics by which this trough area, this span of campiness and corniness, might be successfully bridged.

First of all: this is the cheapest and easiest: use mystification. The public should be infected with the creeping suspicion that there is something in this project which has not been publicly revealed. That there is a secret, higher project behind the public project. This is a psychological operation, intended to keep people off-balance and waiting on tenterhooks. Waiting for the other shoe to drop == a shoe which will never drop.

There are any number of ways to accomplish this. The simplest is to say nothing, and wait for rumors to build up on their own, because they certainly will. Certain terms have already come up in our discussion which have the proper kind of Gothic resonance for this. A term like “Dark Archive,” for encrypted files time-stamped and hidden away for centuries, is very suggestive. So is “The Dracula Room for Undead Media.”

The second simplest way is to boldly invent some fake rumors. Simply make up a dramatic, archaic-looking, Masonic myth, with a mystic eye in the pyramid, and some impressive Latin mumbo-jumbo slogans: Novus Ordo Seclorum, E Pluribus Unum. You’ve all seen it done.

The most effective method, however, would be to have two clocks. First, the obvious public clock, on display. Second, the secret mystified clock. The two of them keep time in perfect harmony, but the first one is exposed to all the winds and gales of public enthusiasm and disdain, whereas the second clock is never revealed. Blurry pictures of it are periodically let slip. It might even have a live webcam. But no one can approach the mystic clock. No one can harm it. It is beyond mortal touch. It is never subject to public judgement. No one knows where it’s kept.

Why do this? Because this shadow clock makes it impossible to derive any psychic relief from the death of the public clock. You can’t enjoy a cigarette after Ruskin dies == because there’s ANOTHER RUSKIN, still going strong! This also has great morale benefits for the keepers of the public clock. If it’s broken by a vandal or hacked by a hardware hacker eager for publicity == the common kind of lunatic who wants to set fire to the temple == then there is no break in the cycle of timekeeping. A backup heartbeat is still going on in a secret location.

You don’t necessarily need a secret location. It would be almost as mystically glamorous to have a public yet physically inaccessible location, like, for instance, the depths of Marianas trench. Drop a self-winding Long Now clock down there, sealed in some kind of thermos bottle. You could wire the clock to run untouched by human hands, powered by, let’s say, the renewable voltage in ocean slime. In this condition, even the *organizers* can’t shut it down. It’s an *autonomous* shadow clock. A kind of temporal doppleganger. An ahistorical, remote-control timebomb, divorced from all human influence. These Gothic aspects are deliberately played up in public relations.

It might not be necessary to build this second clock. The *myth* of a second clock might work almost as well. If the second clock really does exist == then it might be wise to promulgate the myth of a shadowy Third Clock.

I know this sounds like a cheap trick. But it’s likely to work. In Isaac Asimov’s FOUNDATION trilogy of classic science fiction novels, there’s a Foundation of cultural archivists, established to protect human knowledge from a cultural breakdown. There’s also a secret, Second Foundation. When it comes to human psychology, the old tricks are the good ones. The Aum Shinri Kyo cult, the guys with the nerve gas in the Tokyo subway == they were major fans of those Asimov FOUNDATION novels. The whole set-up really preyed on their minds, somehow.