The quote in the headline is from an essay by Stewart Brand, “The Elements of a Durable Civilization,” recently published by the Long Now blog, a site devoted to long-term thinking about the future of life, including human life.

Brand, a writer and media tech pioneer who turned 86 in December 2024, is perhaps best known as the editor of the Whole Earth Catalog and founder of the Well, an early online community. He started the Long Now Foundation in 1996. Along with the Wikimedia Foundation, it is one of my preferred charities. (His 1988 book about the M.I.T. Media Lab influenced my early career as a digital journalist.)

He has proposed a way of explaining complex systems — buildings, forests, planets, civilizations — called the Pace Layer Model. This diagram is an example.

He explains the diagram this way:

In this diagram the rapid parts of a civilization are at the top, the slowest parts at the bottom. Fashion changes weekly. Culture takes decades or centuries to budge at all.

It's the combination of fast and slow that makes the whole system resilient. Fast learns, slow remembers. Fast proposes, slow disposes. Fast absorbs shocks, slow integrates shocks. Fast is discontinuous, slow continuous. Fast affects slow with accrued innovation and occasional revolution. Slow controls fast with constraint and constancy.

Fast gets all the attention. Slow has all the power.

In the domain where slow has all the power, making any change takes a lot of time and diligence.

An example of slow change within culture is the urbanization of global civilization, as more and more people concentrate in cities. This will eventually have other unexpected effects, like a decline in human population, Brand predicts. The big slow change going on is human-caused climate change. Brand is remarkably optimistic that the global civilization will solve this problem. But it’s worth remembering that he’s talking in extremely long scales of time. The current civilizations in conflict on earth are engaged in behaviors that warrant skepticism for people with a short time horizon (all of us, really). But his essay, though a bit abstract, leaves me optimistic for our descendants.

Read the whole thing here:

Longnow.org: Elements of a Durable Civilization

Read more about Brand’s life in “Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand,” by John Markoff.