Long Now Foundation

URL = https://longnow.org

Description

Established in 1996 by Stewart Brand, Danny Hillis and others, the Long Now Foundation exists to foster long-term thinking and responsibility, using a 10,000-year horizon as a deliberate counterweight to short-termism. Its projects include the 10,000-Year Clock, the Rosetta Project (an archive of human languages), Long Bets, and the Seminars About Long-term Thinking.

The Foundation works mostly as a cultural and conceptual institution, with a few durable artefacts, rather than as a policy body. For civic R&D it supplies both a vocabulary (pace layers, deep time, "the long now") and working examples of institutions designed to outlast their founders. It is also a useful case of how to build civilisational-scale projects without market or political deadlines.