Difference between revisions of "Holotopia"

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Revision as of 11:06, 12 July 2020

Imagine...

You are about to board a bus for a long night ride, when you notice the flickering streaks of light emanating from two wax candles, placed 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.

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

Modernity.jpg Modernity ideogram


Our proposal

In a nutshell

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."

Postman.jpg
Neil Postman


We are proposing to create new 'headlights'

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

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

We 'connect the dots' to reach a new insight; to see an issue or situation in a new way—which reveals a new way in which it may need to be handled.

When academic results and other cultural artifacts are combined together under such an insight, they acquire a completely new meaning, and interest, and level of impact.

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

Knowledge federation concretely

We have not invented knowledge federation. Indeed, as we show on our website, the list of visionary thinkers who pointed to the necessity of such a step, and contributed technical solutions, includes an imposing (subset) of the 20th century's famed visionary thinkers. And also others who merited to be recognized as such—whose contributions have not yet been understood and acknowledged.

Our contribution to this age-old and yet timely course of action has been no more than to simply 'connect the dots'—put the already existing ideas together into a coherent system, the Knowledge Federation prototype.

The substance of our proposal is the Knowledge Federation prototype—by which the new approach to knowledge is made concrete, and implementable.

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? Our proposal contains concrete answers to those, and numerous other related questions.

Our proposal is made concrete by the following call to action.

We are proposing to establish and develop knowledge federation as an academic field, and a real-life praxis (informed practice).

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An application

The Club of Rome's assessment of the situation we are in, provided us with a benchmark challenge for putting the proposed ideas to a 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."

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."

Peccei.jpg
Aurelio Peccei

This conclusion, that our present crisis has cultural roots and must be handled accordingly, Peccei shared with a number of twentieth century's thinkers. Arne Næss, Norway's esteemed philosopher, reached it on different grounds, and called it "deep ecology".

In "Human Quality", Peccei assessed our contemporary situation as follows:

"Let me recapitulate what seems to me the crucial question at this point of the human venture. 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 be found by focusing on specific problems, but by transforming the condition from which they all stem, which they called "problematique".

Federating 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'?

The Holotopia prototype is conceived as a way to federate Aurelio Peccei's insight, and call to action.

A vision

What new 'course' will 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.

Unlike the utopias, the holotopia is readily realizable; we already have all that is needed for its fulfillment.

All we need to do to realize this vision, all that remains for us to do to "change course", is to follow a principle or a rule of thumb, which is suggested by the holotopia's very name.

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

This is exactly the direction the Modernity ideogram is pointing to.

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

The point is to see that we are those 'headlights'—whenever we are using information or creating it; and to self-organize and act in ways this function (of being headlights) requires.

Imagine if academia and all knowledge-workers collaborated to serve and develop planetary wholeness – what magnitude of benefits would result!


FiveInsights.JPG
Five Insights ideogram

The holotopia vision is made concrete in terms of five insights.

A vision made concrete

The five insights make the holotopia vision concrete. And palpable.

New thinking

Einstein's "we cannot solve our problems" is implicit on the Holotopia project's every step. But what is the new thinking?

Instead of trying to handle problems within the existing order of things or paradigm—we point to large anomalies that exist in this order of things, which demand fundamental change. Structural, deeper causes of perceived problems.

Our approach is not a replacement for the common problem-based approaches. The climate change, environmental pollution, COVID-19... and other urgent problems have to be dealt with.

Our proposal is not to replace the problem-based approaches—but to dramatically increase their chances to succeed.
<p>By making structural changes that led to those problems. Or by making structural changes in institutions, and enable solutions.

When that is done, the result is far more than just solutions to problems; it is a dramatic and sweeping improvement in the condition we've learned to perceive as "the reality". And an unleashing of creativity in a completely new direction.

The "solutionatique"


Already in 1964, four years before The Club of Rome was established, Margaret Mead wrote:

"(W)e are living in a period of extraordinary danger, as we are faced with the possibility that ourwhole species will be eliminated from the evolutionary scene. One necessary condition of successfully continuing our existence is the creation of an atmosphere of hope that the huge problems now confronting us can, in fact, be solved—and can be solved in time."

But what is "the solution"? Can we even conceive of a form it may have?

Mead.jpg
Margaret Mead

The five insights are conceived as a prototype answer.

Each of the insights reveals a deep structural problem, or technically an "anomaly", dwarfing our efforts to improve our condition, in a pivotal area:

  • The way we use our creativity, our capacity to induce change through technology and innovation
  • The way in which knowledge is created, and information technology used
  • The foundations on which we handle and evaluate information and knowledge, and create truth and meaning
  • The method by which truth and meaning are created
  • The values we serve, which we use to "pursue happiness"

By discussing the five insights, we see how completely new ideas about power and politics, democracy (...) are ready to emerge.

