Nous vivons, en occident du moins, dans un monde qui va vite. Tout s’accélère même. Du point de vue strictement financier, nous sommes impatients; j’en prends à témoin notre propension au crédit versus la patience de l’économie de nos ancêtres.

Internet n’a rien aidé à cet effet en réduisant considérablement les distances. Mais il n’est que l’héritier d’une longue évolution dans les moyens de communication humains.

Afin de recentrer les hommes sur l’importance de la vision à long terme, un groupe de penseurs ont lancé le projet The Long Now Fondation qui propose un calendrier à très long terme et la construction d’une horloge hyperlente.

Civilization is revving itself into a pathologically short attention span. The trend might be coming from the acceleration of technology, the short-horizon perspective of market-driven economics, the next-election perspective of democracies, or the distractions of personal multi-tasking. All are on the increase. Some sort of balancing corrective to the short-sightedness is needed-some mechanism or myth which encourages the long view and the taking of long-term responsibility, where ‘long-term’ is measured at least in centuries. Long Now proposes both a mechanism and a myth. It began with an observation and idea by computer scientist Daniel Hillis:

“When I was a child, people used to talk about what would happen by the year 2000. For the next thirty years they kept talking about what would happen by the year 2000, and now no one mentions a future date at all. The future has been shrinking by one year per year for my entire life. I think it is time for us to start a long-term project that gets people thinking past the mental barrier of an ever-shortening future. I would like to propose a large (think Stonehenge) mechanical clock, powered by seasonal temperature changes. It ticks once a year, bongs once a century, and the cuckoo comes out every millennium.”

Prenez-le temps de lire:
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