ZANDER: 

No matter what age you are, you walk into these bookstores and libraries, you know, there’s a feeling there that is still powerful. And with this room in the Pavilion, you are surrounded in books and you have this moment to be surrounded in books. 

They were a revolutionary medium when invented, similar to the internet. And similar to the internet, they’ve been misused and abused and mistreated and overvalued and undervalued and used as weapons and used as things of peace!

So you’re welcome to enjoy these books all week, but when they close the Man Pavillion to load it with pyro, you are asked to save any and all the books that you want to save from being burned. 

Hopefully the whole library will get given away and not a single book will burn, but I think it might be interesting to see what does get left, um, and, and what happens there.

STUART: 

Hey, everybody. Burning Man LIVE. Yes, I am Stuart Mangrum, and yes, man, I love my job. I get to do so much fun stuff. And one of the funnest things — I’m still not sure, is ‘funnest’ a word? — Anyway, I get to help put together the Man Pavilion, which is the interactive space at the actual foot of the actual Burning Man effigy in actual Black Rock City.

Every year we do it a little differently. This year, to support our 2025 theme of Tomorrow Today, we’ve made it into a bit of an expo space, kind of a World’s Fair. And one of the exhibitors there, I was very happy to see that he put in an application, was a fellow named Alexander Rose.

Now, Zander until recently was the executive director of the Long Now Foundation, one of my absolute favorite non-profits dedicated to long term thinking and responsibility. I know that sounds a little esoteric, but we live in a world where policymakers can’t think past the next news cycle or the next fundraising dinner, and corporations are locked into thinking about next quarter’s earnings. And yet, we have problems that span generations, that spans centuries, so… 

Zander was one of the brains behind the Long Now’s 10,000-Year Clock, which is being built even as we speak inside a mountain in Texas and designed to tick off the years, chime the centuries, and I guess have the cuckoo come out once a millennium. 

He also helped put together their library, which is a sort of book club for the apocalypse. All the titles that you would want to rebuild civilization after civilization collapsed. So it should come as no surprise that his installation at this year’s man base is going to be a library, which may or may not get from bad in the tradition of, Ray Bradbury’s dystopian classic Fahrenheit 451, Zander is one of the smart guys recruited by Long Now founder Stewart Brand.

We just had another one of them on the show a few episodes ago, Kevin Kelly. So if you missed that one, go back and catch my conversation with Kevin. I thought it was a lot of fun. 

Anyways, Zander and I are going to talk about books, but we’ll also talk about robots, about dystopia, about the future, and possibly about the nature of time itself.

Zander Rose.

ZANDER: 

Hey, Stuart. How’re you doing?

STUART: 

I’m doing great. I’m really glad to be speaking with you today. 

This whole Man Pavilion thing this year, I’m actually really excited about it because I love the super interactive Man bases that we’ve had in the past. There were more than just static displays. And you’ve got a really cool installation coming. Maybe we can start, tell us a little bit about… is it The Manual for Civilization or is it Library 451?

ZANDER: 

Yeah, actually we’re naming it after one of the characters in Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, Clarisse McClellan. So it’ll be the Clarisse McClellan Manual for Civilization.

STUART: 

Okay.

ZANDER: 

And there’s going to be lots of things that are kind of themed and Easter egged, along the lines of Fahrenheit 451. And for those of you that don’t know, this was kind of a seminal dystopic future book that was written by Ray Bradbury all the way back in 1953. And I have to say, in rereading it and watching various video interpretations of it while I’ve been working on this project, it is amazingly prophetic, and is really worth the reread and and re look at. 

Some of the things that they had that I just didn’t even remember registering, I think, when I was like in High School is, they had these little things that would go in your ears and you would go into another world. And there was people who were regularly overdosing on sleeping pills, and then this crew would come to their house and clean their blood out. It’s just, it’s such, such a trip.

And yeah, even arthroscopy; arthroscopic surgery is basically like envisioned in it. It’s just, it’s unbelievable, actually.

STUART: 

You know what? We chose this year’s street names based on science fiction writers, and B Street is Bradbury.

ZANDER: 

I saw that, which is great!

STUART: 

And I’ve been reading a little, actually doing a little reading club and going through that. We just finished Margaret Atwood, her MaddAddam trilogy, rereading that. So I think Fahrenheit might be next for me. 

Which of the movie versions actually, by the way, is the best?

