The promise of a technologically advancing future is predicated on millennia of accumulated knowledge. How can we retain that knowledge?

The Long Now Foundation has been involved in and inspired by projects centered on that question since launching in 01996. (See, for example, The Rosetta Project, Westinghouse Time Capsules, The Human Document Project, The Survivor Library, The Toaster Project, The Crypt of Civilization, and the Voyager Record.) For years, Executive Director Alexander Rose has been in discussions on how to create a record of humanity and technology for our descendants. In 02014, Long Now began building it.

The Manual For Civilization is working toward a living, crowd-curated library of 3,500 books put forward by the Long Now community and on display at The Interval. To stack the shelves, we solicited book recommendations from Long Now members and supporters, special guest curators like Long Now founders Stewart Brand and Brian Eno, past Seminar speakers like George Dyson and Neal Stephenson, subject experts Maria Popova and Violet Blue, and volunteer curators like Alan Beatts, Michael Pujals, and Heath Rezabek.

The physical collection in The Interval grounds the catalog, and also provided the size constraint of the number of books. But the Long Now community is global, and the reality is that few Long Now members have had the opportunity to peruse our Bay Area-bound library.

Today, we’re getting ready to digitalize the Manual so that the library can be shared with the world. We are partnering with the Internet Archive, who have created a special collection for the Manual, and, for the first time, we are sharing a selection of the titles in our collection as a temporary browse-only catalog on Libib (currently showing about 800 of the currently 1400 selections). To help make this digitalization effort happen, we will need to raise approximately $100,000 to scan all the books and post them online making the library accessible to everyone. If you are interested in helping support this effort, please contact nick@longnow.org.

The Origins of the Manual (1751-2014)

Framing the library’s focus as “restarting civilization” may seem apocalyptic or predictive on its face, but that is not the intention. Rather, the hope is to create a curatorial principle that inspires valuable conversation that reframes how we think about where civilization has come so far, where it might go in the future, and what tools are necessary to get it there.

In that sense, The Manual For Civilization is the latest in a centuries-long genealogy of ambitious projects to catalog and, crucially, democratize the most essential human knowledge. Inherent in each project—from Denis Diderot’s famous Encyclopedie to Long Now Co-Founder Stewart Brand’s countercultural bible Whole Earth Catalog to The Manual—is a theory of civilization. There is also, as will be discussed further below, a bias depending on which curatorial principle is emphasized and of course, who does that curation.

When Diderot began editing the Encyclopedie in 01751, the ideas of the Enlightenment held sway only amongst learned philosophes. Power rested in the hands of the clerics. Diderot considered the Encyclopedie as a deliberate attempt to “change the way people think” by democratizing the ideals of the Enlightenment. Controversially, the Encyclopedie’s central organizing principle was based on reason, rather than the authority of the church. In the entry for encyclopedia, he wrote:

The goal of an encyclopedia is to assemble all the knowledge scattered on the surface of the earth, to demonstrate the general system to the people with whom we live, & to transmit it to the people who will come after us, so that the works of centuries past is not useless to the centuries which follow, that our descendants, by becoming more learned, may become more virtuous & happier, & that we do not die without having merited being part of the human race.

Diderot would continue editing the Encyclopedie over the next fifteen years, amassing thousands of entries and enlisting the help of some of the Enlightenment’s most brilliant minds as contributors, including Voltaire, Rousseau, and Montesquieu. Diderot’s 35 volumes were describes as constituting a:

tremendous storehouse of fact and propaganda that swept Europe and taught it what ‘reason,’ rights,’ ‘authority,’ ‘government,’ ‘liberty,’ ‘equality,’ and related social principles are or should be. The work was subversive in its tendency, not in its advocacy: it took for granted toleration, the march of mind exemplified by science, and the the good of the whole people….The eleven volumes of plates were in themselves a revolutionary force, for they made public what had  previously been kept secret by the guilds, and they supported the philosophe doctrine that the dissemination of knowledge was the high road to emancipation.

Two hundred years later, while reflecting on the legacy of the Whole Earth Catalog (01968), Stewart Brand wrote that the Catalog and the Encyclopedie shared a similar aim: to hand “the tools of a whole civilization to its citizens.” Like the Encyclopedie, Brand wrote, the Whole Earth Catalog sought to decentralize authority and redistribute it to individuals through access to knowledge, or tools. Diderot’s Encyclopedie, wrote Brand, “was the leading tool of the Enlightenment.”

