Long Now Foundation fans might be interested to know that co-founder Stewart Brand is doing a talk at the ICA about his new book - Whole Earth Discipline on the 30th January. Do come along. The meetup group will also be hanging out in the cafe for a couple of hours after the talk if you can’t make the talk but would like to find out more.

[This is a slightly adapted version of a short talk I gave at MASS LBP on 10 March 2009 in Toronto, Canada]

It feels a bit unfashionable in tumultuous times like these but there’s something you should know about me before we start. I’m an optimist - a practical optimist in that I like making things happen and changing things for the better. I’m a great believer that the direction of human progress is towards greater and greater ability to solve problems. People are getting more intelligent individually and groups of people are getting even smarter because of new tools for collaboration and new ways of co-ordinating activity.

This talk stems from some things I’ve learned over the last five years about what’s possible when you try to take ideas that could change the world and put them into action using web technologies. It’s also about a quote that I made in a film called Us Now that got me in a little bit of trouble with my political friends:

“Representative democracy is based on the assumption that people are thick. And that’s just not true.”

It was one of those things that just came out of my mouth without much thought beforehand. The advantage of saying it on film is that I’ve had to think about it afterwards. What I meant was that by putting decisions and the provision of public services in the hands of a small group of elected representatives we miss a massive opportunity to tap the power of people to solve their own problems.

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Long Now London has been growing quite nicely over the past year with a great bunch of people getting together to talk about long term ideas and have a few drinks. Our January meetup will be on 22nd January 02009 and Alfie Dennen will give a short talk about his brilliant Stopped Clocks project.

Sign up to come along here. You can find out more about the Long Now Foundation here.

“If you’re going to take a long-term orientation, you have to be willing to stay heads down and ignore a wide array of critics, even well-meaning critics. If you don’t have a willingness to be misunderstood for a long period of time, then you can’t have a long-term orientation.”

That’s Jeff Bezos in US News. Jeff also gets a mention in this TED talk by Stewart Brand about a field trip they took to the site of the Clock of the Long Now.

I love Meetup and there’s a great piece in the FT Weekend Magazine that explains quite what it is that makes it work. It really started to come together for me a few weeks ago when we had a fantastic Long Now London Meetup. Up until then it had just been people I knew, but last month we grew beyond that. It was great to be able to organise something so easily that brought together people around a shared interest.

So what’s it got to do with Why Don’t You? Well, the full title of Why Don’t You was “Why Don’t You Just Switch Off Your Television Set And Go Out And Do Something Less Boring Instead?” which was pretty revolutionary for a TV program when you think about it. Somebody once described the email magazine Pick Me Up that I used to help out with as Why Don’t You for grown-ups. With our manhunts in Covent Garden, taking cows to Toxteth and journeys to find the source of the Thames, it was all about getting people away from their email.

I like that idea - that we should build technology projects that help people get away from technology and I’d say Meetup are one of the most inspirational companies that already do so. I hope we’re doing it with School of Everything and Social Innovation Camp too.

Oh, and our next Long Now London Meetup is on September 17th. Come along!

We’re having our second Long Now London Meetup this Wednesday (18th June 02008) at this place from about 7pm. I thought it might be good to get a bit of a discussion going about the Long Bets project as there have been some interesting goings on over the past month or so.

Do drop by if you can.

I’ve been hanging out with Scott and the gang at Meetup a bit recently and remembering what a fantastic tool it is for getting people together. So I’ve set up a Long Now London Meetup group to try and get people interested in long-term thinking and the work of the Long Now Foundation together. Do come along for a drink and a chat if you can.

Lovey piece on the Long Now Foundation site by Danny Hillis about what it was like having Nobel Prize winning physicist Richard Feynman hanging around at Thinking Machines.

The most recent Long Now Seminar in San Francisco sounds like it was brilliant. Frans Lanting set out to take photographs of places where the conditions resemble those from key moments in the distant past of the evolution of planet Earth.

From Stewart’s email summary:

On a live volcano in Hawaii he found the naked planet of 4.3 billion years ago— molten rock flowing, zero life. “Your boots melt. You smell early Earth.” On the western coast of Australia he shot a rare surviving living reef of stromatolites, made of the cyanobacteria who three billion years ago transformed the Earth by filling the atmosphere with oxygen. Lanting took pains to photograph without blue sky in the background, because the sky was not blue until the cyanobacteria had generated a planet’s worth of oxygen.

The photos are absolutely stunning. You can find them here.

The Long Now Foundation (who I’ve got to know and enjoy working with over the past five years) have a new Membership Program. Becoming a Long Now member helps to fund their various projects (like the Clock) and provides access to high quality online video of their San Francisco Seminars.

They also send you a really cool stainless steel membership card engraved with your charter member number. I’m number 63.