Modernity needs the lightbulb

Already in the 1990, at the point when Tim Berners Lee was writing the code for the World Wide Web, the NYU communications scholar Neil Postman was warning us that our habitual massive outpouring of information has the opposite effect than the one intended—that it not only leaves us uninformed, but that it damages our very sense of meaning, our very capability to make sense.

Imagine a world where information is treated as other human-made things—where information and the ways it's handled are adapted to the core purposes that need to be served. What would information be like? By what methods, in what way and by whom would it be created? What new information formats, new kinds of information would emerge? In what way would our public informing be different? What would academic communication be like? By creating our Knowledge Federation prototype, we provided an academically coherent answer to those and various other related questions—answers that are not only described and explained, but also already implemented in actual, real-life embedded prototypes.

The Modernity ideogram depicts our civilization as a bus, and our way of handling information as its candle headlights.

Modernity needs the lightbulb

But having done that, we are compelled to concede that what we are facing is not a problem but a paradox—the same paradox that the giants on whose shoulders we stood to create our prototype had to face, and were unable to overcome.

In the world where we all have been socialized to "mind our own business" and publish more, as scientists, and as journalists, because that's what we are paid for, and what our careers and our institutions depend on—there is no established way, no institution, and not even the will to make the kind of changes that would make information once again serve the social purposes that need to be served.

A purpose of the Holotopia prototype, which is currently under development, is to overcome that obstacle.

What would our world be like, if all our overabundant knowledge were used to give us the kind of meaning we need? And where we used this meaning, to orient our handling, of all things that matter? The goal of the Holotopia project is to answer that question not only in principle, not only on paper, but to implement it in...

How to change course

Based on a decade of The Club of Rome's research into the future prospects of mankind, Aurelio Peccei diagnosed that the humanity is on a collision course with nature. We take his diagnoses as a challenge, and as a natural benchmark test for our project. Can the new 'headlights' we are proposing help us "change course"? And if they can—what will the new course be?

A vision

As a vision of a possible future, the holotopia is a positive answer to the question posited in the Holoscope.org's opening:

Think about the world at the twilight of the Middle Ages and the dawn of the Renaissance: devastating religious wars, terrifying epidemics… Think of the scholastics pondering about the angels dancing on a needlepoint; and Galilei in house arrest, whispering “and yet it moves” into his beard. Observe that the problems of the epoch were not resolved by focusing on those problems, but by a slow and steady development of an entirely new approach to knowledge. Several centuries of comprehensive evolution followed. Could a similar advent be in store for us today?

Just as the case was in Galilei's time, a new order of things or technically a paradigm is ready to emerge.

The holotopia is more desirable future than the common utopias. Yet it is fully realizable. We already own the knowledge needed for its fulfillment. We only need to put it together; and put it to use.

The five insights

The holotopia vision is made concrete or federated in terms of five insights:

• The Convenience Paradox insight points to a revolution in "pursuit of happiness" and in culture, similar to the Renaissance
• The Power Structure insight points to a revolution in innovation, on the scale of the Industrial Revolution, by which human work will be made incomparably more effective and efficient
• The Collective Mind insight points to a revolution in communication, analogous to the advent of the printing press
• The Socialized Reality insight is about a new foundation on which the truth and the meaning are developed, and a possibility for a quantum leap in awareness, similar to the Enlightenment
• The Narrow Frame insight is about a new way to explore the reality, with similar consequences as the once that science had

A strategy

While each of the five insights is spectacular in its own right, even more illuminating are their relationships. By exploring them, in the light of further suitable points of reference, we understand that we cannot meaningfully respond to any of them, without responding to them all.

An even larger, overarching insight results, which naturally leads to the strategy that the holotopia is pointing to by its very name:

Comprehensive change can be easy, even when much smaller and obviously necessary changes may be impossible.

Making things whole

We were able to federate the five insights even further. Each of the five larger-than-life opportunities to improve our condition, which the five insights are pointing to, can be fulfilled by following this simple rule of thumb: Instead of seeing the world in the light of our narrowly conceived self-interest, and trusting that "the free competition" or "the invisible hand" of the market will turn our self-serving acts into the greatest common good (which is so markedly Middle Ages, isn't it?)—we see ourselves and what we do as parts in a larger whole or wholes; and act in ways that make all those larger wholes more whole.

Hence this formula (Vibeke didn't like it, but hey—nobody's reading this yet, so let's have it here as Dino's private joke and foible):

But seek ye first the systemic wholeness,
in all matters and on all levels of detail; 
and all these things shall be added unto you.

The initiative

This paper model of a large sculpture represents the holotopia as an intervention into our shared space or "reality". We use it here ideographically, to point to holotopia as intervention into our everyday, which redefines our relationship to it.

The mission of the Holotopia initiative is to develop whatever is needed for "changing course" – and realizing the holotopia.

The box

A paper model of The Box.

Holotopia's box is an object designed for 'initiation' to holotopia, a way to help us 'unbox' our conception of the world and see, think and behave differently; change course inwardly, by embracing a new value.