Great cultural revival

Each of them is solvable—and we indeed show steps already made toward its solution, as specific prototypes within the Knowledge Federation prototype.

When Peccei talked about "a great cultural revival", he was referring to the Renaissance—the historical moment when a comprehensive change of the human systems was under way. We refer to it by using the symbolic image of Galilei in house arrest—and carefully develop an analogy between that and our present condition.

The five insights show why a similar change is ready to take place once again, by elaborating on the analogy between our time and conditions, and the five specific changes the historical comprehensive change was composed of:

  • The Industrial Revolution, made possible by a revolution in science and innovation
  • The revolution in communication, made possible by the printing press
  • The revolution in epistemology, enabled by the empowerment of human reason to explore and comprehend the world
  • The revolution in our ability to explore and comprehend the world, made possible by the emergence of science
  • The revolution in lifestyle and in arts, happened as the preoccupation with the afterlife lost its hold

A strategy

The sixth insight

The anomalies the five insights point to, and the corresponding solutions, are so closely inter-related that taking care of one necessitates resolving the others. In this way the sixth insight is reached:

Comprehensive change can be easy—even when smaller and obviously necessary changes may have proven impossible.


The holotopia strategy

The holotopia strategy, as suggested by its name, is to focus on changing the entire order of things from which our problems emanate. Exactly as The Club of Rome recommended.

We begin with information

Just as building a house must begin with the foundations, changing the whole order of things has its own natural order in which it needs to proceed. As the Modernity ideogram suggested, to change course, we must begin by changing the illumination source, so that the new course may become visible. In the "Age of Information", re-branded "Anthropocene", we urgently need the kind of information that can illuminate the way.

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!

We create a 'showball'

Imagine us as a collection of 'cells' in our 'collective mind', which mutated in a new way. Having perceived our society as a bus with candle headlights, we perceived ourselves as (part of) those headlights. And we began to self-organize differently. So that we may become 'lightbulbs', not 'candles'!

We understood, in other words, that we must use our creativity in a new way; not by merely observing and reporting—but by being and acting differently.

And so we made a small snowball, and began to roll it downhill. Will it gather snow? Will it grow? Will it have the effect it needs to have?


A call to action

What exactly we must do to make a difference

Margaret Mead wrote in Continuities in Cultural Evolution, already in 1964:

"(W)e are living in a period of extraordinary danger, as we are faced with the possibility that our shole species will be eliminated from the evolutionary scene."

Well before The Club of Rome said their word, Mead pointed to the critical task at hand:

"Although tremendous advances in the human sciences have been made in the last hundred years, almost no advance has been made in their use, especially in ways of creating reliable new forms in which cultural evolution can be directed to desired goals."


Mead's best known motto is encouraging:

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."

We leave her more sober words, regarding what constitutes "a small group of... citizens" that are capable of making such a large difference, as her challenge to the Holotopia initiative:

Mead.jpg
Margaret Mead

"Although lengthy discussions about different kinds of leadership in different situations serve, indirectly, to explain why science has not solved the problem of identifying leaders, they serve no further constructive purpose.

Instead, we take the position that the unit of cultural evolution is neither the single gifted individual nor the society as a whole but the small group of interacting individuals who, together with the most gifted among them, can take the next step; then we can set about the task of creating the conditions in which the appropriately gifted can actually make a contribution. That is, rather than isolating potential "leaders," we can purposefully produce the conditions we find in history, in which clusters are formed of a small number of extraordinary and ordinary men [and women], so related to their period and to one another that they can consciously set about solving the problems they propose for themselves."

A dugnad

Our call to action is an invitation to make an inner all-important step: To consider holotopia as your project, not ours. By seeing yourself as part of the larger whole—and contributing accordingly—you will already be in holotopia

In Norwegian language there is a word, "dugnad" (pronounced as "dügnad"), for the kind of collective event that may be organized by the people in the neighborhood, to collect fallen branches and trash and do small repairs in the commons—and then share a meal and get to know each other.

It is the spirit of dugnad we are inviting you to emulate.

We transcend the borderlines

The key turns out to be those 'candles'.

By this we do not mean to criticize the fine work that is being done in academic disciplines. The point is that we need something else in addition—in the all-important role of the 'headlights'.

The key is the relationship we have with information

We transcend the borderlines between academic disciplines, and other cultural traditions. Also—between art and science. We combine and engage all resources.

In the context of our proposal—the Holotopia prototype completes it—by giving it an agency. A way to impact the world, and make a difference.