Difference between revisions of "Holotopia"

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<p>Despite the <em>holotopia</em>'s optimistic tone, we <em>do not</em> assume that. Of course the huge problem now confronting us <em>can</em> be solved, if we take the critical factor—the "human quality", or in other words us—out from the equation. But a solution that excludes us, humans, can hardly be considered a solution.</p>  
 
<p>Despite the <em>holotopia</em>'s optimistic tone, we <em>do not</em> assume that. Of course the huge problem now confronting us <em>can</em> be solved, if we take the critical factor—the "human quality", or in other words us—out from the equation. But a solution that excludes us, humans, can hardly be considered a solution.</p>  
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Revision as of 08:57, 20 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


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."

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 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 created, and practically 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.

Looking at all sides

Holoscope.jpeg
Holoscope ideogram

If we conceive of the purpose of information as providing "an objectively true picture of reality", then only that which is "scientifically proven" will be given 'citizenship rights'. Whatever challenges our "reality picture" will be considered "controversial".

When, however, our goal is to see things whole in order to make them whole, then this attitude is no longer appropriate and must 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 alternative ways to look a situation or issue, necessary if we should see it from all sides, in order to correctly assess its nature or condition, and see what needs to be done.

This change of attitude becomes mandatory when the object of our attention is a hand-held cup, but our 'bus' or civilization; when our goal is to see whether it 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 hypothetical, only a possibility, is obligatorily given the kind of prerogative that scientific discoveries have in the traditional academia.

This coexistence of a multiplicity of views is also a way to give ignored but potentially transformative ideas 'citizenship rights'.


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.

In the order of things or paradigm we are proposing, the core challenge is to perceive problems or issues in such a way that they do have solutions.

To liberate our thinking from the narrow frame of inherited concepts and methods, and allow 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 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.

It goes without saying that the traditional-academic publishing and peer reviews will not be a social process suitable for maintaining this multiplicity of views. What we are calling knowledge federation can be understood as collective thinking or sense making, whereby overarching insights ("the cup is cracked") are distilled from a multitude of insights and 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.

FiveInsights.JPG
Five Insights ideogram

Illuminating problems to see solutions

Suppose that you had a flexible searchlight, which you could point at any theme or issue and illuminate what remained hidden while we looked at it 'in the light of the candle' (in the habitual or traditional way). Your goal is to see sweepingly large possibilities for improving our condition, on the scale that resulted from the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. What would you point it at? What would you see?

The holotopia vision is made concrete in terms of a collection of five such scope and view pairs; or five insights, as we are calling them.

In the spirit of the holoscope, we here provide for each of them only a short summary; and we present the supporting evidence and details in the corresponding detailed view or module.

We shall see in those detailed views that not only those issues were diagnosed, but that also solutions were identified and proposed—characteristically a half-century ago. And 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 innovate (create and induce change). We use suitable information to illuminate the resulting the way our civilization or 'bus' has been following in its evolution.

Genuine revolutions often result from a new way of perceiving the perennial issues of power and freedom. We offer the power structure as a means to that end. Think of it as a new way to conceive of the conventional idea of "power holder", whom we suspect might be our "enemy". While the exact meaning and character of the power structure will become clear as we go along, imagine it, to begin with, as our institutions. Or a bit more generally as the systems in which we live and work, which we'll refer to simply as systems. Notice that systems have an immense power—first of all over us, by providing the environment that determines how we live and work; and then also over our environment, because they organize us and use us in certain specific ways. The power structures, conceived of as systems determine what the effects of our work will be; whether they will be problems, or solutions.

How suitable are our systems for their all-important role?

We readily see that the bus with candle headlights metaphor applies not only to our handling of information, but to our systems in general. The structure of our systems tend to be of a Promethean ancientry, which has through centuries of existence been corrupted by the degenerative tendencies we'll talk about in a moment. And that at any rate, we have no reason to expect that they will still fulfill their purposes in the post-traditional and technologically advanced society we are living in presently.

So why don't we treat them as we treat other human-made things—by adapting them to the purposes that need to be served?

