Protocols for the Long Now
The Protocol Institute collaborates with the Long Now Foundation on three participatory cross-disciplinary labs – applications are due June 5!
Last week, we introduced the Protocol Institute and held its first general assembly. Thank you all for your support, especially the members who attended that first call. Partnering with effective individuals and organizations is an important facet of the institute’s strategy. Accordingly, last week also marked the launch of our first official collaboration: Protocols for the Long Now.
Over the coming years – with your help – we will explore the question of civilizational durability from a fresh lens. Which protocols allow civilization to grow and manage tensions? How have past civilizations integrated information technologies after an initial period of disruption? What role does diplomacy play in producing durability, and how does that extend to bridge-building with both natural and artificial agents?
Like in chess, it’s tempting to jump into the endgame of this initiative. There are two ways to do so, both of which should be avoided. First, by interpreting it as another attempt at predicting the arc of history and dismissing it on those grounds. Second, by making a tidy checklist for an immortal civilization, as if the question were mostly settled and only needed some packaging. Neither of those strategies would allow us to do the work needed to produce useful tools. To do that, we must play through the arduous middlegame – comprising research, to learn what has worked in the past; prototyping, to improve upon existing protocols and create new ones; and entrepreneurship, to solve distribution so that what is learned and built actually reaches the people and institutions who need it.
Below is the announcement from our parter, the Long Now Foundation, written by Denise Hearn. It covers all three of the Labs that we’ve designed together: Book of Time, Information Revolutions and Epistemic Crises, and Interspecies Protocols.
Apply yourself, or at a minimum, send this to a colleague or friend.
Long Now Labs: Where Long-term Thinking Becomes Long-term Practice
Today we’re excited to announce a new initiative at Long Now that builds on our history of incubating new projects and ideas: Long Now Labs. It’s where long-term thinking becomes long-term practice.
Long Now Labs will build cross-disciplinary collaborations around frontier ideas, creating tools, artifacts, and frameworks that expand humanity’s capacity to navigate the unknown and preserve possibilities for future generations.
Our inaugural Lab, Series 001: Protocols for the Long Now, launches today in partnership with the Protocol Institute.
Why protocols?
Civilizations run on protocols. They shape how we keep time, how we store knowledge, and how we make decisions in relation to other species and new technologies.
Protocols are the hidden infrastructure of cooperation. While they may depend on physical or digital structures like traffic lights or software networks to operate, protocols are broader than that – they’re the underlying social rules and conventions that define how things interact. Most of them are invisible until they fail.
Processes like globalization and financialization are well understood as planetary forces reshaping how we govern ourselves. Protocolization is a process happening alongside these forces. It isn’t new. But once we recognize how protocols shape our everyday interactions, we can reshape them to better serve civilizational resilience across generations.
Pairing Long Now’s practice of long-term thinking with the Protocol Institute’s expertise in protocol design, Protocols for the Long Now investigates three aspects of civilizational durability that are being radically reshaped by frontier technologies.
Lab 001.1 Book of Time
This Long Now Lab invites you to submit a concept for a new way of marking, experiencing, or making sense of time.
Our models of time dictate how we live. Many early civilizations experienced time as cyclical, mythic, and sacred. Before reliable pendulum clocks were invented, people told time by measuring the position of the sun in the sky. Clock time moved us away from this planetary connection, abstracting time into discrete, measurable units.
In 01999, Long Now cofounder Stewart Brand wrote, “Civilization is revving itself into a pathologically short attention span.” Today that feels truer than ever as social media algorithms, digital notifications, news feeds, financial transactions, and agentic workflows slice our days into ever more urgent microseconds.
How we think about time is changing at all levels. Technological advancement is both accelerating our relationship to time, while, in some cases, producing new conceptions of time. For example, blood tests that tell you your biological age, or the Internet Archive, which creates a timestamp of the entire Internet at regular intervals.
