Civilization is revving itself into a pathologically short attention span. … Some sort of balancing corrective [is needed] which encourages the long view and the taking of long-term responsibility—where ‘long-term’ is measured at least in centuries.
The Long Now Foundation, established in 1996, is an American non-profit organization based in San Francisco that seeks to start and promote a long-term cultural institution. It aims to provide a counterpoint to what it views as today’s “faster/cheaper” mindset and to promote “slower/better” thinking. The Long Now Foundation hopes to “creatively foster responsibility” in the framework of the next 10,000 years. In a manner somewhat similar to the Holocene calendar, the foundation uses 5-digit dates to address the Year 10,000 problem (e.g., by writing the current year “02022” rather than “2022”).