The reasons, and how to overcome them, will be a recurring theme in this brief introduction to the holotopia, and, we anticipate, also during its future evolution. One of them we have already suggested, by sharing the Modernity ideogram: We have not yet developed the habit of seeing things on that high level of generality or abstraction; we have no established way to see things whole. This is why such preposterous errors as 'using candles as headlights' can indeed be made on that very large scale, without us noticing.

A bit deeper assessment of reasons reveals that we tend to ignore the possibility of adapting systems to their purposes because they serve for us an entirely different purpose—they organize us together in our various turf strifes and power battles. Both within our system (where we compete for a better position), and and also without (where the systems struggle against each other).

Hence our civilization's evolution, or metaphorically the way our 'bus' is following, is steered by Darwinian evolution, the survival of the fittest. What "fitness criterion" steers this evolution? And what kind of systems result? It stands to reason—but we provide evidence to support this central point—that this evolution will favor the systems that are 'sharks', not 'sheeps'. We share examples and theoretical academic insights that show that our systems are wasting a lion's share of our resources; that they are causing our problems; and that they are generally organizing us in ways where our best efforts and intentions yield results that are outright cruel and evil.

We see, in other words, that those systems must be considered as our "enemy"—and not specific persons or groups who may appear to have power or do evil, because of their roles or "power positions" within those systems.

A salient characteristic of power structure as "enemy" is that no conspiracy is needed, no evil intention or even awareness of adverse effects. On the contrary—our best intentions, our usual "values" such as "doing a good job" and "minding our own business", are all that is needed in order to turn us into well-functioning cogs in a too-large-to-be-visible problem causing 'machinery'.

A still deeper understanding of this core issue reveals that the power structure is capable of creating both our culture, and our "human quality"—by socializing us in ways that suit their "interests" (it is a bit more accurate to say that we, and our culture, evolve as part of our systems, and hence within the power structure). This has, of course, been the case since the beginning of civilization. But if you'll for a moment consider that our not-so-distant ancestors were living meditative lives pursuing their chores in nature, and occasionally reading the Bible—you will easily see why this problem is far more acute today. <p> <p>And we may be growing and living in a media-constructed (or power structure–constructed) "reality".

Jantsch-vision.jpeg

That at this moment our and our society's key evolutionary task is to develop the capability to create or consciously evolve the systems in which we live and work has, of course, not remained unnoticed. Indeed, the very first step The Club of Rome's founders did after its inception, in 1968. Erich Jantsch, one of the co-founders, organized a meeting of a suitable expert team in Bellagio, Italy, where a suitable methodology was developed. They gave the holotopia's motto, to make things whole, a more technical name "systemic innovation", and we adopted and adapted systemic innovation as one of our keywords.

Collective mind

<p>If our key evolutionary task is to learn make things whole at the level of institutions—where should we begin?

Handling of information, or metaphorically our society's 'headlights', suggests itself as the answer for several reasons. One of them is that if we'll use information and not "the survival of the fittest" to guide our society's evolution, then our information and our creation, integration and application of information, will need to be entirely different.

Another reason is that "the tie between information and action has been severed". Evidence suggests that academic publishing influences the public opinion and policy only exceptionally; and as a rule—not at all! To think of all the excellent work of our best minds, who have been selected, trained, and publicly sponsored, prevented from benefiting our society which is in dire need for new ideas and directions—by the very system or institution that organizes them together—may feel disheartening.

Dismay, however, changes to holotopian optimism, when we see that the other side of this coin is a vast and most fertile creative frontier—where we, academic researchers, are allows to recreate our very system. Just as the founding father of academia did centuries ago.

Optimism turns into enthusiasm when we realize that characteristic parts of contemporary information technology (the network-interconnected, interactive digital media) have been created as enabling technology for for an entirely different way of working (which is not publishing or broadcasting, but more similar to the way in which cells in a well-functioning mind operate—which we have named knowledge federation), by Doug Engelbart and his SRI team, and demonstrated in their famous 1968 demo.

DE-one.jpeg
Engelbart's own opening slide, pasted into our standard format.

We like to tell story of "Engelbart's unfinished revolution" (as Stanford University called it when it was first uncovered, in the 1990s), because it vividly, or strikingly, illustrates the kind of paradoxes and anomalies that we are now up against. Just imagine the Silicon Valley's premier innovator trying and trying—and failing—to explain to the Silicon Valley that if we should draw the kind of benefits from the information technology that can and need to be drawn, IT innovation will have to be systemic.

Engelbart explained in his second slide:

We ride a common economic-political vehicle traveling at an ever-accelerating pace through increasingly complex terrain.

Our headlights are much too dim and blurry. We have totally inadequate steering and braking controls.

Socialized reality

Our next question is who, that is what institution, will initiate and develop the systemic innovation in knowledge work?

Erich Jantsch and Doug Engelbart believed that the answer would have to be "the university"; and they made their appeals accordingly. But they were ignored—and so were other progenitors of knowledge federation and transdisciplinarity before and after.

Why?

It is tempting to conclude that the academia's evolution has been following the general trend. That the academic disciplines too have evolved as power structures—namely as a way to provide the insiders clear, rational rules for competing over the academic 'turf', and to keep the outsiders out. But to see solutions, we will need to look at deeper or more fundamental causes.

As we pointed out in the opening paragraphs of knowledgefederation.org, the academic tradition did not evolve as a way to pursue practical knowledge, but what might be considered as "right" knowledge. When Socrates engaged people in dialogs, his goal was to challenge their way of "knowing". And when the Academia's tradition was later revived by Galilei and other progenitors of science, the motive was again not the pursuit of practical knowledge, but of a certain kind of knowledge of knowledge—which originated in astrophysics, and proved to be transformative across the board.

In the 19th century, when the modernization of our worldview and our culture was in full swing and Adam and Moses as cultural heroes and forefathers were succeeded by Darwin and Newton, the "official narrative" that emerged was that the goal of our pursuit of knowledge, and of information, is to give us an "objectively true understanding of reality". That the traditions and the Bible got it all wrong. But that science corrected their errors.

The "homo sapiens" acquired a corresponding self-image, according to which correct understanding of reality is his evolutionary prerogative. When that is granted, his rational faculties will allow him to make rational choices, and subdue the natural forces to his own interests.

The twentieth century's science and philosophy completely reversed this naive picture. It has turned out that we got it wrong.

Einstein-Watch.jpeg

There is simply no way to rationally assert that our ideas and models correspond to reality.

Information is (or more accurately it needs to be perceived as), and has always been, the central piece in the 'machinery' of the society, which keeps it together and enables it to function.

"Reality" turned out to be a contrivance of the traditional culture, or of power structure, invented to socialize us in a certain way. As Berger and Luckmann observed in "Social construction of reality", our "reality pictures" serve as "universal theories", to legitimize a given social order.

Bourdieu-insight.jpeg

By ignoring the subtler, non-factual roles of information, and its "symbolic power", we have ignored the possibility to turn information into an instrument of our liberation. And to take conscious control over the production of culture. And to use both culture and information as vehicles for our true evolutionary tasks—such as improving "human quality"; and the pursuit of societal and environmental wholeness.

As it turned out, information, and culture, and "reality construction", only changed hands, from one power structure (the kings and the clergy) to the next (the corporations and the media).

It may appear as bold to say that 'Galilei is held in house arrest' (the due evolution of knowledge is held in check) by the very institution that was created to continue his legacy. But not if we observe that the academia in our society has acquired the role that the Church had in Galilei's time—the role of the "universal theory" provider.

When resubmitting to the academia the proposal that Jantsch, Engelbart and others made a half-century ago, to help our society change the relationship we have with information, we are doing that (also) on the academia's own terrain—namely on fundamental grounds. We carefully show that such a step follows as the next step in academia's own evolution; because the knowledge of knowledge we own demands that.

