From The Drift Magazine, Issue 4, May 6th:
Over the course of a week at the end of 2020, the air tens of thousands of feet above the North Pole heated 100 degrees in what’s known as a sudden stratospheric warming event. This phenomenon, which scientists predict could become more common with climate change, wobbled the great atmospheric turntable of the jetstream, sending waves of Arctic air towards the U.S. Two months later, Winter Storm Uri arrived, blanketing 73 percent of the lower 48 in snow — the highest level since NOAA began tracking the figure in 2011 — and wrenching Texas into pre-industrial darkness. The state has long prided itself on the so-called Texas Miracle: low regulation, small government, cheap living, economic growth. When Uri descended, dropping record snowfall on cities like Austin, Abilene, and San Angelo, it was history colliding at two speeds — a landmark storm meeting a much longer systemic failure of imagination and political will.
Uri struck a brittle and vaguely libertarian electric system. Weather forecasters downplayed climate change in their predictions. Producers hadn’t winterized equipment for fear of passing on costs to consumers. Plants weren’t incentivized to hold power in reserve. The Lone Star State is electrically isolated, unconnected to the two federal super-grids serving the eastern and western halves of the country. The Texas power supply came within minutes of total collapse. At least a hundred people died during the storm, many of hypothermia, many in the Black and brown neighborhoods where the blackouts were the worst. Some burned furniture to keep warm. Consumers were left with four- and five-digit electric bills, and the state incurred $90 billion of damage. Meanwhile, Governor Greg Abbott blamed Texas’s windmills, taking the opportunity to stoke fears about the Green New Deal — even though Texas mostly runs on fossil fuels, and windmills actually out-produced these energy sources throughout the crisis.
Soon after, America’s favorite billionaires stepped in. Bill Gates was on Bloomberg defending renewables and touting Breakthrough Energy Ventures, his for-profit energy technology investment firm. Elon Musk, who recently relocated to Texas and is constructing a massive power storage facility near Houston, was on Twitter trolling the state’s grid operator. Warren Buffet offered to build an $8.3 billion cluster of natural gas plants to shore up the state’s energy reserves — in exchange, of course, for a guaranteed 9.3 percent rate of return on his investment paid out from extra fees on consumer utility bills.
But no billionaire sees Texas as a bigger proving ground for high-tech world-saving than Jeff Bezos. The Amazon tycoon attended elementary and middle school in Houston, where his adoptive father was a petroleum engineer for Exxon. As a teen, Bezos spent summers among the mesquite trees on the 25,000-acre “Lazy G” Ranch in Cotulla, Texas, reading sci-fi books from the local library. It belonged to his grandparents, Lawrence Preston Gise and Mattie Louise Strait, both of whom cast their influence across time and space on a monumental scale, just like their grandson. Gise worked on ballistic missile defense and space technology at the Defense Department in the ’50s and ’60s, and Strait comes from a line of Texas ranchers dating back to John Joseph Strait, a Confederate soldier.
In February, Bezos announced a homecoming. Later this year, he’ll be stepping down as Amazon CEO and will focus on his projects fighting climate change and promoting space travel, both of which have deep roots in Texas. During Bezos’s tenure as CEO, Amazon built a 100-plus turbine wind farm in Scurry, a small town outside Dallas, as part of its company-wide carbon neutrality push. Bezos also owns 300,000 acres near the West Texas railroad town of Van Horn, home to the projects that Bezos conceives as his ultimate endgame, for himself and for humanity. The expanse encompasses a launch site for his space colonization venture, Blue Origin. It also hosts an even more ambitious and idiosyncratic project: the 10,000-year Clock of the Long Now.
Bezos has maintained a disturbingly consistent lifelong plan for getting humans into space to escape an insufficient Earth. In his 1982 high school valedictorian speech, he quoted from Star Trek’s opening (“Space: the final frontier”) and laid out his plan to secure the future of the human race by moving us all onto a giant space station and turning the Earth into a wildlife preserve. “He believed that we, as a species, had to explore space because this was a very fragile world, and we weren’t taking good enough care of it,” a former girlfriend, Ursula Werner, told Robert Spector in his 2000 biography of Bezos, Amazon.com: Get Big Fast. “He was not so focused on the ecology side — that we need to worry about our Earth more — but more about taking a long-term view of the Earth as a finite place to live.” Bezos’s plan hasn’t changed much since 1982, but the contents of his bank account have. Speaking with journalists in the ‘90s, Werner put a finer point on it: “The reason he’s earning so much money is to get to outer space,” she said. That money is now funding Blue Origin in Texas.
