The Long Now Foundation is a San Francisco nonprofit established in 01996 — the foundation writes years with five digits, a standing reminder that the 10,000-year frame it works in outlasts four-digit dating. Stewart Brand, Danny Hillis, and Brian Eno founded it; the name is Eno's, the clock is Hillis's, and the organizing idea is Brand's: civilization is "revving itself into a pathologically short attention span," and needs a corrective measured in centuries.

## Origin

Hillis proposed the clock in a February 01995 Wired essay — a mechanism that ticks once a year, advances a century hand once a century, and sends a cuckoo out each millennium — and Brand assembled the founding board in 1996: Carlston, Saffo, Schwartz, Kelly, Hillis, and Eno, per the photograph caption in Eno's own essay. Schwartz supplied the defining span: the "long now" is the present plus or minus 10,000 years, about as long as the history of human technology. The first clock prototype — built by a team led by Alexander Rose — ticked twice at midnight on New Year's Eve 01999 and now sits as the final exhibit in the Science Museum's Making the Modern World gallery.

## Projects

The flagship is still the clock: a full-scale installation being carved into a west Texas mountain, funded by Jeff Bezos at a figure he himself put at $42 million — a number this index attributes to him rather than asserts. The official FAQ keeps the patronage precise: Jacqui Safra funded the first clock, Nathan Myhrvold the Orrery, Bezos the Texas build. Around the clock sits a constellation of projects with the same design sense — things meant to be maintained, not merely made: the Rosetta Project's language archive (one disk of which rode ESA's comet mission to 67P), the PanLex lexical database, the Long Bets arena where Warren Buffett's famous decade-long wager on index funds resolved for Girls Inc. of Omaha, a talk series running since 02003, the Nevada Bristlecone Preserve under ancient pines, and The Interval — the bar-cafe-library at Fort Mason that opened June 15, 02014 and still operates as the foundation's public face.

## Method and reception

The method is myth-making: artifacts engineered well enough to generate stories. Neal Stephenson's Anathem — a novel where 10,000-year clocks are civilizational furniture — launched at a Long Now talk before 900 people, and the foundation counts it as the method working. The critique is also on record: a billionaire-funded monument invites the "waste of time" charge Wired published in 2018, and the concentration of the largest project on one patron's land and money is a dependence the public record cannot quantify. Board transitions, project budgets, and the clock's completion schedule are all undisclosed — the open questions in this packet are the honest remainder of a largely self-published record.

*This index was compiled from public sources and does not imply the organization's endorsement. Citations live in the packet's source catalog.*