To make our appeal unambiguous and clear, we defined academia as "institutionalized academic tradition". And we pointed to the trials and tribulations of Socrates (as progenitor of Academia) and Galilei (as progenitor of science) to highlight that the role of the academic tradition has always been to use knowledge of knowledge to counter the "knowledge" created by the power structure, and allow the homo sapiens to continue his evolution.

Has the contemporary academia preserved enough of that original spirit to once again perform that role?

Narrow frame

We reach the narrow frame insight when we look at the way in which the homo sapiens goes about exploring "the reality" in order to comprehend it and handle it. We again see that a patchwork of popular habits and myths emerged when our 19th century ancestors attempted to adapt the "scientific worldview", as it was then, to the all-important task of recreating the daily life and culture. Simple causality—which led to stunning successes in developing science and technology—led to disasters when it was applied to culture, where it gave us "instrumental" thinking or "adiaphorization", as Bauman called it, which eliminated whatever in culture could not be comprehended in that way (notably ethics and development of "human quality", and religious and other mores and rituals on which it depended); and created the contemporary power structures

Heisenberg–frame.jpeg

We adopted and adapted this keyword from Werner Heisenberg, who observed that the "narrow and rigid frame" of concepts and ideas that the general culture adopted from the 19th century science was damaging to culture; and that the experience of 20th century's physics constituted a scientific disproof of the narrow frame.

Beck-frame.jpeg

In the social sciences, similarly, it was understood that the concepts we've inherited from the past won't allow us to comprehend our new realities. "Max Weber’s ‘iron cage’ – in which he thought humanity was condemned to live for the foreseeable future," Ulrich Beck continued the above observation, "is to me a prison of categories and basic assumptions of classical social, cultural and political sciences.”

But "the tie between information and action" having been severed—none of this has so far affected the way the contemporary homo sapiens looks at his "reality" and trying to comprehend it.

Narrow frame

Another way to look at the 'movement' of our metaphorical 'bus' is to perceive it as a result of our consumer and lifestyle choices. And on a deeper level—of our values. This way is even more closely related to the "human quality", and to culture and its possible revival.

Here we see that the narrow frame—the way of looking at the world that our general culture adopted willy-nilly from the 19th century science—put convenience as value into 'the driver's seat'. This way of making choices approximates both Newtonian causality (we look for "instant reward") and Darwinian theory of evolution (we put "our own" interests above other concerns, and consider egotism as "natural").

When we, however, use the holoscope to 'illuminate the way' (when we federate relevant insights from scientific and cultural traditions, to see how our choices and our way of making them influences our condition in the long run), then again "a way to change course" is readily seen.

LaoTzu-vision.jpeg

We see, namely, that convenience is a paradoxical and deceptive value, whose pursuit leaves as a rule less whole. In its shadow, immense opportunities for improving our condition have remain ignored.

A spectrum of technical discoveries are combined together, emanating from a broad variety of cultural traditions, contemporary therapeutic movements and techniques, and scientific results, amounting to a stunning realization that there is a radically better way to be human than what we have experienced, and what we as culture are aware of. When they are brought together, the familiar traditions such as our religions, and the less familiar ones that are now reaching our culture from the Orient, appear to us in a completely new light, and acquire a different meaning. Happiness (or wholeness or whatever may reasonably be the end destination of our pursuits) is not where we tend to look for it! Wholeness does exist; and it does feel incomparably better than what the deception of convenience would allow us to believe. But the way to it is paradoxical, and needs to be illuminated by suitable information.

Huxley-vision.jpeg

Most interestingly, we readily see that our quest within, for personal wholeness, is perfectly confluent with our quest without, for the wholeness of our systems, and our society. This new line of inquiry allows us to see that overcoming egocentricity (the value that now so tightly binds us to power structure, and prevents us from self-organizing to overcome it) is what also directly obstructs our pursuit of wholeness.

Lao Tzu (often considered as the progenitor of Taoism) appears in holotopia as an icon for using knowledge to understand "the way" to wholeness ("tao" literally means "way"). He is often pictured as riding a bull, which signifies his tamed ego.

