BELONG:

ESSENTIAL READING
 CONTENTS

1. + LONG VIEW
The Big Here and Long Now by Brian Eno

2. + RESILIENCE
The Next Big Thing: Resilience by Jamais Cascio

3. + BREAKTHROUGH IDEAS
excerpt Time for the Stars by Robert Heinlein
excerpt The Future of Innovation: Foreword by Gary Hamel
excerpt Innovation: Crucial to Our Future by Judy Estrin

4. + TRANSITION GENERATION
speech Singularity University Keynote by Larry Brilliant
excerpt The Meaning of the 21st Century by James Martin
 1.
+ LONG VIEW

We need to see our work on innovation as involving

disciplined practice, not the quest for short-term wins.
This is an obvious problem in our instant-gratification,
quarterly-earnings-based culture in which corporate
managers (and politicians) are evaluated and
rewarded based on their success at maintaining a
continuous upward trend that produces immediate
results. At times, it seems like the question “What
have you done for me lately” approaches the status
of a business model. If resource allocation, decision
making processes, and career-path planning all obey
a short-term logic, while the important challenges
facing both organizations and society are mostly
long term, isn’t the disconnect obvious?

– JOHN KAO, author of Innovation Nation


+ LONG VIEW
The Big Here and Long Now
Brian Eno
Musician, composer, pioneer of ambient music
Board member of The Long Now Foundation
It was 1978. I was new to New York. A rich acquaintance had invited me to a
housewarming party, and, as my cabdriver wound his way down increasingly
potholed and dingy streets, I began wondering whether he’d got the address
right. Finally he stopped at the doorway of a gloomy, unwelcoming industrial
building. Two winos were crumpled on the steps, oblivious. There was no other
sign of life in the whole street.
“I think you may have made a mistake,” I ventured.
But he hadn’t. My friend’s voice called “Top Floor!” when I rang the bell, and
I thought – knowing her sense of humour – “Oh this is going to be some kind
of joke!” I was all ready to laugh. The elevator creaked and clanked slowly up-
wards, and I stepped out – into a multimillion dollar palace. The contrast with
the rest of the building and the street outside couldn’t have been starker.
I just didn’t understand. Why would anyone spend so much money building a
place like that in a neighbourhood like this? Later I got into conversation with
the hostess. “Do you like it here?” I asked. “It’s the best place I’ve ever lived,”
she replied. “But I mean, you know, is it an interesting neighbourhood?” “Oh,
the neighbourhood? Well that’s outside!” she laughed.
The incident stuck in my mind. How could you live so blind to your surround-
ings? How could you not think of where I live as including at least some of the
space outside your four walls, some of the bits you couldn’t lock up behind you?
I felt this was something particular to New York: I called it “The Small Here.” I
realised that, like most Europeans, I was used to living in a bigger Here.
I noticed that this very local attitude to space in New York paralleled a similarly
limited attitude to time. Everything was exciting, fast, current, and tempo-
rary. Enormous buildings came and went, careers rose and crashed in weeks.
You rarely got the feeling that anyone had the time to think two years ahead,
let alone ten or a hundred. Everyone seemed to be passing through. It was
undeniably lively, but the downside was that it seemed selfish, irresponsible
and randomly dangerous. I came to think of this as “The Short Now,” and this
suggested the possibility of its opposite – “The Long Now.”
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ESSENTIAL READING
“Now” is never just a moment. The Long Now is the recognition that the
precise moment you’re in grows out of the past and is a seed for the future.
The longer your sense of Now, the more past and future it includes. It’s ironic
that, at a time when humankind is at a peak of its technical powers, able to
create huge global changes that will echo down the centuries, most of our social
systems seem geared to increasingly short nows. Huge industries feel pressure
to plan for the bottom line and the next shareholders meeting. Politicians feel
forced to perform for the next election or opinion poll. The media attract
bigger audiences by spurring instant and heated reactions to human interest
stories while overlooking longer-term issues – the real human interest.
Meanwhile, we struggle to negotiate our way through an atmosphere of
Utopian promises and dystopian threats, a minefield studded with pots of
treasure. We face a future where almost anything could happen. Will we be
crippled by global warming, weapons proliferation and species depletion, or
liberated by space travel, world government and molecule-sized computers?
We don’t even want to start thinking about it. This is our peculiar form of
selfishness, a studied disregard of the future. Our astonishing success as a
technical civilisation has led us to complacency, to expect that things will
probably just keep getting better.
But there is no reason to believe this. We might be living in the last gilded
bubble of a great civilisation about to collapse into a new Dark Age, which,
given our hugely amplified and widespread destructive powers, could be very
dark indeed.
If we want to contribute to some sort of tenable future, we have to reach a
frame of mind where it comes to seem unacceptable – gauche, uncivilised – to
act in disregard of our descendants. Such changes of social outlook are quite
possible – it wasn’t so long ago, for example, that we accepted slavery, an idea
which most of us now find repellent. We felt no compulsion to regard slaves as
fellow-humans and thus placed them outside the circle of our empathy.
This changed as we began to realise, perhaps it was partly the glory of their music,
that they were real people, and that it was no longer acceptable that we should
cripple their lives just so that ours could be freer. It just stopped feeling right.
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ESSENTIAL READING

