The Time Lords

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 committed 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.