We have lost the sense of direction

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.

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.

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

We seek meaning in meaningless routines

In the world where we've all 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—we have no established institution, no way, and not even the willpower to make the kind of changes that would make information and knowledge once again serve the social purposes that need to be served.

A goal of the Holotopia prototype, which is currently in development, is to overcome that obstacle.

What would our world be like, if all our overabundant information were used to give us the kind of meaning we need? Where the best ideas of our best minds were reflected in the ways in which our core issues are widely comprehended—and where they were acted on?

The purpose of Holotopia is to not only answer those questios—but to also empower us to begin to create such a world.

What would it take 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?