Billionaires fund monuments appropriating deep time as corporate personhood claims

Evidence

These same billionaires aren’t stopping with space but are interested in appropriating time, as well, putting clocks in mountains. Jeff Bezos has put more than $42 million into constructing “The Clock of the Long Now,” a project originally conceived by computer scientist and entrepreneur Danny Hillis, within a mountain Bezos owns in Texas. It will tick once a year for at least ten thousand years, with a cuckoo coming out every millennium. The purpose of this clock, according to founding board member and futurist Stewart Brand (of course our conception of slow time has to have a corporate board today, in the Corpocene), will be to “embody deep time for people” and “be charismatic to visit,” as well as “be famous enough to become iconic in the public discourse.” Billionaires will own space and time—or at least this seems to be the goal—while they conflate their personhood with the corporations they manage. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 391

Categorization

• CANDY: A ten-thousand-year clock with a cuckoo every millennium, funded by Bezos in a Texas mountain, is a genuinely tweetable nugget.
• SHARE: Worth sending to anyone who follows Stewart Brand or the Long Now Foundation.
• XREF: connects to: Corporately funded monument structures embody conservative rather than radical values. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1621