ZANDER: 

The 2018 one was not so great. But there is this amazing 60s English one that was done. It’s all shot in Technicolor and, you know, it’s not… obviously the special effects aren’t that great, but they’re kind of charming and like, they’re done as like very practical effects. And they kind of skipped over certain technologies that they just had no idea how to do. But the envisioning of the world and the weird retro future-ness of it is definitely the best in that one. 

STUART: 

Special effects, what do you need? You need fire, right? Flamethrower. Isn’t that basically what’s going on here? This is a reverse fire department!

RAY BRADBURY: 

It was a pleasure to burn, to see things blackened and changed. With the brass nozzle in his fist, with his great python spitting its venomous kerosene upon the world, and his hands were the hands of some amazing conductor, playing all the symphonies of blazing and burning to bring down the tatters and charcoal ruins of history. 

With his symbolic helmet numbered 451 on his stolid head, and his eyes all orange flame with the thought of what came next, he flicked the igniter, and the house jumped up in a gorging fire that burned the evening sky, red and yellow and black.

—Fahrenheit 451

STUART: 

Okay, so you are bringing a library modeled after, I assume, after The Manual for Civilization that was a Long Now project. And then you’re going to burn it. Is that right?

ZANDER: 

Well, sort of. Yes. 

It’s very interesting, you know, the moment you bring up burning books, obviously, especially these days, it’s a very touchy subject. And I love how it gets people kind of riled up. But actually, I am not going to burn any books. 

STUART: 

Oh? Okay.

ZANDER: 

The only people who are going to burn books are the people that do not save these books from being burned. So this library is kind of a provocation. And it’s so it’s a small reading room that’s somewhat modeled after The Manual for Civilization, which was a collection that I started curating at The Interval with Long Now, which was at the time, you know, we had room for 3000 books in that library. And so we were curating the 3000 books you would most want to restart civilization. We collected across categories ranging from the classics, things like the Harvard Five Foot Shelf and, you know, Shakespeare, and Greek tragedies, things like that. And then a history and future section, a kind of a smaller science fiction section of world-building. And then the mechanics of civilization, which could range from anything from, you know, how to restart a steel industry, to how to deliver a baby, to how to cook food.

STUART: 

The Way Things Work is a great, great title for that.

ZANDER: 

Yeah, The Way Things Work. Exactly.

STUART: 

And of course, the whole Foxfire library; all 600 volumes.

ZANDER: 

Yes, the whole Foxfire, which in fact, yeah, I just got some of those in. And then, you know, and a McMaster car catalog. I think that’s the other. Those are kind of the most important things. 

One of the things that’s interesting about that collection is it has a high overlap with banned books. All the classics. There’s just so many books that are considered classics basically have been banned at any one time in any one country by any, you know, one kind of authoritative regime. And sometimes they’re banned for you know, very liberal reasons and sometimes very conservative reasons.

I got this big BANNED stamp. Any of the books that have been banned anywhere, I’ll make sure they’re stamped. 

STUART:

Yeah.

ZANDER:

But the provocation in the library, so it has a high overlap with the banned book collections, and then inside of every book we’ll have a bookplate that reads, “You’re welcome to enjoy these books all week, but on Friday, up until sunset when they close The Man Pavilion to load it with pyro, you are asked to save any and all of the books that you want to save from being burned.”

STUART: 

Nice.

ZANDER: 

People can kind of spend some time with books during the week, and then on Friday they come out to save the books that are most important to them. 

Hopefully the whole library will get given away and not a single book will burn, but I think it might be interesting to see what does get left, uh, and, and what happens there.

STUART: 

You know, the idea of burning books out there is not new. It is so provocative that people have been playing with that for a while. I remember my friend DS Black…

ZANDER: 

Yeah. 

STUART: 

DS Black had a library. In another life, he is actually a head librarian at a major academic institution. He had a burnable library. 

And I was just reading up on this: There was a project called Peruse It or Lose It, which was done at one of the SF Decompressions. Sadly, they did all end up burning some books to the horror of some people. 

Are people really horrified about that anymore, though? Honestly, is it a generational thing? We’re of a similar age. We grew up with this, you know, love of and respect of books. I had a librarian mom, so I had it kind of slapped into me. Do kids care anymore?

ZANDER: 

You know, I posted across a bunch of Burning Man forums about this project, and there’s not a single one of them where someone didn’t say, “You’re not going to burn the books, are you?!” And so clearly, there are some people, I don’t know if the kids are, per se. 

