| --- |
| title: "House Oversight: Estate Documents (Nov 12) (HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018361)" |
| source: "House Oversight: Estate Documents (Nov 12)" |
| sourceUrl: "https://www.justice.gov/epstein" |
| date: "2026-01-01" |
| category: "House Oversight" |
| eftaNumber: "HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018361" |
| ocrPages: 1 |
| ocrChars: 3466 |
| ocrElapsed: 0.0 |
| parseTier: "external-legacy" |
| engine: "engine undisclosed (ep-nov-12.greg.technology mirror)" |
| externalSource: "greg-ep-nov-12" |
| externalLicense: "not granted" |
| externalCredit: "ep-nov-12.greg.technology" |
| externalUrl: "https://ep-nov-12.greg.technology" |
| --- |
| |
| (Yes.) Do you write it in English? (To be determined!) Working with composer Brian |
| Eno on the sound of the clock chime, and with a team of geologists and physicists, |
| Hillis had made the clock into a natural extension of his tinkertoy computer, a device |
| that both served a purpose and sent a message. If there was an emotion it conveyed, |
| a feeling that it tickled in the way Bernini's Apollo and Daphne might inspire terror |
| or joy or faith, it was meant to be awe. |
| Stewart Brand, one of the supporters of the clock and an early member of the New |
| Caste too, would tell you that the idea for the clock had emerged from a desire to |
| emphasize, to physicalize in a way no one could forget, the importance of longer- |
| term thinking. We'd all arrived now, Brand and the other clock masters worried, at a |
| moment in history when no one had a view that extended much past their own lives |
| - or sometimes past the next election, or year, or the next financial quarter. Our |
| modern "on to the next thing" economics and politics were eroding every slow, |
| patient instinct. "Civilization is revving itself into a pathetically short attention |
| span," one manifesto for the clock began. "What we propose is both a mechanism |
| and a myth." 179 With its steady 10,000 year ticking, the Clock of the Long Now was |
| meant to make us think in longer jumps. The human winding mechanism, for |
| instance: Generations of clock-winders had to share in the work, and they would be |
| connected in a long thread over the 10,000 years. A sacred priesthood of time. |
| Moving slowly. As I spent time thinking, dreaming about the clock, I found myself |
| too craving the solidity and patient isolation it promised. Who among us these days |
| doesn't want a break from the instant nowness of our age? |
| Yet, the more I understood the clock, the more I realized something else was at |
| work. Stop for a moment to consider who was backing and building the device. It |
| was a cluster of people who had, as a common link, the fact that they had their hands |
| honestly sunk into the guts of the Internet. Hillis, after all, had been waving more |
| than that slim book of email addresses when he talked about the early days of the |
| Internet. He was waving the credentials of a man who had been living in the virtual |
| cyber neighborhood of Web connections from its very first days. He was as close to a |
| native of the connected, fiber optic, light-speed world as you could find. |
| All the names supporting the clock smelled similarly of burning electrons: Jeff Bezos |
| had built Amazon into a high-speed marketplace whose backbone was the Web |
| itself. Another backer, Mitch Kapor, had cracked apart several centuries of slow |
| accounting habits when he created Lotus 1-2-3, the first successful computer |
| spreadsheet program in 1983, software that permitted you to see and change your |
| whole business one keystroke at a time. Kapor's software helped move finance from |
| quarter-by-quarter calculations to a really instant-by-instant sort of business - more |
| or less the opposite of the "long time frame" the clock team was aiming to preserve. |
| Esther Dyson was one of the earliest, best investors in network companies. This was |
| a collection of men and women unified by a genius for connected change, sure, but |
| also by a desire for ever faster clock speeds, ever speedier delivery, ever faster |
| 179 "Civilization is revving itself": Stewart Brand, The Clock of the Long Now: Time |
| and Responsibility. (New York: Basic Books, 1999) 2 |
| 129 |
| HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018361 |
|
|