To drive his point home, Bezos is working on another ultra-long-term project meant to vault humanity beyond Earth’s immediate constraints. Together with the Long Now Foundation, a group of wealthy Silicon Valley eccentrics, he has spent 16 years and around $42 million of his fortune installing a clock that will tick for 10,000 years 500 feet deep inside the nearby Sierra Diablo Mountains. The stated goal is to encourage people to consider their relationship to the timescales of nature and civilization; with this profound historical vision, the logic goes, the human race will be inspired to undertake revolutionary changes that could only occur across multiple generations. Every empire has its capital, and every ideology has its temple. For Bezos, that’s Van Horn. “If people pay attention to the clock,” Bezos told Wired in 2018, “they’ll do more things like Blue Origin.”
Bezos made his fortune as a master of efficiency, seizing every marginal dollar of profit that could be wrung out of economies of scale, military-grade logistics, reams of data, and a vast network of employees and contractors pushed to the limits of productivity. Blue Origin and the Long Now clock operate on an opposing logic; both are deeply, existentially inefficient. Trying to save the world as the richest man in it comes with inescapable contradictions — money-making versus the common good, ambition versus delusion — that even someone as cunning and ambitious as Bezos hasn’t figured out a way to overcome.
Last fall I drove from Northern California to West Texas to see just how a billionaire retail magnate plans to save the world from climate change with rockets and a giant clock. Once there, I thought, I’d finally understand what Bezos was trying to say with Long Now and Blue Origin, and, more broadly, what these endeavors suggest about the society that the billionaires of our time are trying to build for the future. But I didn’t find anything. After driving for three straight days through wildfire smoke, quarantine-quiet desert towns, and Border Control checkpoints, the closest I could manage to get to the clock was peeking past the gate to Bezos’s ranch. Months before, my entreaties for a private tour were rejected. The 10,000-year clock isn’t yet open to the public either. Even the cattle inside the fence didn’t like outsiders; they bolted at the sight of me. There are a few prototypes of the clock to see — two in San Francisco and one in London — and another clock planned for a remote mountain top in Nevada, but for all practical purposes, this project still exists mostly as a mental exercise for rich inventors.
As it stands, this portal to the utopian future yields nothing more than a bombastic reminder of the inequalities of the present, of who stands on which side of the 300,000-acre fence. But leaning on a parked car outside the gates may be the perfect way to experience the Bezos agenda: at a far remove. The clocks and the rockets are spectacular monuments to nothing, built by people who have little to suggest about improving the future beyond their own centrality in it, and even less to say about the present world order of scarcity and precarity they helped create.
If our contemporary tech billionaires have taught us anything, it’s that blind trust in technology makes for a dreadful kind of progress. Silicon Valley tech makes its creators wealthy and influential, and massive wealth and influence convince people to trust the wealthy and influential to tackle equally massive societal problems. Those with the most must be the best. Ultimately, the solutions dreamed up by Silicon Valley have a way of making founders still more wealthy and more influential. This lopsided accumulation of resources further degrades the social and environmental fabric, and the cycle repeats. In the hazy fog of half-progress, half-plunder, the rest of us are left waiting for the titans of Silicon Valley to save us.
In a mechanical sense, the clock is perfect: efficient, self-sustaining, awe-inspiring. No one else has ever made anything like it. “To see the Clock you need to start at dawn, like any pilgrimage,” Kevin Kelly, a founding editor of Wired magazine and a Long Now board member once wrote. Visitors hike 1500 feet up a bare mountainside until they reach a hidden door in a rock face leading to an airlock. Once inside, a tunnel leads into a 500-foot cylindrical cavern, which houses a robotically cut stone staircase wrapping around the clock, a steampunk geothermal marvel of huge interlocking gears roughly 200 feet tall.
The clock can power itself and keep time for millennia without human intervention. Pushing a capstan winds the clock, powering a massive weight and gear mechanism made of stainless steel, ceramic, and titanium, which strikes one of 3.5 million unique chimes at noon. At the top of the clock, the date and time are displayed on an eight-foot disk that mechanically maps the changing positions of the stars since the last visit....
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