I still think it’s interesting, like, when you walk into a room when you’re surrounded by books, no matter your, what your number, what age you are… I was just traveling in Japan with my daughter, who was 15, now, just 16; You walk into these bookstores and libraries and, you know, there’s a feeling there that still works and is still powerful. And that’s what I’m hoping with this kind of room in the Pavilion. 

The idea is that you are surrounded in books and you have this moment to be surrounded in books, and to consider them. They were a revolutionary medium when invented, similar to the internet. 

And similar to the internet, they’ve been misused and abused and mistreated and overvalued and undervalued and used as weapons and used as things of peace. So I think they’re still powerful. And I think there’s still some guttural thing that we kind of like to be surrounded by books, which is a very different feeling than being surrounded by a bunch of computer screens.

STUART: 

That’s true, or a bunch of thumb drives.

You know, Burning Man… Burning Man’s Founder Larry Harvey was a huge bibliophile. In fact, when we did the Carnival of Mirrors theme, his inner circus freak was the bookworm, who was conversant with all the world’s literature because he had literally devoured it. 

STUART LIVE:

Ladies and gentlemen, prepare yourself for a human oddity so bizarre, a freak of nature so unlikely, that it may make you doubt your own sanity: Half man, half worm, half genius! Conversant with all of the world’s literature because he has literally devoured it. Welcome, the human bookworm!

STUART: 

You knew Larry. I mean, I actually remember going to one of the Long Now talks where you introduced him, interviewed him on stage. Tell me a little bit about that.

ZANDER: 

Yeah, well, I’ve been going to Burning Man since ‘96, and actually the very first person that I met at Burning Man —  was in a very kind of difficult situation — was actually Danger Ranger. I was camped right next to one of the people that got hit in their tents between main camp and rave camp.

STUART: 

Ouch. Yeah.

ZANDER: 

And so I woke up at five in the morning to the helicopter landing to take those people to the hospital. And the person standing there was Danger Ranger. And, so it was, that was a very interesting introduction to my first morning at Burning Man. 

I don’t think I met Larry until I started working on some of the big pyro effects with Jim Mason, with the ICP / Fire Symphony project, and that would have been ‘98 or so.

STUART: 

The ICP. I’m sorry, what was… what does that stand for?

ZANDER: 

Yeah, the ICP was… Well, it was originally called the Fire Symphony, which was this giant, like they were 500 foot flamethrowers that were played before The Man burned between ‘99 and 2001. They were kind of predecessors to the oil derrick piece that Dan Das Mann did and using same technology of liquid flame. Jim Mason was the lead of the original version of that, and his girlfriend renamed it ICP as in Impotence Compensation Project.

STUART: 

Thank you. That’s what I wanted to hear. Yes. Oh, the days… Yeah.

ZANDER: 

I encountered Larry then. And then in ‘99 when Long Now bought our property in eastern Nevada the very first person I called was Larry. We had the coffee at the Cafe DuMond in the Mission, and he told me all the reasons why having property in Nevada is a big pain in the ass, and that meth heads are going to cut through all our containers and steal all our stuff. So, yeah…but.

STUART: 

I’m looking here. I just pulled up a list of ‘the most banned books’ based on multiple countries and all that stuff, and man, just, I can’t even get out of the A titles: 

• The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; of course
• The Adventures and Huckleberry Finn
• Anarchist Cookbook; well, I understand that one.

ZANDER:

Right. 

STUART: 

• American Psycho 
• The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie

What’s wrong with that?

ZANDER:

Yeah, and there’s some… I’ve just been watching some good documentaries on banning books and, you know, it’s, you know, you start asking people about, you know, like, should any books be banned? And some people say no books should be banned. It’s like, well, what about books that tell you how to build nuclear bombs? Well, maybe those should be limited. So it gets very interesting, very quick.

STUART: 

Well, it’s guardrails around free speech, right?

ZANDER: 

Yeah.

STUART: 

It’s ‘shouting theater in a crowded fire’ or the other way around.

ZANDER: 

Yeah. Or, you know, books that would make it really easy to build chemical weapons, and biological weapons, and things like that. It’s an interesting question of how we want to put guardrails around things like that.

STUART: 

You should have to go on the dark web to find that, like everybody else!

ZANDER: 

Exactly!

STUART: 

So, you’ve done pyro in Black Rock City. Any other projects that you recall from out there?

