A story of Silicon Valley dreams and hubris—and the gap between so-called visionary thinking and its effects on our lives
The Time Lords tells the story of how Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and a secretive group of San Francisco tech founders have spent over two decades and $42 million building a monumental clock designed to tick for 10,000 years hidden in a Texas mountain.
The Clock of the Long Now, as it is called, was conceived in the 1990s, a time of utopian hopes about the power of the emerging internet, excitement about the wealth creation it promised, and anxieties about the frenetic pace and unknown effects of this major technological shift. Amongst the tech and cultural visionaries who conceived of it and began to work to make it a reality—Danny Hillis, Stewart Brand, and Jeff Bezos prominently among them—it was meant to inspire long-term global problem solving, thinking and action that would affect the long term trajectory of human civilization itself.
Meanwhile, the tech world that produced Bezos and the clock began driving unprecedented economic inequality and gentrification, while spreading online hate and conspiracies. And despite his multi-billion dollar climate philanthropies, Bezos came to hold an equally grim vision of Earth as a tapped-out planet in need of a space frontier for human life to continue.
Against this backdrop, a clock designed to give long-term hope seemed like a cruel joke. The billionaire behind it funded climate work while working with fossil fuel companies and trying to escape the Earth. He pushed the long-term view, while grinding workers to the bone to keep up with warehouse robots. The Time Lords takes readers from the counter-culture infused origins of Silicon Valley culture, to the workshops of San Francisco and to Bezos’s Texas ranch, using the tale of the clock to expose the glaring contradictions within both Silicon Valley’s attempts to save the world and capitalism itself.
“A landmark portrait of Silicon Valley’s deeper philosophy, and the unseen ways it shapes everyday life. The Time Lords traces that history through strange hidden worlds where the future is imagined. Ambitious and deeply reported, it hums with humanity and force.”
—Justin Farrell, author of Billionaire Wilderness: The Ultra-Wealthy and the Remaking of the American West
“The ultra-rich in every age want to inspire past their death. Jeff Bezos is no different. But as Josh Marcus shows us, no one has ever quite tried to master future epochs like the king of Amazon and his 10,000-year timepiece.”
—Noah Kulwin, co-host of the Blowback podcast
“A feat of intellectual history and shoe-leather reporting, The Time Lords offers a fascinating genealogy of the present. How did we come to be ruled by tech overlords whose technical genius and farsightedness are inversely proportional to their concern for present-day human fragility and want—who are eager to colonize the stars and contemplate the twelfth millennium but evince near indifference to the political and ecological effects of their innovations on today’s mere earthlings? These are the questions Josh Marcus takes up in his indispensable new book. In his capable hands, the ‘Clock of the Long Now’ becomes a potent and contradictory metaphor in a heist caper: about the Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, futurists, and gurus who plundered the present for the sake of the future—possibly imperiling both.”
—Sam Adler-Bell, co-host of the Know Your Enemy podcast
“The Time Lords exposes a troubling reality: The seemingly cuckoo plan to hide a 10,000-year clock inside a Texas mountain owned by Jeff Bezos is part of a serious quest to control the future. Josh Marcus has written an urgent and compelling book that is essential reading for anyone trying to understand the long-term designs of our would-be tech overlords.”
—Gil Durán, author of The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy