We have lost the sense of direction

In 1990, when Tim Berners Lee was still writing the code for the World Wide Web, Neil Postman (NYU's distinguished scholar of culture and communication) warned us that our habitual massive outpouring of information tends to have the opposite effect from the one intended. It not only leaves us uninformed—but it damages our very sense of meaning; our very capacity to be informed!

Imagine a world where information and the way it is handled are consciously adapted to their core purpose—the creation of meaning. Where information is treated as a human-made thing; and adapted to the core functions it needs to fulfill in various other things. Such as our lives, and our society.

What would the resulting information be like? By what methods, in what ways and by whom would it be created? How would information be used? What new information formats, what new kinds of information would emerge? How would the information technology be adapted and applied? In what way would our public informing be different? What would academic communication, and education, be like? By creating the Knowledge Federation prototype, we provided an academically coherent answer to those and other related questions; answers that are not only described and explained, but also implemented, as real-life embedded prototypes.

But having done that, we are still facing the same challenge that our visionary predecessors failed to overcome.

By depicting our civilization as a bus, and our handling of information as its candle headlights, the Modernity ideogram points to a grave oversight we've made in our modernization.

We seem unable to make a change

The challenge we are facing is not a problem that can be solved, but a paradox.

Having been socialized to "mind our own business" and just publish more, as scientists, and as journalists (because that's what we are paid to do, and what our careers depend on and our institutions require)—we have no incentive, no institutionalized method, no will and no willpower to make the kind of changes that would put information and knowledge into the service of meaning—the kind of meaning that our condition and the condition of our society now require.

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

What would our world be like, if we elevated the most vital insights from the "information jungle", and wove them together to give us vision? How would our world be different, if the best ideas of our best minds were reflected in our comprehension of things—and acted on?

The purpose of Holotopia is to not only answer those questions by providing insights—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?

A vision

As a vision of a possible future, the holotopia is a positive answer to the question posited in this website's preamble:

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 paradigm is ready to emerge—as soon as we once again begin to use the knowledge of knowledge, to update the very way in which our knowledge is being handled. As Galilei and other founding fathers of science did.

The holotopia is a more desirable future than the common utopias—whose authors lacked the information to see what is possible. Yet the holotopia vision is fully realizable—we already own the information that is needed for its fulfillment.

Five insights

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

• The Convenience Paradox insight points to a revolution in "the pursuit of happiness" and in culture, reminiscent of the Renaissance
• The Power Structure insight points to a revolution in innovation by which human work is made incomparably more effective and efficient, as the Industrial Revolution did
• The Collective Mind insight points to a revolution in communication, analogous to the advent of the printing press
• The Socialized Reality insight points to a new way to create truth and the meaning, analogous to the Enlightenment
• The Narrow Frame insight is about a new way to create knowledge that is capable of providing high-level insights— analogous to science, and complementing science

While the upper three insights point to developments corresponding to the Renaissance, the Industrial Revolution and the revolution in communication that the printing press made possible, the bottom two insights explain why an Enlightenment-like change is ready to happen for fundamental reasons, as a consequence of the knowledge of knowledge we own. Hence together, the five insights complete a vision of a complete order of things, which is ready to emerge.

A strategy

While each of the five insights will alone show us our time and condition in a similar light as we might see the circumstances from which the Enlightenment emerged, even more illuminating are their relationships. By exploring those relationships, we realize that we cannot meaningfully respond to any of those insights, without responding to them all.

A larger, overarching insight results:

Comprehensive change might be easy, even when smaller and obviously necessary changes may seem impossible.

This insight points to the strategy that gave the holotopia its name—where instead of focusing on specific problems, or specific improvements, we consciously aim to understand and transform the very order of things that holds them in place.

Making things whole

Considered together, the five insights point to a simple principle or 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, in the light of the five insights, perceived as markedly "Middle Ages")—we see ourselves and what we do as parts in a larger whole or wholes. And where we act in ways that make all those larger wholes more whole.

Hence this formula (which 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.

Seeing things whole

Naturally, to be able to make things whole, we must first be able to see things whole. And that's where the knowledge federation comes in.

A purpose of the holoscope is to illuminate what has remained hidden, so that we may see the whole in correct shape and proportions.

In the context of the Holotopia prototype>> we condense and simplify the core ideas of our knowledge federation proposal, until only its essence, which is its function, remains and meets the eye. To that end, we use knowledge federation only as a verb; and we refer to the proposed approach to knowledge by its pseudonym holoscope—which points to its core function, to help us see things whole. </p> <p>The social role of the holoscope is to complement the traditional approach in the sciences:

Science gave us new ways to look at the world, and our vision expanded beyond bounds. The telescope and the microscope enabled us to see the things that were too distant or too small to be seen by the naked eye. At the same time, science had the tendency to keep us focused on things that were either too distant or too small to be relevant – compared to all those big things nearby, which now demand our attention. The holoscope is conceived as way to look at the world that helps us see any chosen thing or theme as a whole – from all sides; and in correct proportions.