+ LONG VIEW

The same type of change happened when we stopped employing kids to work
in mines, or when we began to accept that women had voices too. Today we
view as fellow-humans many whom our grandparents may have regarded as
savages, and even feel some compulsion to share their difficulties – aid dona-
tions by individuals to others they will never meet continue to increase. These
extensions of our understanding of who qualifies for our empathy, indicate
that culturally, economically and emotionally we live in an increasingly Big
Here, unable to lock a door behind us and pretend the rest of the world is just
“outside.”

We don’t yet, however, live in The Long Now. Our empathy doesn’t extend far
forward in time. We need now to start thinking of our great grandchildren, and
their great-grandchildren, as other fellow-humans who are going to live in a real
world which we are incessantly, though only semi-consciously, building. But
can we accept that our actions and decisions have distant consequences, and
yet still dare do anything? It was an act of complete faith to believe, in the days
of slavery, that a way of life which had been materially very successful could be
abandoned and replaced by another, as yet unimagined, but somehow it hap-
pened. We need to make a similar act of imagination now.
 2.

+ RESILIENCE

We are at the beginning of time for the human race.

It is not unreasonable that we grapple with problems.
But there are tens of thousands of years in the future.
Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what
we can, improve the solutions, and pass them on.

–RICHARD FEYNMAN

+ RESILIENCE
The Next Big Thing: Resilience
Jamais Cascio
Environmental futurist at Institute for the Future
If the financial crisis has taught us anything, it is that brittle systems can fail
catastrophically.
With increasing fervor since the 1980s, sustainability has been the watchword
of scientists, environmental activists, and indeed all those concerned about the
complex, fragile systems on the sphere we inhabit. It has shaped debates about
business, design, and our lifestyles.
Sustainability is a seemingly laudable goal – it tells us we need to live within
our means, whether economic, ecological, or political – but it’s insufficient for
uncertain times. How can we live within our means when those very means
can change, swiftly and unexpectedly, beneath us? We need a new paradigm.
As we look ahead, we need to strive for an environment, and a civilization, able
to handle unexpected changes without threatening to collapse. Such a world
would be more than simply sustainable; it would be regenerative and diverse,
relying on the capacity not only to absorb shocks like the popped housing
bubble or rising sea levels, but to evolve with them. In a word, it would be
resilient.
Sustainability is inherently static. It presumes there’s a point at which we can
maintain ourselves and the world, and once we find the right combination of
behavior and technology that allows us some measure of stability, we have to
stay there. A sustainable world can avoid imminent disaster, but it will remain
on the precipice until the next shock.
Resilience, conversely, accepts that change is inevitable and in many cases
out of our hands, focusing instead on the need to be able to withstand the
unexpected. Greed, accident, or malice may have harmful results, but, barring
something truly apocalyptic, a resilient system can absorb such results
without its overall health being threatened.
Like sustainability, resilience encompasses both strategy and design, guiding
how choices are made and how systems are created. Stripped to its essence, it
comes down to avoiding being trapped – or trapping oneself – on a losing path.
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ESSENTIAL READING
Principles of resilience include:
Diversity: Not relying on a single kind of solution means not suffering from a
single point of failure.
Redundancy: Backup, backup, backup. Never leave yourself with just one path
of escape or rescue.
Decentralization: Centralized systems look strong, but when they fail, they fail
catastrophically.
Collaboration: We’re all in this together. Take advantage of collaborative tech-
nologies, especially those offering shared communication and information.
Transparency: Don’t hide your systems – transparency makes it easier to figure
out where a problem may lie. Share your plans and preparations, and listen
when people point out flaws.
Fail gracefully: Failure happens, so make sure that a failure state won’t make
things worse than they are already.
Flexibility: Be ready to change your plans when they’re not working the way
you expected; don’t count on things remaining stable.
Foresight: You can’t predict the future, but you can hear its footsteps approach-
ing. Think and prepare.
Ultimately, resilience emphasizes increasing our ability to withstand crises. Sus-
tainability is a brittle state: Unforeseen changes (natural or otherwise) can easily
cause its collapse. Resilience is all about being able to overcome the unexpected.
Sustainability is about survival. The goal of resilience is to thrive.
 3.