These problems do have solutions

We turn each of mentioned five issues into insights, by showing—by sharing examples from our prototype portfolio—that it can be resolved, by 'connecting the dots' or combining already published ideas.

  • The power structure issue is resolved by extending innovation to include systems; the Knowledge Federation transdiscipline is shown to be an institutional infrastructure capable of federating academic insights into concrete systemic solutions, and we give example applications to designing the corporate infrastructure, education, and The Game-Changing Game by which young people are empowered to "craft their future", by co-creating the systems in which they live and work
  • The collective mind issue is resolved by developing systemic innovation in knowledge work; we show examples where the collective mind approach to IT systems has been applied to public informing and academic research, and to the way in which they interoperate
  • The socialized reality issue is resolved in an academically rigorous way through consistent use of truth by convention; we show how to "change the relationship we have with information" by stating the new relationship as a convention (and creating is technically called design epistemology)
  • The narrow frame issue is resolved by developing a general-purpose methodology on design epistemology as foundation; this methodology provides an academically coherent way to create information about any theme of choice, and on a freely chosen level of generality or detail
  • The convenience paradox issue is resolved by applying the methodology to illuminate the pivotal issue of values, and the way we "pursue happiness"; the results empower us to depart from the values imposed on us by the power structure, through socialization, and to engage in "guided evolution of society" by recreating the power structure

The solutions compose a paradigm

The five issues, and their solutions, are closely co-dependent; the key to resolving them is the relationship we have with information (the epistemology by which the proposed paradigm is defined).

  • The power structure issue cannot be resolved (we cannot begin "guided evolution of society", as Bela H. Banathy called the new evolutionary course that is emerging) without resolving the collective mind issue (by creating a knowledge-work infrastructure that provides "evolutionary guidance")
  • The resolution of the collective mind issue requires that we resolve the socialized reality issue (that instead of reifying our present institutions or systems, and the way in which we look at the world, we consider them as functional elements in a larger whole)
  • The resolution of the socialized reality issue follows from intrinsic considerations—from the reported anomalies, and published epistemological insights (Willard Van Orman Quine identified the transition to truth by convention as a sign of maturing that has manifested itself in the evolution of every science)
  • The resolution of the narrow frame issue, by developing a general-purpose methodology, is made possible by just mentioned epistemological innovation
  • The resolution of the convenience paradox issue is made possible by federating knowledge from the world traditions, by using the mentioned methodology
  • The power structure issue can only be resolved when we the people find strength to overcome self-serving, narrowly conceived values, and collaborate and self-organize to create radically better systems in which we live and work


We adapted the keyword paradigm from Thomas Kuhn, and define it as

  • a new way of conceiving a domain of interest
  • which resolves the reported anomalies
  • and opens up a new frontier to research
The five insights complete our proposal as a paradigm proposal. Not in any traditional domain of science, where paradigm proposals are relatively common, but in our handling of information or knowledge work at large.

The new paradigm enables a cultural revival

The five insights were deliberately chosen to represent the main five aspects of the sweeping cultural and social change that marked the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. They show how sweeping improvements in our condition can once again be achieved, by resolving the large anomalies they are pointing to.

  • The power structure insight shows how dramatic improvements in efficiency and effectiveness of human work can be made, similar to the ones that resulted from the Industrial Revolution
  • The collective mind insights points to the possibility of a revolution in communication, similar to the one that the invention of the printing press made possible
  • The socialized reality insight points to a possible revolution in our very relationship with information and knowledge, similar to the Enlightenment
  • The narrow frame insight points to a revolution in our understanding of our everyday realities, similar to the revolution that science made possible in our understanding of natural phenomena
  • The convenience paradox insight points to a general "cultural revival", analogous to the Renaissance

Together, the five insights complete the first half of our response to Aurelio Peccei's call to action—where we showed that the holoscope can illuminate the way in the way in which he deemed necessary.

The second half will consist in implementing the "change of course" in practical reality.


A strategy

We will not "solve our problems"

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 our whole 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."