ZANDER: 

Back in that time, I started a camp called Antarctica, which was a refrigerated semi-trailer back in ‘98 through 2001. And, when I started coming back to Burning Man, when I came back in 2018 — after taking a long time off, having kids, things like that — my girlfriend at the time, I took her out there for the first time and she, you know, had that moment of like, “Oh, we have to come back with a big camp!” 

I was like, “Well, I did this camp a while ago and this was pretty good. I think we could make a more realized version of it.” And she took that and worked with some other friends like Brady Forest to bring that back as a much more realized kind of immersive thing called Shackleton. So that was, we brought that. We did that in 2019 and then, again after the pandemic. But basically a refrigerated, 53 foot refrigerated semi, dressed up as the inside of The Endurance, with a dance party inside, running it at below freezing temperatures. And it was pretty great.

STUART: 

You know, around the time when you first started showing up there was still a lot of gearhead participation in Burning Man; not, you know, Mark Pauline, but a lot of his prottégés, out of SRL.

ZANDER: 

Yeah, I was there for Helco that ‘96 year.

STUART: 

Okay. I don’t know when you came out to the West Coast, but that was really a huge scene back then, right, the Survival Research Lab scene?

ZANDER: 

Well, I’ve lived here my whole life. I mean, sort of. I was born in France by hippie parents and came back when I was one, But, um, my stepfather was also an avant garde theater producer with Antenna Theater, which actually did some commissioned pieces out of Burning Man, with their Sands of Time piece, which was kind of like sand art along the walk out to The Man from Center Camp, using the Big Bang as the starting point of time rather than the birth of Christ.

STUART: 

So growing up in the Bay Area, you must have crossed paths with Survival Research Labs, with Mark Pauline.

ZANDER: 

Yeah. I grew up in the Bay Area, and, you know I grew up actually in a junkyard in Sausalito, literally in a junkyard. That was how I knew Stewart Brand from growing up, from that Sausalito waterfront. And so me and my friend interned in a way, as much as you can intern at Survival Research Labs, when we were 16 and 17 years old, for some of those big shows, like the ones that were done under the Bay Bridge, all the pianos lit on fire.

STUART: 

Oh, yeah. I did security for a couple of those too.

ZANDER: 

Yeah. And actually one of the lead clock engineers and machinists worked for SRL as well during that time, back in the day. And I built robots for Robot Wars, and then later BattleBots, so I’ve been part of that scene for a long time.

STUART: 

That’s right, you’re kind of a BattleBots legend, like multiple world championships!

ZANDER: 

Indeed. Yeah. One of the obscure things that I have a championship in.

STUART: 

Is there anything out of, any particular memories, out of the field of combat, out of the ring? Any bots or battles that you’ll never forget?

ZANDER: 

You know, the very earliest days were very fun when no one really knew what worked. There was people like Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage, who, later went on to do their TV show, and they came there with Blend-O, which was the very first rotary, you know, high powered rotary weapon that basically just got, it got given a first place trophy and told to go home because the arena couldn’t really contain it. So there’s those kinds of moments. 

I love the earliest time of things when people are still trying to figure them out and finding the limits of things. That was some of the fun of the early parts of Burning Man, of really pushing limits. And then also, you know, realizing that maybe driving back and forth between rave camp and main camp isn’t a good idea, and shooting guns around tens of thousands of people probably has to get limited.

Watching a community figure out how to be a community is, I think, a really interesting place. That’s been the fun of coming back to Burning Man through the years.

STUART: 

So you came for the fire and you stayed for the iterative development?

ZANDER: 

Yeah, I did, you know, I had been invited to Burning Man before ‘96, several years, and I was like, all right, well, it’s finally time to go, you know, before it gets not cool. Um. And, I didn’t quite realize how still in the beginning of things it was at the time. And it was before I was doing any large pyro, but about the same time I was starting to do robotics, and then got into the large pyro stuff with Jim Mason, and then took that project over for the last couple years that it ran.

STUART:

So let’s talk more about the library. How are you sourcing materials? It seems to me that books are pretty much free anymore. I know this because one of my friends used them just for architecture. Jules Nelson-Gal did her project Unbound a few years ago, where she just stripped them and used the spines and the covers, as, like, cladding on her building.

That’s… Somehow that’s worse than burning, I don’t know.

ZANDER: 

Yeah, it’s very funny. You know, there’s the great Stewart Brand quote that “information wants to be free, and it also wants to be expensive,” which is the part that people always forget about that quote, as the other half of it. 