Though the first commune-bound readers of the Whole Earth Catalog— those “bands of adventurous malcontents who were setting out to reinvent civilization”— did not exactly restart civilization, their process held “surprising value.” Brand wrote that as the decades passed, the Catalog’s true legacy was glimpsed in the personal computer revolution that followed, which was informed by the same process:

The personal-computer revolution was a direct result of that value system. It was initiated and carried to fruition by youthful longhairs, on purpose, with striking consistency between what was intended and what was accomplished. The impulse was to decentralize authority—to undermine the high priests and air-conditioned mainframes of information technology and hand their power to absolutely everybody.

“Here are the tools to make your life better. And to make the world better,” Brand wrote in his foreword to the Millennium Whole Earth Catalog (01994)—the last edition published. “That they’re the same tools is our theory of civilization.”

In the inaugural Whole Earth Catalog, Brand declared that “We are as gods and might as well get good at it.” But we are as gods only because of our ancestors’ diligence. The promise of a technologically advancing future is predicated on millennia of accumulated knowledge. Civilization has taken a lot of work to build, and it demands a great deal of know-how to sustain. And as modern life increasingly encourages specialization, familiarity across that accumulated knowledge’s breadth can wane. Our ability to collaborate is a strength, but beyond a point we risk losing comprehension of the infrastructure—both physical and intellectual—that supports our modern lives. How can we retain that knowledge?

These questions inspired Long Now to build The Manual For Civilization. In developing the experience of The Interval, we integrated the Manual of Civilization book collection into the design layout as two floors of bookshelves that would face outward in The Interval space. The first floor shelves would be open and accessible for browsing, and the upper shelves would be accessible by staff, reached from the front by a tall ladder, or from the opposite side, since the shelves are open to the Long Now office above.

As the opening date of The Interval approached in the summer of 02014, we knew we had a lot of empty shelves to fill, but had already started assembling the catalog as well as physical copies of books. In one pre-opening party, we had a bucket brigade of supporters passing physical books in the door, up the spiral staircase, to people on ladders who arranged the books on shelves, about 1,000 volumes that evening!

We’ve had over 2,500 submissions and recommendations to the collection so far, with approximately 1,400 approved for inclusion in The Manual by our director Alexander Rose. Currently, 1,007 physical books reside in the Manual’s bookshelves. 861 titles from the collection are available to view on Libib.

Our plan is to solicit more book lists and recommendations until the list grows to about 5,000 from which we will edit the collection down to the 3,500 or so volumes that can fit on the shelves. We began the collection by using four broad categories to structure the collection:

• Long-term Thinking, Past and Future: these include books on history as well as futurism and many books by Long Now speakers.
• Rigorous Science Fiction: especially works that build richly imagined possible worlds to help us think about the future.
• The Cultural Canon: great works of literature, poetry, philosophy, religion.
• Mechanics of Civilization: “how-to” books for critical skills and technology, for example books on navigation, growing and gathering food, midwifery, forging tools.

Beyond these categories, we are exploring other ways to organize and catalog the collection, and to locate books on shelves. With any scheme though, we want to preserve the experience and delight of serendipitous discovery, of going to the bookshelf to look for one thing, and discovering three or four other things you are curious about.

We also hope to open up the discussion so that we can have an ongoing conversation about which books are in and out of the collection at any point in time, and why. With any curatorial principle comes a bias. This bias is problematic, but can be mitigated in a variety of ways. Wikipedia, for example, makes it possible for anybody to edit and contribute to its catalog. In the case of the Manual, we are committed to evolving our curatorial principle over time, the hope being that as we move through the Long Now, this living collection is responsive, adaptive and open.

We’ve already had a few valuable learning experiences. When the Manual launched, Long Now member and Brainpickings founder Maria Popova contemplated Stewart Brand’s selections for the Manual, and had “only one lament:”

One would’ve hoped that a lens on rebuilding human civilization would transcend the hegemony of the white male slant and would, at minimum, include a more equal gender balance of perspectives — of Brand’s 76 books, only one is written by a woman, one features a female co-author, and one is edited by a woman. It’s rather heartbreaking to see that someone as visionary as Brand doesn’t consider literature by women worthy of representing humanity in the long run. Let’s hope the Long Now balances the equation a bit more fairly as they move forward with the remaining entries in their 3,500-book collaborative library.