+ BREAKTHROUGH IDEAS

It’s hard to develop radical ideas into something

broadly practical, because commercial money
and government money are obliged to be
conservative, and academic money is limited to
discovery. The best money for pushing really
radical ideas into experimental use comes from
individual philanthropists.

– STEWART BRAND, president of The Long Now Foundation


+ BREAKTHROUGH IDEAS
Excerpt Time For The Stars
(1956)
Robert Heinlein
Renowned science fiction author
We got interested in the purposes of the Long Range Foundation. Its coat of
arms reads: “Bread Cast Upon the Waters,” and its charter is headed: “Dedi-
cated to the Welfare of Our Descendants.” The charter goes on with a lot of
lawyers’ fog but the way the directors have interpreted it has been to spend
money only on things that no government and no other corporation would
touch. It wasn’t enough for a proposed project to be interesting to science or
socially desirable; it also had to be so horribly expensive that no one else would
touch it, and the prospective results had to lie so far in the future that it could
not be justified to taxpayers or shareholders. To make the LRF directors light
up with enthusiasm you had to suggest something that cost a billion or more
and probably wouldn’t show results for ten generations, if ever...something like
how to control the weather (they’re working on that).
The funny thing is that bread cast upon waters does come back seven hundred
fold; the most preposterous projects made the LRF embarrassing amounts of
money – “embarrassing” to a non-profit corporation that is. Take space travel:
it seemed tailor-made, back a couple of hundred years ago, for LRF, since it was
fantastically expensive and offered no probable results comparable with the in-
vestment. There was a time when governments did some work on it for military
reasons, but the Concord of Bayreuth in 1980 put a stop even to that.
So the Long Range Foundation stepped in and happily began wasting money.
It came at a time when the corporation unfortunately had made a few billions
on the Thompson mass-converter when they had expected to spend at least a
century on pure research; since they could not declare a dividend (no stock-
holders), they had to get rid of the money somehow and space travel looked
like a rat hole to pour it down.
Even the kids know what happened to that: Ortega’s torch made space travel in-
side the solar system cheap, fast, and easy, and the one-way energy screen made
colonization practical and profitable; the LRF could not unload fast enough to
keep from making lots more money.
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ESSENTIAL READING
Excerpt The Future of
Innovation: Foreword
Gary Hamel
Prominent business thinker
We owe our future to innovation. Today, human beings confront a daunting
array of problems that demand radical new solutions. Climate change, global
pandemics, failed states, narco crime, terrorism, nuclear proliferation, environ-
mental degradation – meeting these challenges will require us to invent entirely
new innovation systems. We need to learn how to solve problems that are
multi-dimensional and multi- jurisdictional. In the early years of the 20th cen-
tury, Thomas Edison and General Electric invented the modern R&D lab, and
with it a set of much-imitated protocols that would help to generate a century’s
worth of technological progress. Today, humanity’s most pressing problems
aren’t merely technological; they’re social, cultural, political – and transnational.
That’s why, like Edison, we must reinvent innovation. What’s needed are new
meta-innovations (like idea markets, crowd-sourcing and folksonomies) that
will facilitate innovation across disciplines, borders, institutions and ideologies.
This is the only way we’ll solve the make-or-break challenges now facing our
species. Our future, no less than our past, depends on innovation.
Innovation:
Crucial to Our Future
Judy Estrin
Author of Closing the Innovation Gap
Board member of Walt Disney and FedEx
Look around you. If you’re like me, your life is filled with technology and tools
that help you work, live, and play. New devices like iPhones, social networks like
Facebook, “breakthrough” pharmaceuticals, and sleek household products are all
around us. It seems like innovation in many fields – from Web 2.0 to personal-
ized medicine – is accelerating at a rapid pace in the United States, right? Wrong.
In fact, the underlying infrastructure of research, development, and application
that produced these marvels – as well as world-changing innovations like the
Internet – has drastically deteriorated in the U.S. in recent years. The decline of
what I call our “Innovation Ecosystem” poses a grave threat to both the economic
prosperity of our country and the security of our children’s future.
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+ BREAKTHROUGH IDEAS