STUART: 

Oh, wow. 

ZANDER:

I’m finding the same thing about books, that books want to be free, but sometimes they also want to be expensive. Like when I wanted to find the Foxfire books, I couldn’t find a free version of those. I’m sure if I had enough time, I could find them free, but there’s certain ones that I’m purchasing, and using some budget for that. But for the most part, I’m getting huge amounts free. It’s really just kind of a time game. How much time do you want to spend sifting through books in free piles versus just making sure you have the right kind of flavor to the collection.

I just went through my mom and step dad’s library yesterday and took home probably eight grocery bags full of books. I have been going to estate sales, where they have big free piles of books,and I go through those. And then sometimes they have books for sale and then I purchase those. So it’s a mix because I definitely, I want the books that are in there to mean something to people. I think there shouldn’t be a single book you pick up and go, wow, yeah, this wouldn’t be useful in the future.

What I found with this collection principle of The Manual for Civilization is that no matter what, they’re interesting books. 

When you posit this idea to somebody of, “what books would you want if you were dropped on Mars and you had to restart civilization and you didn’t have access to anything but this set of books?” There’s a whole kind of school of people who are like, well, clearly you just need to save all the classics of literature and all that mechanic stuff, and all the technology will reinvent itself. And then there’s a whole other set of people that are the opposite of, like, well, we need to save all the technology and all the classics will just rewrite themselves. 

And so you definitely want to do both, and I think it’s an interesting idea to have even debates about arguing better versions of a certain type of book in, or out; why things were banned; why they touched a nerve to the point where they were banned. All those things are the kind of conversations that I hope come up in this library.

STUART: 

Yeah, the free pile. I’ve gotta tell you, last time I checked, there was a whole lot of Tom Clancy in there.

ZANDER: 

Yeah.

STUART:

But I’ll tell you what, that came in really handy. My book club, the Belligerati, we had a event we called Ballistic Criticism. We used books as targets to see what caliber would penetrate through an entire book. And Tom Clancy won because his books are all, like, six inches thick.

ZANDER: 

Right. Yeah. I’m sure, Tom Clancy and Neal Stephenson would definitely be bullet stoppers.

STUART: 

Oh, Neal. Although, don’t burn Neal. I love all of his books, even the ones that drive me crazy.

ZANDER: 

Yeah, well, and actually, as an Easter egg, there’s actually a few Neal Stephenson signed copies that are going to be in this collection. There’s a few signed copies of several books, science fiction authors that I know, that are going to be in here. So, yeah…

STUART: 

And people aren’t supposed to take them until Friday?

ZANDER: 

That’s right. On the honor system.

STUART: 

Okay…

ZANDER: 

I am going to be setting up a time lapse camera for the whole week of the thing getting built and then people accessing it, and then the library dissipating on Friday, and then hopefully a sacrificial camera for the Burn.

STUART: 

Can you have short term checkouts or take-a-book-leave-a-book? 

ZANDER: 

Sure. Yeah. I mean, I think…

STUART: 

Do you have a time/date stamp?

ZANDER: 

If you have a better book than the one you’re taking, you can leave it; you can trade a book out!

STUART: 

Okay. Great. I’ll bring my Tom Clancy.

ZANDER: 

There you go. Yeah. 

STUART: 

So you are, among other things, a futurist. You’re the resident futurist at Automattic, parent company of WordPress. What’s that gig like? And how do I get it?

ZANDER: 

Yeah, well. I realized at a certain point that as I started at Long Now to build the 10,000-Year Clock, and I came in as an industrial designer with that as really the goal, and ended up building the whole institution as a way to that product, but if I stayed on, I was just going to be administrating a nonprofit for the rest of my life.

And so I took some time off, and I started looking out into the world. And one of the first people that I ended up having a conversation with was Matt Mullenwig, the founder of WordPress and Automattic. And he had been trying to launch the 100 year plan there, which is kind of a prepaid 100 years of website service, and nobody had bought it yet. And so I had some ideas about that. And he said, “Well, what are you doing right now?” 

And I said, “Well, I’m… I’m open.” 

And he said, “Why don’t you come start working for me and we work together on this?” 

So we’ve relaunched that as well as 100 year domains. And now I’m, you know, as the company is kind of thinking about different ways that it’s going to be in the future. I’m working with them on that. 

