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Purpose Prize

Marc Freedman Portrait

The Latest from CoGenerate

Can Intergenerational Connection Heal Us?

Can Intergenerational Connection Heal Us?

The problems of social isolation and loneliness have been well documented.  We know that too many Americans, particularly young adults and older ones, feel lonely too much of the time. We know how we got here – the decline in membership groups, civic and community...

Overheard on Text: Can you take a joke?

Overheard on Text: Can you take a joke?

As colleagues from different generations (x and millennial), Marci Alboher and Duncan Magidson have been leading talks and workshops sharing their insights about working across generations. As they plan, they usually text furiously, sharing ideas and reflections....

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Stewart Brand

The Long Now Foundation
Purpose Prize Fellow 2006

Nurturing long-term thinking and long-term responsibility

Technology has brought breathtaking change to modern life, but it’s also left us with a collective attention span shrinking precipitously, and that, to Stewart Brand is a risk to civilization. Known for creating the Whole Earth Catalogue, Brand, 67, co-founded the Long Now Foundation in 1995 to develop a coherent and compelling body of ideas about long-term thinking and long-term responsibility. Here was a way, he thought, to consider otherwise intractable or invisible problems. The Foundation embraced several projects, including a 10,000-year clock inside a remote Nevada mountain; an online collection of the world’s living languages (the Rosetta Project); a publicly-available digital preservation and archiving project; and seminars focusing on long-term thinking. In 1997, Brand presented a BBC television series, “How Buildings Learn,” building on his book by the same title published three years earlier. and in 1999, wrote The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility, a series of essays on long-term thinking. While hundreds have attended Long Now seminars, the Foundation’s greatest audience has been on the Web, where up to 30,000 people a month download the free audio recorded lectures.