Despite the holotopia's optimistic tone, we do not assume that. Of course the huge problem now confronting us can be solved, if we take the critical factor—the "human quality", or in other words us—out from the equation. But a solution that excludes us, humans, can hardly be considered a solution.

Mead.jpg
Margaret Mead


There is a catharsis that needs to come to us from the depth of our problems. A sobering up. That must be our first step. It may well be too late to bring our civilization back to a viable course. We may well be too addicted to our corporate profit lates, our next academic conference, our Facebook identity, our TV news, "ontological security" and "the world that has been pulled over our eyes to blind us from the truth", to wake up and face our new realities before it's too late.

We take a deep dive into the depth of our problems. But we don't dwell there! Instead, we look at the other side of the same coin. We look up—at the huge opportunities now confronting us, the opportunities for creative change our situation is calling for.

This does not mean that we are denying or abandoning the problems. It only means that we are taking them into a context where they can be solved—and can be solved in a natural and easy way.

Ironically perhaps, our problems might only be solved when we no longer see them as problems—but as mere symptoms of deeper, structural problems, which can be solved.

And whose solutions bring us far more than—solutions to problems!

We will "change the world"

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."

And she 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."

As a cultural anthropologist, Mead left us this concrete advice: "(W)e 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."

As we have seen—and as we shall seen in lavish amounts during this very brief holotopia presentation—the "single gifted individuals" have already gave us their gifts. But we have not yet received them! A different way of being together, and acting, has to be born among us.

That is the core of the holotopia strategy.

Armed by a clear view of our situation on the one side, and the holotopia's rule of thumb or design epistemology on the other, we engage in change as a co-creative strategy game. Resolutely, we create among us a transformative space, which includes a transformative way in which we are together. And we engage in that way in the larger-than-life space of creative opportunities, which we have here only began to describe.

Our call to action

Our call to action is, simply, to

consider holotopia as "our" project
where "our" includes you as well.

It is that simple act—of seeing ourselves as part of a larger whole, that changes the world.

We do not need to wait for "the huge problems now confronting us" to be solved. In the Holotopia project, we are already living in a new culture.


The five insights, and the ten direct relationships between them, provide us reference—in the context of which some of the age-old challenges are understood and handled in entirely new ways.

How to put an end to war

Consider, for instance, this age-old question: "How to put an end to war?" So far our progress on this all-important frontier has largely been confined to palliative measures; and ignored those far more interesting curative ones. What would it take to really put an end to war, once and for all?

When this question is considered in the context of two direction-changing insights, power structure and socialized reality, we become ready to see the whole compendium of questions related to justice, power and freedom in a completely new way. We then realize in what way exactly, throughout history, we have been coerced, largely through cultural means, to serve renegade power, in the truest sense our enemy, by engaging our sense of duty, heroism, honor and other values and traits that constitute "human quality". We then become ready to redeem the best sides of ourselves from the power structure, and apply them toward true betterment of our condition.

Religion beyond belief

Or think about religion—which has in traditional societies served to bind each person with "human quality", and the people together into a culture or a society. But which is in modern times all too often associated with dogmatic beliefs, and inter-cultural conflicts.

When religion is, however, considered in the context provided by socialized reality and convenience paradox, a whole new possibility emerges—where religion no longer is an instrument of socialization—but of liberation; and as an essential way to cultivate our personal and communal wholeness.

A natural strategy for remedying religion-related dogmatic beliefs and inter-cultural conflicts emerges—to evolve religion further!

The ten themes cover the holotopia

Of course any theme can be placed into the context of the five insights, and end up being seen and handled radically differently. To prime these eagerly sought-for conversations, we provided a selection of ten themes (related to the future of education, business, science, democracy, art, happiness...) that—together with the five insights—cover the space of holotopia in sufficient detail to make it transparent and tangible.


The dialogs

The dialog is an art form

We make conversation themes alive through dialogs.

We turn conversations into artistic and media-enabled events (see the Earth Sharing prototype below).