Long Now immediately reached out to Popova and invited her to contribute her own list for the Manual. In selecting it, she found it especially challenging to reconcile the curatorial constraints of the Manual with her desire to offer a diverse and balanced representation of essential human knowledge:

I faced a disquieting and inevitable realization: The predicament of diversity is like a Russian nesting doll — once we crack one layer, there’s always another, a fractal-like subdivision that begins at the infinite and approaches the infinitesimal, getting exponentially granular with each layer, but can never be fully finished. If we take, for instance, the “women problem” — to paraphrase Margaret Atwood — then what about Black women? Black queer women? Non-Western Black queer women? Non-English-speaking non-Western Black queer women? Non-English-speaking non-Western Black queer women of Jewish descent? And on and on. Due to that infinite fractal progression, no attempt to “solve” diversity — especially no thirty-item list — could ever hope to be complete. The same goes for other variables like genre or subject: For every aficionado of fiction, there’s one of drama, then 17th-century drama, then 17th-century Italian drama, and so on.

The inherent biases in catalogs like the Manual must be acknowledged, and ideally mitigated through open conversation, if such catalogs are to persist over the long term. Over time, we believe that the conversation about what goes into Manual will become as rich and interesting as the collection in the Manual itself.

New documentary exposes what ‘Oppenheimer’ left out about the impact of nuclear testing on Native, Hispanic people

Generations of New Mexicans — mostly Native Americans and Hispanics — have become ill with cancer after being exposed to catastrophic levels of radioactive fallout from the Trinity nuclear bomb testing.

Now, a new documentary film, “First We Bombed New Mexico,” tells the counter-narrative to the award-winning “Oppenheimer” film, of generations still feeling the impacts of the tests and of government betrayal with tragic consequences.

The film, directed and produced by New Mexico-based filmmaker Lois Lipman, alleges a government cover-up of monumental proportions – bigger than Watergate, bigger than arms for Iran, bigger than government experiments on people of color.

Inspired by New Mexico cancer survivor Tina Cordova, Lipman told ICT she made the film to unearth the story and make the public aware of a compensation bill looming in government to help the families who continue to be ignored.

Congress has until June 7, 2024, to expand the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, known as RECA, to families harmed in New Mexico and in other areas impacted by radiation. The act has provided reparations for Nevada Cold War nuclear test victims since 1990, so why was New Mexico left out? Many blame environmental racism.

“We feel it’s urgent to get this social justice story known,” Lipman told ICT, “and to put public pressure on legislators to understand what this is about and to lend their support to extending RECA (before it expires) to include ignored Downwinders and the post-1971 Uranium miners.

The Senate overwhelmingly voted last summer to include the expansion of the bill in the annual defense authorization act, but in December, the Republican leadership removed it.

“That was a huge disappointment for many,” Lipman said. “So, the pressure is back on to possibly slip RECA in some legislation so it is extended before it finally expires.”

The film premiered at the Santa Fe International Film Festival in October, and is currently making the rounds of the festival circuit.

‘Generations of cancer’

Cordova, who is featured in the film, is a cancer survivor and co-founder of the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium, an organization started 18 years ago that works to advocate bills through the government and organize peaceful protests.

“My father developed oral cancer without any risk factors,” Cordova, who is Hispanic, says in the film. “He didn’t smoke, didn’t drink, didn’t use chewing tobacco. Had no viruses. The doctor told us this just didn’t happen. But they also told us they see this a lot here.”

She says government leaders need to admit what they have done.

“I can tell you what I believe to be true,” she said. “They have a very difficult time admitting that they harmed American citizens, that they killed American babies afterwards, that’s a very difficult thing to admit to. But that is the truth and that is what happened. The only way that we will ever get past this history is if we finally admit what took place, acknowledge the harm that was done and atone for that harm.”

The radiation exposure stems from the Manhattan Project, which developed the nuclear weaponry that ended World War II. Trinity was the code name for the first detonation of a nuclear weapon, conducted by the U.S. Army at dawn, 5:29 a.m., on July 16, 1945, at a site located 35 miles southeast of Socorro, New Mexico, on the plains of the Alamogordo Bombing Range, known as the Jornada del Muerto, near the Mescalero Apache reservation. The surrounding communities were never warned, never acknowledged, and never helped afterwards. Generations of cancers followed.

New Mexico’s Democratic governor, Michelle Lujan-Grisham,is among those interviewed in the documentary.

“No one should have to fight so hard to get restitution when you are victimized by your government,” she says. “They absolutely knew about the radiation exposure. Lots more science about it today, but they knew.”

Lipman, an American journalist who was based in London for many years, learned of the story after moving to New Mexico.

“I had a big career living in London,” Lipman told ICT. “I worked for ‘60 Minutes’ and the BBC and traveled around the world, making award-winning films, developing them and field producing them. And then I took a break and moved to New Mexico, which I fell in love with. I had a very strong feeling that I need to use my skill to make a difference.

