Imagine...

You are about to board a bus for a long night ride, when you notice two flickering streaks of light emanating from two wax candles, placed in the circular holes where the headlights of the bus are expected to be. Candles? As headlights?

Of course, the idea of candles as headlights is absurd. So why propose it? Because on a much larger scale this absurdity has become reality.

By depicting our society as a bus without a steering wheel, and the way we look at the world and try to comprehend it and handle it as a pair of candle headlights, the Modernity ideogram renders the essence of our contemporary situation.

Modernity ideogram

Our proposal

The core of our knowledge federation proposal is to change the relationship we have with information.

What is our relationship with information presently like? Here is how Neil Postman described it:

"The tie between information and action has been severed. Information is now a commodity that can be bought and sold, or used as a form of entertainment, or worn like a garment to enhance one's status. It comes indiscriminately, directed at no one in particular, disconnected from usefulness; we are glutted with information, drowning in information, have no control over it, don't know what to do with it."

Suppose we handled information as we handle other man-made things—by suiting it to the purposes that need to be served.

What consequences would this have? How would information be different? How would it be used? By what methods, what social processes, and by whom would it be created? What new information formats would emerge, and supplement or replace the traditional books and articles? How would information technology be adapted? What would public informing be like? And academic communication, and education?

Our knowledge federation proposal is a complete and academically coherent answer to those and other related questions; an answer that is not only described and explained, but also implemented—in a collection of real-life embedded prototypes.

An application

What difference will this make? The Holotopia prototype, which is under development, is a proof of concept application.

The Club of Rome's assessment of the general condition we are in, provided us with a benchmark challenge for putting our ideas to test. A half-century ago—based on a decade of this global think tank's research into the future prospects of mankind, in a book titled "One Hundred Pages for the Future"—Aurelio Peccei issued the following warning:

"It is absolutely essential to find a way to change course."

Aurelio Peccei

Already this event constitutes an anomaly, which motivates the paradigm we are proposing (we attribute to these keywords a similar meaning as Thomas Kuhn did). Why did Peccei's call to action remain unanswered? Why wasn't The Club of Rome's quest—to illuminate the way our civilization has taken—handled by our society's institutions? Isn't this already showing that we are 'driving with candle headlights'?

Peccei also specified what would need to be done to "change course":

"The future will either be an inspired product of a great cultural revival, or there will be no future."

"Let me recapitulate what seems to me the crucial question at this point of the human venture", Peccei explained in "Human Quality". "Man has acquired such decisive power that his future depends essentially on how he will use it. However, the business of human life has become so complicated that he is culturally unprepared even to understand his new position clearly. As a consequence, his current predicament is not only worsening but, with the accelerated tempo of events, may become decidedly catastrophic in a not too distant future. The downward trend of human fortunes can be countered and reversed only by the advent of a new humanism essentially based on and aiming at man's cultural development, that is, a substantial improvement in human quality throughout the world."

The Club of Rome insisted that lasting solutions would not found by focusing on specific problems, but by transforming the condition from which they all stem, which they called "predicament" or "problematique".

Peccei's following observation, with which he concluded his analysis in "One Hundred Pages for the Future", will also be relevant:

The arguments posed in the preceding pages (...) point out several things, of which one of the most important is that our generations seem to have lost the sense of the whole.

Seeing things whole

In the context of Holotopia, we refer to our proposal by its pseudonym holoscope, which highlights its distinguishing characteristic—it helps us see things whole.

Perspective ideogram

The holoscope uses suitable information in a suitable way, to illuminate what remained obscure or hidden, so that we may correctly see the shape and the dimensions of the whole (correct our perspective).

The Information idogram, shown on the right, explains how the information we propose to create is different from the one we have.

The ideogram shows an "i", which stands for "information", as composed of a circle placed on top of a square. The square stands for the details; and also for looking at a theme of choice from all sides, by using diverse kinds of sources and resources. The circle, or the dot on the "i", stands for the function or the point of it all. That might be an insight into the nature of a situation; or a rule of thumb, pointing to a general way to handle situations of a specific kind; or a project, which implements such handling.

Information ideogram

By showing the circle as founded on the square, the Information ideogram points to knowledge federation as a social process (the 'principle of operation' of the socio-technical 'lightbulb'), by which the insights, principles, strategic handling and whatever else may help us understand and take care of our increasingly complex world are kept consistent with each other, and with the information we own.

Knowledge federation is itself a result of knowledge federation: We draw insights about handling information from the sciences, communication design, journalism... And we weave them into technical solutions.

BottomUp - TopDown intervention tool for shifting positions, which was part of our pilot project in Kunsthall 3.14, Bergen, suggests how this proposed information is to be used—by transcending fixed relations between top and bottom, and building awareness of the benefits of multiple points of view; and moving in-between.

The holoscope complements the usual approach in the sciences:

Science gave us new ways to look at the world: The telescope and the microscope enabled us to see the things that are too distant or too small to be seen by the naked eye, and our vision expanded beyond bounds. But 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 large things or issues nearby, which now demand our attention. The holoscope is conceived as a 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.

A vision

The Club of Rome was itself a federation effort—where one hundred expert and policy makers were selected and organized to gather and create the information that would, in the language of our metaphor, 'illuminate the way'. The stark contrast between a civilization-wide resolute response to an immediate threat—the COVID19 pandemic, at the point of this writing—and the virtual lack of attention to the long-term but incomparably larger threat that The Club of Rome was warning us about, already suggests that we are 'driving in the light of a pair of candles'. It also suggests that something might be amiss in our homo sapiens self-image. Could we be living in an illusory Matrix, without knowing what's really going on; and without even wanting to know? And what other things, similarly important, might have remained in the shadow of our "knowing"?

Yet perhaps the most interesting possibility is to just federate further. What insights might be powerful enough to trigger "a great cultural revival"? What exactly might we need to do to "change course"? The Holotopia project has been conceived as the vehicle for this sort of inquiry.

What possible futures would we see, if a proper 'light' were used to 'illuminate the way'?

The holotopia is an astonishingly positive future scenario.

Like the utopia, the holotopia is a vision of a highly desirable future. This future vision is indeed more desirable than the ones that were offered by the familiar utopias—whose authors lived in times when the resources we have today were not available; or lacked the information to see what is possible.

But unlike the utopias, the holotopia is readily realizable—because we already own the information that is needed for its fulfillment.

Making things whole

What exactly do we need to do, to "change course" and 'travel' toward holotopia?

From all the detailed information that we carefully selected and considered, and organized and made available in the square so that this claim can be verified, we distilled a simple principle or rule of thumb: We need to see ourselves and what we do as parts in a larger whole or wholes; and act in ways that make those larger wholes more whole.

This is, needless to say, a radical departure from the ethical stance that is now common.

And it is, indeed, exactly the course of action that the Modernity ideogram is pointing to.