The dialog is an attitude

The dialog is an integral part of the holoscope. Its role will be understood if we consider the human inclination to hold onto a certain way of seeing things, and call it "reality". And how much this inclination has been misused by various social groups to bind us to themselves, and more recently by various modern power structures. (Think, for instance, about the animosity between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland, or between Sunni and Shia Muslims in the Middle East.)

The attitude of the dialog may be understood as an antidote.

The dialog is an age-old tradition

The dialogues of Socrates marked the very inception of the academic tradition. More recently, David Bohm gave the evolution of the dialogue a new and transformative direction. Bohm's dialogues are a form of collective therapy. Instead of arguing their points, the participants practice "proprioception" (mindfully observe their reactions), so that they may ultimately listen without judging, and co-create a space where new and transformative ideas can emerge.

We built on this tradition and developed a collection of prototypes—which holotopia will use as construction material, and build further.


We employ contemporary media

The use of contemporary media opens up a whole new chapter, or dimension, in the story of the dialog.

Through suitable use of the camera, the dialog can be turned into a mirror—mirroring our dysfunctional communication habits; our turf strifes.

By using Debategraph and other "dialog mapping" online tools, the dialog can be turned into a global process of co-creation of meaning.

The dialog as spectacle

The holotopia dialogs will have the nature of spectacles—not the kind of spectacles fabricated by the media, but real ones. To the media spectacles, they present a real and transformative alternative.

The dialogs we initiate are a re-creation of the conventional "reality shows"—which show the contemporary reality in ways that need to be shown. The relevance is on an entirely different scale. And the excitement and actuality are of course larger! We engage the "opinion leaders" to contribute their insights to the cause.

When successful, the result is most timely and informative: We are witnessing the changing of our understanding and handling of a core issue.

When unsuccessful, the result is most timely and informative in a different way: We are witnessing our resistances and our blind spots, our clinging to the obsolete forms of thought.

Occasionally we publish books about those themes, based on our dialogs, and to begin new ones.

The dialog is an instrument of change

This point cannot be overemphasized: Our primary goal is not to warn, inform, propose a new way to look at the world—but to change our collective mind. Physically. The dialog is the medium for that change.

We organize public dialogs about the five insights, and other themes related to change, in order to make change.

Here the medium in the truest sense is the message: By developing dialogs, we re-create our collective mind—from something that only receives, which is dazzled by the media... to something that is capable of weaving together academic and other insights, and by engaging the best of our "collective intelligence" in seeing what needs to be done. And in inciting, planning and coordinating action.

In the holotopia scheme of things everything is a prototype. The prototypes are not final results of our efforts, they are a means to an end—which is to rebuild the public sphere; to reconfigure our collective mind. The role of the prototypes is to prime this process.

The elephant

Elephant.jpg
Elephant ideogram

The elephant

Imagine the 20th century's visionary thinkers as those proverbial blind-folded men touching an elephant. We hear them talk about things like "a fan", "a water hose" and "a tree trunk". But they don't make sense, and we ignore them.

Everything changes when we realize that they are really talking about the ear, the trunk and the leg of an imposingly large exotic animal, which nobody has yet had a chance to see—a whole new order of things, or cultural and social paradigm!

A spectacle

The effect of the five insights is to orchestrate this act of 'connecting the dots'—so that the spectacular event we are part of, this exotic 'animal', the new 'destination' toward which we will now "change course" becomes clearly visible.

A side effect is that the academic results once again become interesting and relevant. In this newly created context, they acquire a whole new meaning; and agency!

Post-post-structuralism

The structuralists undertook to bring rigor to the study of cultural artifacts. The post-structuralists "deconstructed" their efforts, by observing that there is no such thing as "real meaning"; and that the meaning of cultural artifacts is open to interpretation.