“I discovered this story in New Mexico that had never been told and was bigger than anything I’d ever worked on,” she said, “which was that the U.S. government detonated Oppenheimer’s Trinity bomb as close as 12 miles from New Mexico residents, most of them Native American and Hispanic, and now they have had generations of cancer.

“They have never been helped and they need to be helped,” she said. “I also found government documents that have been top secret that explain all of this. I channeled and struggled with how to tell the story, then I met Tina and clearly Tina is our engine. Through Tina we learned this story.”

‘A true travesty’

The film shows Cordova rallying communities and gathering devastating health information while residents try to continue living normal lives.

“The government continues to say today that no one lived here, and no one was harmed when the bomb was detonated, but nothing could be further from the truth,” Cordova says in the film. “In 18 years, we’ve discovered so very many times … how our government looked away from us. They have never come back. They’ve never done any kind of meaningful study of the impact on us and I’m the fourth generation in my family to have cancer since 1945.”

“I have a 23-year-old niece. She’s a beautiful young woman going to college in California in San Jose. She’s studying art. She wants to work at Pixar. She was diagnosed with thyroid cancer a year ago,” Cordova said.

“That’s the cancer that I had, and the first thing they asked me when I was diagnosed was, ‘When were you exposed to radiation?’ I come from a multi-generational family of cancer patients. I wish I could say we were unique. We’re not. We’ve documented hundreds of families just like mine that are displaying four and five generations of cancer here. It’s a true travesty that our government has looked away from us.”

Cordova says some members of Congress contend it’s going to cost too much to atone for the exposure. The state of New Mexico is unique, since that is where the uranium was mined, where the nuclear bombs were developed, where it was detonated, and now where they store nuclear waste.

“There’s a lot of employment, industry and big business associated with that,” she says. “And so many people believe you just don’t bite the hand that feeds you. You just don’t discuss the hard truths about what that means. At one of the very first town hall meetings we ever held, a woman told me, ‘You’re not going to be satisfied until they close down the Air Force base.’ And I said, ‘That’ll never happen.’”

Cordova says in 1945, the government depended on the Native and Hispanic communities to be uneducated, unsophisticated, and unable to stand up for themselves. Many of them were uranium miners, who went into the mines without adequate protective gear.

That is the Oppenheimer legacy in New Mexico, she said.

“This happened through no fault of our own,” Cordova says. “We did nothing except simply live in the same place for hundreds if not thousands of years. We’ve occupied this land. These are our homelands, and everything has been taken from us because I can clearly tell you that without your health you have nothing,”

 

Excavation of ancient city Ganweriwala begins, spotlighting its rich history and potential. A collaborative effort aims to uncover Indus civilization secrets.

Commissioner Bahawalpur Division Dr. Ehtesham Anwar, alongside notable archaeologist Professor Dr. Rafique Mughal, CEO Thaap Sajida Wandal, and Director General Archaeology Punjab Shozab Saeed, inaugurated the excavation of the ancient city of Ganweriwala in the Cholistan desert. This significant event marks the commencement of efforts to spotlight Ganweriwala’s rich history and potential for UNESCO heritage listing.

Reviving Ganweriwala’s Legacy

The Ganweriwala excavation project, a collaborative effort between the Punjab government, the Department of Archaeology, Divisional Administration, and Thaap, seeks to unearth the relics of the ancient Indus civilization. Spanning over 80 hectares, Ganweriwala is poised to reveal the secrets of a civilization that thrived alongside Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa. With Governor Punjab Muhammad Balighur Rahman’s backing, this initiative not only aims to preserve a pivotal part of history but also to bolster the national economy through tourism and heritage conservation.

Archaeological Significance and Potential Discoveries

Under the guidance of Dr. Rafique Mughal, renowned for his expertise in ancient artifacts, the excavation work at Ganweriwala is expected to uncover numerous insights into past civilizations. With Ganweriwala strategically located between Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa, the discoveries here could reshape our understanding of Indus Valley Civilization’s urban planning, trade, and daily life. Furthermore, the potential inclusion of Derawar Fort in UNESCO’s heritage list underscores the global significance of the region’s historical and archaeological sites.

Collaboration for Preservation and Research

This project has garnered support from various sectors, including academia and development authorities, highlighting the wide-ranging interest in Ganweriwala’s preservation and study. Professor Sajida Wandal emphasized the importance of Ganweriwala’s location and its archaeological remnants, discovered in 1975 but unexplored due to resource constraints. Now, with renewed focus and support, the site’s mud brick walls and pottery shards are set to offer a window into the lives of its ancient inhabitants.

