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 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."

Neil Postman

In detail

What would information and our handling of information be like if we treated them as we treat other human-made things—if we adapted them to the purposes that need to be served?

The substance of our knowledge federation proposal is a complete prototype—by which the proposed modernization of information is made concrete, and practically realizable.

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 proposed prototype includes detailed answers to those and other related questions.

An application

The situation we are in

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 call to action:

"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."

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 explained his call to action 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".

Can the proposed 'headlights' help us "find a way to change course"?

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 regular institutions, as part of their function? Isn't this already showing that we are 'driving with candle headlights'?

If we used knowledge federation to 'illuminate the way'—what difference would that make?

The Holotopia project is conceived as a knowledge federation-based response to Aurelio Peccei's call to action.

We coined the keyword holotopia as a placeholder for the vision, and the cultural and social order of things that will result from this quest.

The mission of the Holotopia project is to evolve (a prototype of) a pair of 'headlights', in actual practice, by which this new course will become visible; and to initiate the transformative cultural and social processes that are necessary for this vision to be realized.

To prime this work, we have developed an initial Holotopia prototype, which includes both an initial vision, and a project infrastructure. This prototype is described on these pages.

A vision

The holotopia is not a utopia

Since Thomas More coined this term and described the first utopia, a number of visions of an ideal but non-existing social and cultural order of things have been proposed. But in view of harsh and contrasting realities, the word "utopia" acquired the negative meaning of an unrealizable fancy.

As the optimism regarding our future faded, apocalyptic or "dystopian" visions became common. The "protopias" emerged as a compromise, where the focus is on smaller but practically realizable improvements.

The holotopia is different in spirit from them all. It is a more attractive vision of the future than what the common utopias offered—whose authors either lacked the information to see what was possible, or lived in the times when the resources we have did not yet exist. And yet the holotopia is readily realizable—because we already have the information and other resources that are needed for its fulfillment.

Making things whole

What do we need to do to change course toward the holotopia?

From a comprehensive body of insights from which the holotopia emerges as a future realistically worth aiming for, we have distilled a simple principle or rule of thumb—"making things whole". And we suggested that principle 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.

You will recognize that this principle is also suggested by the Modernity ideogram: Instead of reifying our institutions and professions, and merely acting in them competitively to improve "our own" situation or condition, we consider ourselves and what we do as functional elements in a larger system or systems; and we self-organize, and act, as it may best suit their, and our, wholeness.

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

A method

Seeing things whole

To make things whole, we must be able to see things whole.

To highlight that the knowledge federation methodology we are proposing affords that very capability, in the context of the holotopia we refer to it by its pseudonym holoscope.

The characteristics of our current prototype of the holoscope—the main design choices or design patterns, how they follow from published insights, and why they are necessary for 'illuminating the way'—will become obvious in the course of this presentation. One characteristic, however, must be made clear from the start.

Holoscope ideogram

If we consider it as our goal to "discover an objectively true reality picture", then whatever challenges our current "reality picture" will be perceived as "controversial".

When, however, our goal is to allow the way we look at the world to change and evolve further, to make us capable of seeing things whole and making them whole, then this very attitude needs to be modified. In the holoscope, the co-existence of a multiplicity of views, even when they might appear to contradict one another, is axiomatic. Those views are not considered as competing or contradictory "reality pictures", but as legitimate ways to look a situation or issue, necessary if we should see it from all sides, correctly assess its condition, and see what needs to be done.

This change of attitude becomes mandatory when our goal is not to see whether a hand-held cup is whole or cracked, but whether our 'bus' or civilization has defects that must be attended to. Then a discovery of a way of looking that reveals a defect, even when that defect is only a possibility, needs to be given the kind of prerogatives that scientific discoveries have in the traditional academia.

By allowing for a multiplicity of views, we also give ignored but potentially transformative ideas 'citizenship rights'.

Knowledge federation can then be understood as collective thinking or sense making, whereby overarching insights ("the cup is cracked") are distilled from a multitude of data, and acted on. And as a social process that keeps a multiplicity of views coherent with one another; and of course also with academic result and other cultural artifacts; and with the people's and the society's contemporary needs.

Thinking outside the box

That “we cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them" is a commonplace. A salient technical novelty in the holoscope is that free and deliberate choice of what we look at and how, which in our technical jargon is called scope, is made possible on rigorously academic grounds.

