Time to Slow Down?

Lately, on the lecture circuit, Brand has been encouraging his audiences to distinguish the truly important from the merely urgent -- to make taking the long view once again natural and common, rather than difficult and rare. To be sure, Brand believes that there is a time and a place for sprinting. But we've all been going all out for almost a decade now, he says, and the strain of going so fast for so long is beginning to show. The way to ease that strain is to stop, for a while at least, and to make some investments -- in the biosphere, in culture (building the qualities of continuity and respect), in governance (promoting the emerging global order), in infrastructure (making a business case for education), and in archival depth.

Through his work at the Global Business Network, Brand has been leading clients through 20-year scenario planning -- often with radical results. "If you start thinking 20 years ahead, schools suddenly become really important to you, because that's where your workforce will come from 20 years from now. You start taking responsibility for your industry as a whole -- and that includes your competitors."

The simple truth is that investment in different time frames gets rewarded in different ways. "We're used to thinking that if a problem can't be solved within two years, it can't be solved, and that's a really bad way to live," Brand says. "With global warming, the time frame for making real change might be 10, 20, 100 years, but just taking on an issue of that scale unleashes a profound sense of optimism. And, paradoxically, that helps make the world safe for Internet time -- that is, safe for risk."

Brand pauses for a moment, deliberately, to let that idea sink in. "It's okay if the Internet crashes," he says. "That would only set us back about eight years. But if the biosphere crashes . . ." You see the point.

In Brand's view, the way to ensure sustainability is to learn to go both fast and slow -- to play the game at both extremes. "The new economy is simultaneously more niche-oriented and more global," he says. "So we need to learn to perform effectively throughout that spectrum -- to address not only the urgent and the local, but also the important and the vast."

Without such a balance, Internet time will advance unchecked -- pushing us to go faster, faster, faster, and running away like the plague. At that point, our civilization will come to resemble a creature with one oversize limb, designed for speed, and one atrophic stump, formerly used for practicing patience. It's not a pretty picture. To avoid it, says Brand, we need to embrace a paradoxical truth: "If you want to keep speeding up, you also need to learn how to slow down."

Elizabeth Weil (lweil@ix.netcom.com), a writer based in San Francisco, is completing a book on a self-made man and his spaceship. Contact Stewart Brand by email (sb@gbn.org).