And what has kind of blown me away, that I didn’t realize about Automattic and WordPress coming in, is that 43% of the world’s websites are on WordPress, and I had no idea. The cultural resource that represents to me is so profound that I think anything that we can do to build tools – and one of the tools that we’re building, for instance, that’s about to get released is a link checker that can go on any WordPress website, and it will, if your link is dead, it will both tell you, and it will also find the most recent version on the Internet Archive and link to that. So it’ll self-heal and keep context of websites that might be getting out of date, which is, you know, a difficult problem of websites that are not being maintained, or, they want to be preserved as a historical artifact, but that all links that go out don’t work, right? So doing things like that.

STUART: 

You’re not talking about burningman.org, are you here, specifically?

ZANDER: 

I’m sure there’s no dead links in burningman.org.

STUART: 

You know that idea of future-proofing, yeah, that sounds like a super valuable tool for future-proofing a site.

ZANDER: 

Yeah. So that’s been fun. 

And then we’re still finishing up the clock out in West Texas. All of that’s now installed, and we’re getting ready to connect all the different modules together, and hopefully have an opening in the near future.

STUART: 

Yeah, I’m sure not everyone listening knows about the 10,000-Year Clock, which is, as you say, how you got involved in Long Now in the first place, back in 01990-something, or?

ZANDER: 

Yeah, it was ‘97. Yeah.

STUART: 

Tell us about the clock.

ZANDER: 

Well, the clock was originally an idea by computer scientist Danny Hillis, who had been building some of the fastest supercomputers out of MIT, and he really pioneered the massively parallel architectures that all cluster computing is now based on. And even Richard Feynman worked for him to create the router for the first supercomputer he built, which was called the Connection Machine One. And, they built several of these that were used largely in the defense industry and cracking codes and nuclear simulations and things like that. But it was designed in the 80s, and it had the ability to have 64,000 parallel processors, which is pretty stunning. 

So he has spent his entire life building computers that were faster and faster. And he realized in having conversations with people like Stuart Brand, Brian Eno, Kevin Kelly, that there’s a whole range of things in civilization that can only be worked on, on a slow and generational scale, and that nobody was really working in that scale. And so he thought, if he’s been building the fastest computers in the world, what if he built the slowest computer in the world? 

He wrote in the 1995 Wired Scenarios issue, there was an essay that came out from that. He had this kind of poetic idea of a clock that would tick once a year and bong once a century, and the cuckoo would come out once a millennium. And he and a bunch of people started thinking about that as more than just a poetic idea.

And then I got hired in ‘97. And I’d known Stewart Brand from growing up on the Sausalito waterfront, and was recently back from Carnegie Mellon Design School, and was doing computer, you know, CD-Rom world design, some of the early virtual world design stuff, and the first wave of that in the 90s, but was getting pretty bored of it. And when I heard about this project, I was like, this is way too interesting to not do. And so, I’ve been working with Danny Hillis ever since, so coming up on 30 years. 

We built the prototypes that you can see at The Interval in San Francisco. There’s also one at the Smithsonian, one of the dials. And then at the Science Museum in London, there’s one of the first prototypes. This final one is being built out in West Texas that’s 500 feet tall, built underground, with a little bit that peeks out at the top, that allows the sun in to synchronize the clock to solar noon on the solstices, which is an event that we just saw for the first time this last June.

STUART: 

So when does that happen? When’s it gonna open up? I hope I live long enough to see this.

ZANDER: 

We don’t have a date for when it opens, but…

STUART: 

Ah, okay!

ZANDER: 

I can say that, you know, all the stuff is in the mountain, now.

STUART: 

Okay! All the parts have been machined, and it’s just a matter of assembling?

ZANDER: 

Yeah. Everything’s machined, everything’s in. We could test things kind of module by module in shops, but we never had a 500 vertical foot space to test everything together. 

So we’re slowly connecting things, starting with the power storage system, that’s this big, huge weight that can fall like 100 feet under the ground, and can power the clock for hopefully, as much as a century without any outside power. And people can wind that part, but it’s also wound by the temperature difference from day to night, that we harness up at the top of the mountain. 

And then it has a chime system that was developed, both as an algorithm with Danny Hillis, and then Brian Eno, these bells, ten bells, that ring in a different sequence each day the clock is visited for 10,000 years — so over 3.5 million permutations of bell ringing.

