The Books We Can Use to Rebuild Civilization, Selected by Neal Stephenson, Brian Eno, Tim O’Reilly & More

With so many of us across the world stuck at home, humanity's thoughts have turned to what we'll do when we can resume our normal lives. This time of quarantine, lockdown, and other forms of isolation urges us to reflect, but also to read — and in many cases to read the important books we'd neglected in our pre-coronavirus lives. Quite a few such volumes appear in the Long Now Foundation's "Manual for Civilization," which longtime Open Culture readers will remember us featuring not long after it launched in 2014. Its name refers to a library, one that according to the Foundation's executive director Alexander Rose "will include the roughly 3500 books most essential to sustain or rebuild civilization."

Read the full article on Open Culture here

Intellectual Dark Matter

Knowledge that we can show exists, but cannot directly access, rests at the foundations of society and technology.

Read the full article on Medium here

Essay: The Library

What on earth would something aspiring to be a 10,000-year library be good for? One answer might be that it would provide, and even embody, the long view of things, where responsibility is said to reside. Another would be that it could conserve the information needed from time to time for the deep renewals of renaissance. The added element is that 10,000 years is an extremely long view, during which time there are likely to be profound cataclysms requiring many-levelled renewal. Building real value into a 10,000-year library could be an intellectual adventure as challenging as space travel.

Read the full article on The Long Now Foundation HERE

The Long Now Foundation

The Long Now Foundation

tv clip from BBC2 featuring Brian Eno and Stewart Brand (2000)