In this accelerating era, we are seeking novel prototypes for time – alternative tempos that might help humanity re-orient our thinking, behavior, and decision-making for the long term. Imagine not just new clocks, but new time standards, measuring frameworks, or other experiments that provide a different way of relating to the past, the future, and the present pace layers of civilization.
Open call until June 5 – apply now!
Lab 001.2 Epistemic Cycles
This Long Now Lab seeks an individual or team to investigate historical epistemic cycles – patterns of technological disruption that result in the breakdown of a society’s shared ability to discern truth.
Like oil, gold, topsoil and silicon, information is one of civilization’s raw materials. Protocols used by states and citizenries to process information are a critical aspect of their collective longevity. The ways people argue determine how robust a peace they can sustain. Negotiations between nations and nature must be structured to be truth-seeking, rather than purely affirming of humanity’s special place in the world.
Our relationship with raw information is also transforming. The last quarter century has precipitated a flood of technologies, from social media to smartphones to LLMs, that have washed out the old paths by which we used to form common knowledge. We are deeply curious about other times in history where these crises of our epistemic commons have occurred and what we can learn from responses to those crises in order to create mechanisms for shared sensemaking.
By analyzing analogous historical ruptures (from papyrus to the printing press, from medieval court rituals to social media), this Lab aims to provide insight for navigating the current epistemic crisis brought on by synthetic intelligence and generative media content.
Like economic bubbles, epistemic cycles of disruption and crisis are recurring. This Lab aims to look deeply into the long now to see how earlier civilizations dealt with similar crises to find repeatable patterns for hardening our own epistemic commons.
This Lab seeks an interdisciplinary individual or team who will analyze historical information technologies that disrupted common knowledge production and sense-making to provide deep contextualization for our current challenges.
Open call until June 5 – apply now!
Lab 001.3 Interspecies Protocols
This Long Now Lab explores the protocols needed to support interspecies ecologies – the interactions between humans, nature, and synthetic intelligences.
Whales have a phonetic alphabet. Rivers hold legal rights. AI agents negotiate on behalf of humans they’ve never met. Synthetic biology blurs the lines between species. These signal a profound shift: the assumption that humans sit at the center of things is dissolving, bringing a set of questions we can no longer defer. How do we communicate with, govern alongside, and share decision-making power with other species on earth? This Long Now Lab explores the protocols needed to support the interspecies ecologies of the future.
Our new tools can be engines of collective intelligence or lead to institutional decay – the challenge ahead is to create shared protocols for preserving human capabilities while honoring and respecting the capabilities of the more-than-human world. This new planetary sapience is demonstrating mutual dependence between us and our planet’s ecologies — helping us conceptually move from managing the world as a resource to stewarding it for mutual flourishing.
Getting there will require new orientations to language, data collection, legal definitions of personhood and rights, and agreements on what constitutes knowledge or consent across species boundaries.
This Lab will take the form of a course launching in early 02027. Please be in touch with ideas or suggestions for guest faculty and curriculum partners at labs@longnow.org.
To learn more about this initiative, visit longnow.com/labs.
 | A guest post by
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I tried to figure out what your protocol institute was doing but I wasn't clear. There's nothing that's going to be creating more progress or be more impactful on every aspect of society then the monks knowledge Renaissance. Nothing will remain untouched. In fact everything will be defined in all of human history as before and after this event.
It's so big that people just have a hard time accepting it. Let me break it down a little simply. You have to explain light first so that you can understand how it builds matter so you can understand what mass is which allows you to explain gravity and of course everything of a physical nature in our universe.
Now that might not sound Earth shaking but if you're interested in curing cancer or making a better battery or just understanding your relationship to the universe, this is huge. People have dreamed of having this much knowledge for the entire time that we've been thinking.
It's so big that it's available for free on a platform for writers called medium. Google search: medium light orbits, and certainly when you're there if nothing else read the one that explains that we are not arguing with the facts we are arguing with the interpretation of the facts. That article is titled Validations. do yourself a favor and read that and enter the Golden Age of thinking!