And then the chamber with the dials and the timekeeper part, this big pendulum, mostly astronomical dials, things that would make sense over 10,000 years, but it does have a — down where you can reach it — there’s a calendar readout with a Gregorian calendar, and you can make a rubbing of the date that you are there at the clock.

STUART: 

That is absolutely awesome. I mean, when I got out of the Air Force, I swore I’d never go back to West Texas. But I will, to visit the clock. Ever since I first heard about it, I’ve just been fascinated by it. It is such a magnificent folly, or, I don’t know what else to call it. It’s just a really magnificent gesture towards eternity.

ZANDER: 

There’s actually kind of an early discussion about, you know, whether the clock should be forever or it should be bounded. And that’s really where the 10,000 years came from. And the idea is that, you know, roughly, civilization has been starting to change the world to bend to it for about 10,000 years, like, with agriculture and cities, and things like that, that that was kind of the human Anthropocene moment.

And instead of thinking of ourselves at the end of that moment, thinking of ourselves at least in the middle of a 20,000 year timeline where we’re in the middle of that. And what is our next 10,000 years really going to look like? And how are we shaping it? And what are the things that we are doing now that will make that harder or easier? The idea was kind of really trying to reframe us as not being at the end of something, but being at least in the middle of something. 

That really got me, you know, I mean, I grew up at the tail end of the Cold War. The only future I knew as a child was nuclear armageddon. And it wasn’t until I heard about this project, and I was like, well, actually, I don’t know that that’s our future anymore.

Strangely that’s starting to come back into frame, but we certainly were still feeling like this dystopic ‘end of times’ feeling even when I was a kid, and less so maybe in the hope, more hopeful, heady 90s. And then as we crossed into the millennium, we’re kind of turning back towards a bit more of a dystopic world; at least it feels that way. 

But I think these are all, in some cases, a lot of these things are kind of immune responses to making sure that we value the parts… Life for each generation has been getting better for the last 10,000 years. And, you know, by all measures that we have, life has been getting better. At least, you know, on average for everybody on the planet, there’s not anyone I know that would like to go back 100 years. I mean, they might say they do, but all of a sudden you’re back before dentistry and antibiotics and, you know, certainly if you’re not a white male, um, being back 100 years would be pretty horrific.

STUART: 

Yeah. 

ZANDER: 

And so a lot of this project is about hope for the future, realizing that there is ways to be hopeful about a future, and also making sure that we create that future to be hopeful about.

STUART: 

The Burning Man theme this year is very much about that, about how we hold utopias and dystopias in our heads, you know, they are concepts; they are mind games. 

ZANDER: 

Yeah. 

STUART: 

And how do we move from the dystopia that we have pretty much media saturation of, and kind of meme saturation of, into something a little bit more hopeful?

I just had Kevin Kelly on not too long ago… 

ZANDER: 

Yeah. 

STUART: 

…talking about his notion of protopia, of possibly it’s nothing quite as disastrous or as exciting as either of those things. It’s just we just keep slowly slogging forward, making a little bit better all the time. 

ZANDER: 

Yeah.

STUART: 

I don’t know. What do you see? How do you maintain a certain optimism about the future? 

ZANDER: 

Well, I think probably the largest force that has been in our favor, and continues to be in our favor, is that there’s no parent that wants the world to be worse for their children. The problem, of course, is making the world locally better for your children, now, we’re realizing, can have bad effects to a global world, where you know your consumption and your walled city and your gated neighborhood — however you want to define your local — you know, your country that doesn’t allow immigrants in, if you start kind of deciding the “us’s and the thems,” that’s where often the dystopic parts of these worlds happen. And I think the times in our world where we are much more — we, as in the collective we of humanity — are feeling much more globalistic and inclusive, and thinking of the world population thriving better, not just the population that is the people around me. That’s what really gives me the most hope.

And I think the younger generation does feel a much larger collective “us.” Just like there’s a longer now, there’s a larger us. And I think they got caught on their heels during things like Brexit, and to a large extent this last Trump election. But, you know, there’s obviously a lot of young people who are very pro that way, and they are going to get to see the way that that world plays out, for better or worse, at this point.

But I think no matter what, the pendulum of justice and inclusiveness and globalization is going to keep swinging further in the direction of positivity and better lives for us and our kids. I think there’s going to be hiccups along the way, but I am always hopeful and really positive about the future in general.

STUART: 

You know, ol’ Larry used to like to imagine that Burning Man would be a 100 year movement. 

ZANDER: 

Yeah. 