As the excavation of Ganweriwala progresses, the anticipation grows not only among archaeologists and historians but also among those keen on exploring the depths of human civilization’s past. This venture into the heart of the Cholistan desert is more than just a dig; it’s a journey to reconnect with a heritage that once flourished along the banks of the now-vanished Hakra River. The outcomes of this excavation could very well redefine the historical narrative of the region and, by extension, of ancient civilizations globally.

HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) — Whenever bestselling author Robin Cook releases a new medical thriller, the head of the public library in West Haven knows demand for digital copies will be high. So will the price.

Like many libraries, West Haven has been grappling with the soaring costs of e-books and audiobooks. The digital titles often come with a price tag that’s far higher than what consumers pay. While one hardcover copy of Cook’s latest novel costs the library $18, it costs $55 to lease a digital copy — a price that can’t be haggled with publishers.

And for that, the e-book expires after a limited time, usually after one or two years, or after 26 checkouts, whichever comes first. While e-books purchased by consumers can last into perpetuity, libraries need to renew their leased e-material.

The modestly funded West Haven Library has spent more than $12,000 over the last three years to lease just 276 additional digital titles beyond what patrons can access through a consortium of public libraries. Eighty-four of those books are no longer available. If that same amount had been spent on paper books, it would have covered about 800 titles.

“Imagine if a playground was built at a school with tax dollars, only to be taken down after two years of use,” librarian Colleen Bailie said at a recent public hearing.

Publishers, however, argue the arrangement is fair considering e-book licenses for libraries allow numerous patrons to “borrow” them and the per-reader cost is much less expensive than the per-reader rate.

This year, lawmakers in states including Connecticut, Massachusetts, Illinois, Hawaii and New Hampshire have proposed bills aimed at closing the affordability gap. A bill was introduced in Virginia but was tabled in February.

They face strong opposition from the publishing industry, which argues the legislation undermines intellectual property values and will harm the publishing ecosystem.

“They do have a funding problem, but the answer is not to take it out of the pockets of authors and destroy the rights of creators and pass unconstitutional legislation,” said Shelley Husband, senior vice president of government affairs at the Association of American Publishers, noting how more people than ever can access e-material that might otherwise have been purchased from booksellers.

Readers across the globe borrowed 662 million e-books, audiobooks and digital magazines last year, up 19% since 2022, according to data provided by OverDrive, the main distributor of digital content for libraries and schools.

Libraries Online Inc., a Connecticut interlibrary consortium, is currently spending roughly $20,000 a month on e-books for its 38 members. Replacing expired titles consumes 20% of the consortium’s budget, said e-book committee chair, Rebecca Harlow.

“If we replaced all of the content that has expired this year, the cost would exceed our entire annual budget for e-books,” Harlow recently told lawmakers. “We have completely lost the ability to build a library collection.”

The consortium leases fewer than 30 books a month for children and 30 books a month for teens, she said.

Dumping e-books and audio books isn’t considered an option for libraries with patrons like Casey Rosseau, 53, of West Hartford, Connecticut.

Rosseau, an information technology worker, has worsening eyesight. He reads about 200 audiobooks a year using OverDrive’s Libby app on his phone, and is typically on waiting lists for months at a time for the most coveted titles.

“I’ve always gone to the library to get the latest John Grisham or the latest James Patterson (novel),” he said. “Those come out so often that you have to have really deep pockets in order to be able to afford to buy them.”

In 2021, Maryland passed a law that would have required publishers to make e-books available on “reasonable terms” to libraries if they were being offered to the general public. That was struck down by a judge in 2022, after publishers successfully argued that federal copyright law bars states from regulating publishing transactions. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul vetoed a similar measure in 2021.

Many of the latest legislative proposals try a different approach.

An Illinois bill would void contracts between libraries and publishers that include certain provisions, such as restricting a library’s right to determine loan periods for licensed electronic material. Massachusetts and Connecticut are looking at similar proposals.

“Basically, rather than telling the publishers that they have to do anything in particular, our bill would tell the libraries on what terms they can make deals with the publishers,” said Connecticut state Rep. Matt Blumenthal, a Democrat.

Husband, of the Association of American Publishers, said she sees no real difference between the overturned Maryland law and these latest efforts. Last year, organizations representing publishers, booksellers and authors formed The Protect the Creative Economy Coalition to oppose state legislation.

But Julie Holden, assistant library director for the Cranston Public Library in Rhode Island, said that without legislative change, local librarians will not only continue to face financial strain, they’ll be bogged down examining lists of expiring digital leases to decide whether they can justify spending more money to renew each one.

“Taxpayers who fund our public libraries deserve better. Way better,” she said.