The Time Lords (Jeff Bezos, a 10,000-Year Clock, and Big Tech's Quest to Seize the Future)

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.

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