Leading-edge science and technology have been at the foundation of our Reviving sustainable innovation will require sweeping changes at all levels
country’s economic growth for more than a century. Significant inventions like of society – from the schoolroom, to the boardroom, to the hallways of our
the personal computer, cell phones, and the Net have all driven major cycles of nation’s capitol.
our economic growth. Today, more than ever, our role in the future depends on
our ability to sustain a culture that supports and promotes the ability to inno-
vate. Along with the rest of the world, the U.S. faces major challenges – climate
change, national security, dependence on oil, and the need for affordable health
care – that threaten our future. Each of these challenges also brings opportuni-
ties – if we give innovation the attention it deserves.

Innovation does not just happen. Like a garden, it must be actively nurtured.
The once-groundbreaking technologies that today seem commonplace were all
built on a strong and deep foundation of investments by business and govern-
ment in our long-term growth.

In the course of writing my new book, Closing the Innovation Gap, I discovered
that the mania for instant gratification that is killing innovation has spread
from Wall Street to Washington to Silicon Valley, permeating our culture.
Stockholders focus on short-term transactions at the expense of building for
the future. Federal agencies like DARPA – which financed the research I did
in the early ‘70s at Stanford led by Vint Cerf, the father of the Internet – now
demand technologies that can be deployed within months to aid the war effort.
Instead of educating our children to become inquisitive about the world around
them and have respect for science, we drill them on standardized tests, while
scientists are devalued as just another political special-interest group.

“Our culture is telling kids that science isn’t cool – particularly for girls,” Sally
Ride, the first female astronaut in the U.S., told me. “When we were growing
up, our society put much more emphasis on the importance of science and
math, so there was a cultural imperative that created a generation of scientists
and engineers. Now that imperative is gone.”

We are rapidly losing our advantage in the emerging global economy. Most of
these marvelous new products and services, even the iPod, capitalized on pre-
existing technologies. We are too focused on incremental innovations, to the
detriment of truly disruptive breakthroughs.

There’s a disease that afflicts trees called root rot. Infected trees eventually die,
but for a long time, they appear to be healthy, with lots of branches and green
leaves. Root rot is an apt metaphor for what has happened to America’s Innova-
tion Ecosystem as our planning horizons have become focused purely on mak-
ing things better for today, this quarter, or this year – with hardly any thought
for the fate of future generations.
 4.

+ TRANSITION GENERATION

The world’s biggest problem is that not enough

people are working on the world’s biggest problems.

