Long Now
Wearable Rosetta
Wearable Rosetta
The Long Now Foundation was established in 01996* to develop the Clock and Library projects, as well as to become the seed of a very long-term cultural institution. The Long Now Foundation hopes to provide a counterpoint to today's accelerating culture and help make long-term thinking more common. We hope to foster responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years.
Civilization is revving itself into a pathologically short attention span. The trend might be coming from the acceleration of technology, the short-horizon perspective of market-driven economics, the next-election perspective of democracies, or the distractions of personal multi-tasking. All are on the increase. Some sort of balancing corrective to the short-sightedness is needed-some mechanism or myth which encourages the long view and the taking of long-term responsibility, where 'long-term' is measured at least in centuries.
The Wearable Rosetta Project is a global collaboration of language specialists and native speakers working to build a publicly accessible digital library of human languages. For the first time, people can be custodians of the "key" to decipher the world's languages by wearing them in elegant and sophisticated jewelry.