Andrew's Minute Paper 1/31

While the concept of a longer now does have great merit, especially in the context of encouraging forward thinking, the Long Now group seem to be taking it a little far. It seems to me that if the concept of the new were extended forward and back 10000 years, it further promotes one of the continuing problems I find in the promotion of futurism. Like a previous one, one of the readings for today again made the assertion that this concept the longer important time and future are at the expense of the present, which seems to me to be an over all hard to sell pitch. By telling someone that what matters is people 10000 years from now, it seems more likely to alienate them from the idea, rather than encourage it. One thing that really jumped out at me when I was doing the readings for today was a kind of funny connection to a sci-fi book I once read. In the reading, the point of putting off present sensation as the cost of better sensation in the future, reminding me of a line from that book in which humans are referenced as withstanding pain in anticipation of revenge.
As an unrelated note, I was really glad to find out other people seemed to be having the trouble of finding an emerging issue that hadn't already hit the mainstream.