This evolution may be taken a step further. What interests us is not what, for instance, Bourdieu "really saw" and wanted to communicate. We acknowledge (with the post-structuralists), that even Bourdieu would not be able to tell us that, if he were still around. We acknowledge, however, that Bourdieu saw something that invited a different interpretation and way of thinking than what was common; and did what he could to explain it within the old paradigm. Hence we give the study of cultural artifacts not only a sense of rigor, but also a new degree of relevance—by considering them as signs on the road, pointing to an emerging paradigm

A parable

While the view of the elephant is composed of a large number of stories, one of them—the story of Doug Engelbart—is epigrammatic. It is not only a spectacular story—how the Silicon Valley failed to understand or even hear its "giant in residence", even after having recognized him as that; it is also a parable pointing to many of the elements we want to highlight by telling these stories—not least the social psychology and dynamics that 'hold Galilei in house arrest'.

This story also inspired us to use this metaphor: Engelbart saw 'the elephant' already in 1951—and spent a six decades-long career to show him to us. And yet he passed away with only a meager (computer) mouse in his hand (to his credit)!


The holoscope

Seeing things whole

Peccei concluded his analysis in "One Hundred Pages for the Future":

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.

In the context of Holotopia, we refer to knowledge federation by its pseudonym holoscope, to highlight one of its distinguishing characteristics—it helps us see things whole.

Different from the sciences that have been "zooming in" (toward finer technical details); and promoting a fixed way of looking at the world (a domain of interest, a terminology and a set of methods being what defines a scientific discipline); and the informing media's focus on specific spectacular events, the holoscope allows us to chose our scope –"what is being looked at and how".


Stories

We bring together stories (elsewhere called vignettes)—which share the core insights of leading contemporary thinkers. We tell their stories.

They become 'dots' to connect in our dialogs.

They also show what obstructed our evolution (the emergence of holotopia).

Ideograms

Art meets science

Placeholder. The point is enormous—federation of insights, connecting the dots, not only or even primarily results in rational insights. It results in implicit information; we are undoing our socialization!

H side.png
A paper model of a sculpture, re-imaging the five insights and their relationships.

The ideograms condense lots of insights into a simple image, ready to be grasped.


As the above image may suggest, the pentagram—as the basic icon or 'logo' of holotopia—lends itself to a myriad re-creations. We let the above image suggest that a multiplicity of ideas can be condensed to a simple image (the pentagram); and how this image can be expanded into a multiplicity of artistic creations.

Keywords

The Renaissance, and also science, brought along a whole new way of speaking—and hence a new way to look at the world. With each of the five insights we introduce a collection of keywords, in terms of which we come to understand the core issues in new ways.

The keywords will also allow us to propose solutions to the anomalies that the five insights bring forth.

Prototypes

Information has agency only when it has a way to impact our actual physical reality. A goal of the Holotopia project is to co-create prototypes—new elements of our new reality. We share the prototypes we've already developed, to put the ball in play.



Art and new media

Holotopia is an art project

The Holotopia is an art project. We are reminded of Michelangelo painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, and in the heart of the old world order planting the seeds of the new one.

Duchamp's (attempted) exhibition of a urinal challenged what art may be, and contributed to the legacy that the modern art was built on. Now our conditions demand that we deconstruct the deconstruction—and begin to construct anew.

What will the art associated with the next Renaissance be like? We offer holotopia as a creative space where the new art can emerge.


Art as production of space

KunsthallDialog01.jpg
A snapshot of Holotopia's pilot project in Kunsthall 3.14, Bergen.

Henri Lefebvre summarized the most vital of Karl Marx's objections to capitalism, by observing that capital (machines, tools, materials...) or "investments" are products of past work, and hence represent "dead labour". That in this way past activity "crystalyzes, as it were, and becomes a precondition for new activity." And that under capitalism, "what is dead takes hold of what is alive"

Lefebvre proposes to turn this relationship upon its head. "But how could what is alive lay hold of what is dead? The answer is: through the production of space, whereby living labour can produce something that is no longer a thing, nor simply a set of tools, nor simply a commodity.

As the above image may suggest, the holotopia artists still produce art objects; but they are used as pieces in a larger whole— which is a space where transformation happens. A space where the creativity of the artist can cross-fertilize with the insights of the scientist, to co-create a new reality that none of them can create on her own. Imagine it as a space, akin to a new continent or a "new world" that's just been discovered—which combines physical and virtual spaces, suitably interconnected.