A story of Silicon Valley dreams and Texas treasure—and the dark underside of tech world idealism
For decades, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and a legendary group of San Francisco tech execs have been building a hidden world monument: a huge clock, sheltered inside a Texas mountain, designed to tick for 10,000 years.
At the turn of the millennium, a group of tech luminaries—supercomputer designer Danny Hillis, counterculture icon Stewart Brand and eventually Bezos himself—dreamed of creating an iconic symbol to guide us through the coming Internet Age. An eternal clock, far out in the desert, would inspire hope, visionary long-term action and an enduring legend among the pilgrims who searched for it.
But as the monument took shape in a Texas cave, the future seemed to darken. The idealistic tech world that produced the clock—and the extreme wealth of its founders—fueled frightening inequality, mass surveillance and conspiratorial, hate-filled politics online. Against this backdrop, a clock designed to give long-term hope seemed like a cruel joke.
With his vivid style and on-the-ground reporting, journalist Josh Marcus gives us an unconventional history of Jeff Bezos and his contemporaries, and the wider history and influence of the Silicon Valley world they inhabit.
The Time Lords is a time-shifting, vision-altering road trip across the hippie origins of Silicon Valley culture, the workshops of San Francisco and the remote desert of Bezos’s Texas ranch/rocket base. The tale of the clock exposes the glaring contradictions within both Silicon Valley’s attempts to save the world and capitalism itself.
“A mind-expanding examination of a futurist fantasy.”
—Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review
“A beguiling analysis of an eccentric and troubled futurist project.”
—Publishers Weekly
“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
Introduction
SECTION I: CLOCKS (1950–1996)
CHAPTER 1
The Great Acceleration
CHAPTER 2
Thinking Machines
CHAPTER 3
Consensual Hallucinations
SECTION II: GAMBLES (1996–2008)
CHAPTER 4
Back to the Junkyard
CHAPTER 5
God’s View
CHAPTER 6
Millennium Fever
CHAPTER 7
Long Bets
SECTION III: MOUNTAINS (1998–2011)
CHAPTER 8
The Timescale Made Them Crazy
CHAPTER 9
Reverential Pilgrimages
CHAPTER 10
“It’s Like Something from Tolkien”
CHAPTER 11
Zefram, LLC
SECTION IV: FOUNDATIONS (2010–2013)
CHAPTER 12
“Our Lust for Metal Is Great”
CHAPTER 13
Relentless
SECTION V: DIVISIONS (2014–2022)
CHAPTER 14
The Midas Touch
CHAPTER 15
Hardware Update
CHAPTER 16
Feel Good, Inc.
SECTION VI: ASPIRATIONS (2015–2021)
CHAPTER 17
Spheres of Influence
CHAPTER 18
Global Optimism
CHAPTER 19
The High Frontier
CHAPTER 20
Frontiersmen
SECTION VII: COMPLICATIONS (2010–10,000)
CHAPTER 21
The Keepers of the Clock
CHAPTER 22
The Double-Edged Sword
CHAPTER 23
The End of the Road
CHAPTER 24
The Golden Age
CHAPTER 25
Prometheus
CONCLUSION
Memento Mori
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index