the endless long continuum. We do think in too short a time frame. But the clock

the endless long continuum. We do think in too short a time frame. But the clock also, I began to suspect as I considered it, had another role. Those 10,000 years of marked time were an attempt to scratch an itch bothering these pioneers of cyberspace. It might even have been a sort of guilty sensation. After all, there was something that they had demolished in their ceaseless fast connecting of the world - maybe accidentally, but anyhow it could never be put back to where it was. If the great industrial titans before them had, over several hundred years, vanquished distance, lacing the world with trading networks, the men and women behind the clock were fracturing something else, something that for all of human history had seemed the only reliable, safe, sad constant of our condition: Time. For most of history, time and space were seen as facts, immutable forces that could not be overcome or adjusted or fought. Time particularly. The quintessential, tragically non-negotiable condition of life. The backers of the clock were, in their “day jobs”, in the business of overcoming, adjusting, fighting and even destroying an older sense of time. What might once have taken years, they were committed to making happen in an instant. The Long Now project, then, was like one of those carefully isolated arctic freezers, where samples of essential grains and DNA from Beethoven’s hair and Einstein’s brain are sunk and iced against the godforbid day in which our basic feedstock or a chunk of humanity has been wiped out by accident or disaster. Blasted into a mountain hole, designed to last thousands of years, the clock is a repository for time itself. Itis a defensive museum, built against the moment when instant networks finally devour the off switch and kill an older, essential feeling of time. The clock- makers knew, | think, that they had helped to demolish a particular sense of pace with their fast, instant networks. They wanted, with the knowledgeable keening of the guilty, a new device, one carefully gated away from the very revolution they were encouraging with their business and technical obsessions. This hunger for speed had built their fortunes. Their revolution (and its IPOs) had paid for the clock, frankly. And the hope for “instant world” had inspired their dreams long before deep, fast connections were possible. Bezos’s first name for Amazon, Cadabara, captured just this sense of waving wands and the eye-blink “Now you don't see it, now you do!” appearance of just what you want or need. Murdering time. You could ask: What are the really networks for anyway? Would they feel guilty when they confessed? 2. Danny Hillis’s father was an epidemiologist. His mother was a bio-statistician. And his childhood was a blur of infection-led family migrations. “Anywhere in the world there was an epidemic, we would go,” he recalled. As the family bounced from Dehli to Cairo to Dakha to Nairobi, racing diseases one after another, Danny developed a vivid, energetic autodidactisism. He would collect knowledge from his parents, from the streets around him, his new friends, anywhere. In a library in Calcutta, for instance, he once found a copy of George Boole’s 1854 book “An Investigation Into the Laws of Thought”. Boole invented symbolic logic on those pages and though his instincts were grounded in an age of steam and machines, his vision still echoes in 132 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018364