– MAX MARMER, 20 year old entrepreneur


+ TRANSITION GENERATION
Singularity University Keynote
Larry Brilliant
President, Skoll Global Threats Fund
Collaborator in World Health Organization’s
smallpox eradication project
Speaking to the students of Singularity University’s 2010 Graduate Studies
Program.
You’ve heard people talk about Google here. I love Google, I have some very
dear, close friends at Google; but it’s not good enough. And Facebook: One of my
best friends runs Facebook, but it’s also, really, not good enough. Apple, eBay....
They’re all not good enough, because when you talk about changing the world
in a positive way, you have to look at the real problems we face – the great,
global threats.
I want you to think about the great challenges, because it isn’t just enough to
affect the lives of a billion people positively in 10 years. If you’ll do what I’m
asking you to do, your projects and your ideas will be fixed on a star that will
say something like this: “Positively affect the lives of a billion people over the
next 10 years, and help solve one of the great, global challenges of our time.”
Anything less than that is unworthy of you, because of who you are, where you
come from, the training you’ve had, what you’ve already done to get here,
and the faculty that you’ve got.
The world does not internalize negative externalities. For example, if the
smallpox vaccine was an example of market failure, then climate change is also
an example. The oil and gas and fossil fuel companies that have been producing
energy have also been producing the invisible, odorless, tasteless gas that’s caus-
ing global warming, and causing our planet to be in such peril. Global warming
is the great exacerbater. It exacerbates all the other grand challenges that we
face. When you work on these great challenges, you need to be focused not
only on helping a billion people, but you need to be thinking about the greatest
challenges for those billion, and the billions and billions beyond them.
Two weeks ago, Tom Friedman wrote a column in the NYTimes in which
he quoted Peter Schwartz, and Peter said that it is not your imagination that
there are more bad things happening, all at once, and that they’re all more
intertwined than ever before. It’s not your imagination because the world that
you’re inheriting is really at a crossroads. And it’s not just one crossroads, but
dozens of crossroads, all at the same time. Because of our just in time inventory
systems, because of our transportation system, because of our overpopulation,
11
ESSENTIAL READING
because of our carbon footprint, because of all those things and more, you are
inheriting a world filled with the kind of peril that my generation never faced.
Now, the good news is, you’re going to have tools that we never had. We
eradicated smallpox without a single phone, let alone a cellphone. We had
no computers. If we wanted to communicate, it was by letter, occasionally
by Telex. You will have the tools, and you will learn the skills to take on the
hardest challenges in the world. Having met your predecessors last year, I know
you’re up for it. I ask that when you make your team projects, when you plan
your careers, you take this admonition to affect one billion people, and you add
to it to affect one billion people positively and answer the grand challenges of
our time.
Excerpt The Meaning Of The 21st
Century
James Martin
Founder of Oxford Martin School
At the start of the 21st century, humankind finds itself on a non-sustainable
course – a course that, unless it is changed, will lead to catastrophes of awesome
consequences. At the same time, we are unlocking formidable new capabilities
that could lead to much more exciting lives and glorious civilizations.
This could be humanity’s last century, or it could be the century in which civili-
zation sets sail towards a far more spectacular future. Decisions that will lead to
these wildly different conclusions have to be made soon.
They depend upon our being able to understand the options of the 21st cen-
tury, think logically about our future, and collectively take rational action.
Problems confront us that could become awesome, but this is a book about so-
lutions – many solutions. With these solutions we will bring about a change in
course – a great 21st-century transition. If we get it right, we have an extraordi-
 12
ESSENTIAL READING

+ TRANSITION GENERATION

nary future. If we get it wrong, we face a disruption that will set humanity back
centuries. A drastic change is needed in the first half of the 21st century to set
the stage for extraordinary events in the rest of the century.

A major reason why we have the problems that this book describes is that most
of our institutions don’t have a long-range view of the future. If we look ahead,
it is a short-distance view, not a long-distance view. Finding answers to the
problems that could wreck our future often needs a long-term view. Given the
nature of the 21st century, our young people need to be shown the long-term
views.

Today’s young people will be the generation that brings about this great transi-
tion. They are ultimately responsible for the changes we describe – a transition
unlike any before in history. They are the Transition Generation. It is vital that
they – all of them – understand the 21st century roadmap and the critical role
they will play.

Collectively the task of the Transition Generation is awesome.

All young people need to be taught about the meaning of the 21st Century.
We’ve got to start planning for the future and doing
intelligent things, not the dumb things we’ve been
doing. We are already in real trouble, but I like to
liken it to a baseball game. Young people ask me,
“Where do we stand?” It’s the seventh inning. We’re
down by two runs. The game’s not over. The game’s
not over. We can still turn it around. We’ve gotta hold
them right where we are by putting our best relief
pitcher in, and we’ve gotta put three runs on the board
in the last two innings. My first president of the Turner
Foundation used to say, with a wink in his eye, “The
situation is hopeless, but I could be wrong.” If things
are going to get turned around, young people are
going to be the ones to do it, because my generation
is worn out. We need a long-term plan for humanity.
We need to be planning for a thousand years out.

– TED TURNER