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

The KF proposal

We have candles as headlights

From around the middle of the 19th century, and until the first decades of the 20th century, everything changed: Our countries became democracies; our worldview became scientific and secular; our lifestyle became mechanized and modern. Everything changed—and then for about a century remained frozen!

Meanwhile the human creativity, unleashed from tradition, continued to bear fruits; and we now have

• a completely different understanding of language, truth and reality, and of the meaning and purpose of information and its relationship with power
• a completely new information technology—first the TV, and the immersive audio-visual media, and then the Internet and the interactive digital media
• completely changed societal needs and challenges—from increasing productivity, to understanding and controlling our newly acquired powers to change the planetary systems, and bring about our own end
• the heritage of the world traditions—which for the first time came together and became available

Indeed—as we shall see again and again in the course of our conversations—the most important ideas of our leading thinkers, and the main insights of entire academic disciplines, remained without due influence on public opinion and institutional policy! To this curious phenomenon we have given the name Wiener's paradox.

The point of departure of the knowledge federation initiative is an alarming split—between academically published insights, and what we as society and culture still see the world; and try to handle its issues.

"Knowledge federation" means 'connecting the dots'

The purpose of knowledge federation is to restore the agency to information, and the power to knowledge.

Knowledge federation can be understood as the principle of operation of an entirely different pair of 'headlights'—by which this purpose is achieved.

Political federation combines smaller political units together, to give them visibility and impact. Knowledge federation does that to information. As our logo might suggest—knowledge federation means 'connecting the dots'.

By 'connecting the dots', we can reach a new insight—and see an issue or a situation in a new way, show how it may need to be handled. Or we can create a prototype—and give the information we have a way to impact our institutionalized and everyday reality directly

We are proposing to create new 'headlights'

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."

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

Or to rephrase this in the language of our metaphor, we are proposing to create the 'headlights'—instead of trying to make use of whatever happens to be there; instead of blindly adopting what we've inherited from the past.

We have created a complete prototype

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

The substance of our proposal is the Knowledge Federation prototype—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 situation we are in, provided us with a benchmark challenge for putting our ideas to test. Four decades 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

Why did Peccei's call to action remain unanswered? Why wasn't The Club of Rome's purpose—to illuminate the course our civilization has taken—served by our society's institutions, as part of their function? Isn't this already showing that we are 'driving with candle headlights'?

Can knowledge federation help us "change course"?

Peccei also specified what needed 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."

This conclusion Peccei shared with a number of twentieth century's frontier thinkers. Arne Næss for instance, Norway's most loved philosopher, reached it on different grounds and called it "deep ecology".

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

A vision

What new 'course' shall we see, when we use knowledge federation to 'illuminate the way'?

The holotopia is an astonishingly positive future scenario.

This future vision is more positive than what the familiar utopias offered—whose authors lacked the information to see what was possible; or lived in the times when the resources we have did not yet exist.

When the evidence offered on these pages has been considered, it will be clear why holotopia is not only "the new black"—but also the new red; and the new green!

Unlike the utopias, the holotopia is readily realizable; we already have all that is needed for its fulfillment. To realize it, we need to "change course" in the direction that is suggested by its name.

We must see ourselves as parts in a larger whole; and act in ways that make this larger whole more whole.

But this is exactly the direction the Modernity ideogram is pointing to.

This direction is a radical departure from our current course—which emerges as a result of everyone pursuing "his our own interests"; and trusting that "the invisible hand" of the "free competition" will turn our self-serving acts into the greatest common good.