The Longplayer Letters
Beginning on April 30th 2013, Artangel and the Longplayer Trust will be inviting thinkers and writers from a wide variety of disciplines to engage in a chain of written correspondence on the subject of long-term thinking. Unfolding slowly over time, the Artangel Longplayer Letters form a written conversation in which each conversant is both answering his or her predecessor and thinking toward his or her successor – it is a dialogical relay, very much in the spirit of the Long Conversations.
The letters may also be found on the websites of Artangel and The Long Now Foundation, but comments may only be left below.
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To Carne Ross
Esther Dyson20 April 2014From: Esther Dyson, New York City To: Carne Ross, New York City 02 April 2014 Dear Carne, Through a telescope, darkly. I’ve been reading Stewart’s letter about science and technology and the long-term, but the thing that concerns me more – and that you, Carne, understand – is how society can work collectively to make…
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To Esther Dyson
Stewart Brand28 November 2013From: Stewart Brand, Sausalito To: Esther Dyson, New York City 28 November 2013 Dear Esther, Ghosts don’t exist, but ghost stories sure do. We love frightening ourselves with narratives built around a horrifying logic that emerges with the telling of the tale, ideally capped with a moral lesson. The Monkey’s Paw is a three-wishes fable…
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To Stewart Brand
Nassim Nicholas Taleb02 July 2013From: Nassim Nicholas Taleb, New York To: Stewart Brand, Sausalito 3 July 2013 Dear Stewart, I would like to reply to Brian Eno’s important letter by proposing a methodology to deal with risks to our planet, and I chose you because of your Long Now mission. First let us put forward the Principle of Fragility…
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To Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Brian Eno30 April 2013Dear Nassim, We’re all used to the idea that actions and thoughts take on different values when we expand the ‘picture’ within which we frame them. We realise that something which makes sense in a local frame may make less sense in a broader frame: dumping your waste in the river is fine as long…