[C4stor]

Their home page first sentence states : "The Long Now Foundation is a nonprofit established in 01996 to foster long-term thinking."

So I don't know if the concept is explained in more details elsewhere, but I think it's clearly an integral part of their communication.

[permo-w]

my analysis of it is that it's a way of making people wonder "oh why is he writing it like that?" like I did, lead them to the foundation, and have them engage with it and be aware of it in the future; i.e. marketing. it's quite clearly not a practical thing. the probability that by the time 10000AD rolls around we're still using the same year system, we're still alive as a species, we're still technologically capable as a species, and we don't have the capacity to understand older years minus the leading zero seems near enough zero to be zero. call it what you like, marketing, inspiration, whatever, but it's a sneaky way of leading people's thoughts onto a particular pathway, which I call marketing

to be clear, having read through their website, I think what they're doing is great, and this isn't a criticism

[LorenDB]

We already refer to years in the first millennium AD without leading zeros, e.g. AD 42 or AD 385.