STUART: 

What do you think the odds are that there might be something like Burning Man in 2086?

ZANDER: 

We’re a good ways of the way there, and that the event has survived past Larry’s passing is probably one of the best signs.

A project that I have been working on for many years now is a research project on the longest lived organizations and companies in the world. I’m working hopefully on making this into a book. I’ve already started writing it. 

I’ve been flying around the world to India, Japan, several times now, Japan, Europe, some parts of the Americas kind of interviewing these people that are managing some of the longest lived organizations in the world. And some go back to… the oldest one I interviewed was a hotel in 718, was started in 718, and is on its 48th generational shift, and for the first time to a woman.

STUART: 

In what country? Where?

ZANDER: 

In Japan. A huge disproportionate number of the longest lived companies and organizations are in Japan. 

STUART: 

Wow. 

ZANDER: 

One of the more kind of Burning Man-like things that I encountered and really made me think about Burning Man, for the obvious reason, and maybe a less obvious reason, is the ghats in India, where they burn the bodies. Places like Varanasi that have been told through tales and myths, and documented to go back over 5000 years. The fires claimed to have never gone out for over 3000 years there. 

It sounds really kind of macabre, I think, but when you go to these places, it’s actually very hopeful. It’s a civilization that believes in reincarnation, on that principle, and so it’s really not an ending, it’s a beginning. 

And that whole system is organized in this very loose way, in that the people that run the ghats, when the caste system was there, they were called ‘the untouchables,’ and they were really considered the lowest of the untouchables that ran these ghats. To some extent the government has stepped in and has run … actually after the pandemic because there were so many bodies that had to be dealt with.

But that caste is illiterate, so it’s all word of mouth, how they do all of their management of these massive facilities. You can bring your remains of your Indian American father there and then you give the name, and where do you think they were from. And they talk to each other, and it’s like this giant human computer that figures out your family history, and then there’s this person with a typewriter that types it out. And then you get, you know, what are the correct rites for this person. And it’s all in people’s heads, this like beautiful human computer that’s not documented in any way. It’s all in peoples’ heads from hundreds of generations back. That’s the kind of thing that gives me hope, both for something like Burning Man as well as something like the clock.

These basic needs, basic human needs, whether it’s a hotel or a restaurant, or a lot of things cross over, the booze space of alcohol and more recently spirits, that have lasted a long time. I think there’s a basic need that Burning Man provides, and it’s been said many times before, it’s the basic need that in some cases religion has played in people’s lives. It gives people a community. It gives people a story. It gives people an outlet. It gives people a context. And I don’t think that need is going away. I think the only thing Burning Man could do wrong is get in the way of that in some way. And so I think as long as Burning Man is facilitating that story and that need, then I think it’s going to do fine.

There’s at least two other interesting library projects on the playa. One has been going for a long time, which is the Black Rock Library.

STUART: 

4:15 and D. That’s actually where we’re having our book club meeting. 

ZANDER: 

Yeah. So I just met those guys. I had never talked with them in the past. I connected with them. 

And then there’s the other sponsored project that I guess is out on the playa, the Moonlight Library, and I just got in touch with them as well. 

And so I think it might be interesting, I’m hoping to have some kind of book events that interact with each other, and maybe some books might end up getting returned to each other’s libraries and things like that. So we’ll have some kind of interoperable library card for the playa. We’ll see.

STUART: 

You got to have library cards. Even if you can’t check anything out on it, you gotta have library cards, Zander.

ZANDER: 

Yeah, exactly. As we’re getting complete with some of the other stuff we’re working on some of the kind of more fun little Easter eggs like that.

STUART: 

Outstanding!

Thank you so much, Zander. It’s been really a pleasure talking with you. 

ZANDER: 

Yeah. Thank you, Stuart!

STUART: 

Alright. We good, Vav?

VAV:

We are good! 

STUART: 

All right, Vav.

VAV: 

We, at Burning Man LIVE, are good. 

We are a labor of love from the Philosophical Center of the public benefit nonprofit Burning Man Project.

We share real stories from real humans. We talk about the future and the past and the present. We are here to stay… for now. 

If you appreciate these episodes, find our digital tip jar and share a little bit of what you’ve got to help us with the next episode.

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Thanks to the team at Burning Man LIVE for all you have done, all you do, and all you will do next. 

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stuart (mockingbird)

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and many others. 

 

And thanks, Larry.

 

 

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