To liberate our thinking from the narrow frame of inherited concepts and habits, or metaphorically, to replace 'candle headlights' by a method that allows for deliberate choice of scopes, we used "the scientific method" as venture point, and modified it by taking recourse to state of the art insights in the science and philosophy.

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 proportion.

Looking at all sides

A way of looking or scope that illuminate an entire whole from a specific angle is called aspect. As suggested by the Holoscope ideogram, the art of using the holoscope will to a large degree consist in finding a suitable collection of aspects—suitable because each of them alone affords a simple and clear view of the whole; and because combined together, they show the whole from all sides, and reveal its structure and condition.

Five insights

Five Insights ideogram

A vision made concrete

The holotopia vision is made concrete in terms of five insights. They are the 'engine' that 'drives' the Holotopia project to its destination.

The five insights are the result of looking at five selected main aspects of our contemporary condition. Of looking beyond the apparent problems, and illuminating deeper structural defects that either created them, or prevented us from solving them.

We could have also called them "five issues"—which we are proposing as completely new ways to direct our efforts, incomparably more effective and productive than the still common "problem solving" in the context of the existing systemic solutions (or metaphorically, by driving with 'candle headlights'). As we shall see, each of them is an issue that can be resolved.

Our proposal is not to replace the problem-based approaches—but to dramatically increase their chances to succeed.

We might have also called them "five anomalies"—since each demands a deep or "paradigm" change in its specific domain.

We shall see that each of those issues has been reported—and that the solutions have at least in principle been proposed—characteristically a half-century ago.

And consequently that Postman was right in observing that "the tie between information and action has been severed".

Power structure

"Man has acquired such decisive power that his future depends essentially on how he will use it", observed Peccei. We look at the way in which man uses his newly acquired and rapidly growing power—to create, and induce change. We illuminate the way our culture has been following. (Let's agree to attribute to culture a general meaning that includes the systems in which we live and work, as culture's 'hardware'. "The way" our culture is following can then be understood as the way in which those systems are evolving.)

More concretely, we look at the institutions, or more generally the systems in which we live and work—which have the power to organize us together in ways that empower us to achieve great results; or as the case may be—organize us in ways that are dysfunctional, or even damaging and destructive; without us noticing that.

Revolutions often involve a new understanding of the issues of power and freedom; the holotopia is no exception. So imagine if some sinister power took control over our culture's evolutionary course, and drives us toward disaster. Power structure is that power. We shall see that the power structures wasted a lion's share of our time, money and other resources; that they created the perceived problems.

A salient characteristic of this new way of perceiving this perennial issues of power and justice is that no conspiracy is needed, no evil intention or even awareness of adverse effects. On the contrary—our best intentions, our usual "values" of "doing our job", of "minding our own business", has given our professions or institutions the sinister ability of organizing us together in ways that are self-destructive, and damaging.

The solution—to self-organize differently, and make things whole" at the level of institutions (by adapting them to the contemporary purposes and conditions)—was identified as a necessary response to the "problematique" right after The club of Rome's inception, in 1968. Erich Jantsch, one of The Club's co-founders, proposed it academically, and undertook to initiate the process of implementing it in practice.

Collective mind

If our key evolutionary task is to learn make things whole at the level of institutions—where should we begin? What "joint system of society and technology" is the one that is both the most ready to be changed—and most likely to have a decisive impact?

The answer is obvious; to reach the collective mind insight, we focus on the 'headlights'.

The evidence we'll present in support of this insight will show just how much "the tie between information and action has been severed". It may feel disheartening, especially to our academic colleagues, to see that academic publishing influences the public opinion and policy only exceptionally; and as a rule—not at all!

Our mood, however, will change to holotopian positive, as soon as we look at the other side of this coin, i.e. at possible improvements that are ready to be reached by self-organizing differently. No changes are necessary at the level of the individual disciplines, in any case at the beginning—since dramatic progress in restoring agency to information, and power to knowledge can be reached by creating a trans-disciplinary infrastructure that connects them together. As Erich Jantsch proposed.

Engelbart's own slide explaining his vision, slightly adapted to our standard format.

Our optimism is likely to turn into enthusiasm when we realize that characteristic parts of contemporary information technology (the network-interconnected, interactive digital media) have been created as enabling technology, or metaphorically as "collective nervous system" to change our collective mind by making us capable of thinking and creating together. Or by federating knowledge, as we would say it. That Doug Engelbart conceived this vision already in 1951—and demonstrated the technical solutions already in 1968.

We shall see that also Engelbart's call to action is still waiting to be heard, and honored.