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 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

"The arguments posed in the preceding pages", Peccei summarized his discussion in One Hundred Pages for the Future, "point out several things, of which one of the most important is that our generations seem to have lost the sense of the whole.

But to make things whole, we must be able to see them 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 in new ways

Holoscope ideogram <p>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 is in our technical language called scope, is made possible on rigorously academic grounds.

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.

The art of using the holoscope will to a large degree consist in finding the right choice of the way of looking.

This adds to our work with information and knowledge a whole new 'dimension' or "degree of freedom"; and to our work with contemporary issues as well. Instead of perceiving the same old issues as "problems" and trying to "solve them", we look for ways to perceive a situation so that it can be resolved.

Five insights

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 insights. We could have called them "five issues", because each of them is a structural anomaly in our 'cup', or 'bus', of which our "problems" are mere consequences or symptoms. What turns them into "insights" is that, as we shall see, they not only can be resolved—but their resolution naturally leads to improvements that are far larger than the problems they create.

From the five insights, the holotopia vision readily follows.

In the spirit of the holoscope, we here summarize each of them as a big picture—and provide the supporting evidence and arguments in the corresponding detailed modules.

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 apply the holoscope to illuminate the way our civilization or 'bus' has been following in its evolution.

An easy observation will give us a head start: We use competition and "survival of the fittest" to find and follow the way, not information. The popular belief that "free competition" serves us just perfectly makes our "democracies" elect the "leaders" who represent that view. But is the view correct?

Genuine revolutions often result from a new way in which the perennial issues of power and freedom are perceived. We offer the power structure insight as a means to that end. Think of the power structure concept (or way of looking or scope) as a new way to conceive of the intuitive notion of a "power holder", who 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 more generally, as the systems in which we live and work, which we'll here simply call systems. Notice that those systems have an immense power—first of all over us, because we have to adopt them and adapt to them to be able to live and work. And then also the power over our environment, because by organizing us and using us in certain specific ways, they determine what the effects of our work will be. Whether the effects will be problems, or solutions.

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

Evidence, circumstantial and theoretical, shows that our systems waste a lion's share of our resources; that they are causing our problems; and that they generally organize us so that our best efforts and intentions yield results that are outright cruel and evil. The reason for this is obvious: the evolution of "the survival of the fittest" will tend to favor the systems of predatory nature. In the documentary "The Corporation" (created by Joel Bakan as law professor, in an effort to federate an insight he considered essential), the footage of the shark is shown, while the narrator explains that just as the shark evolved to be a perfect predator, the corporation (our most powerful institution) has evolved to be a perfect "externalization" mechanism, optimized for maximizing profits and "externalizing" costs (passing them onto the people, and the environment). But, we show, the nature of the systems that win in competition has always been the same, only their form keeps changing.

So why don't we treat systems 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, are most interesting; they will be a recurring theme in holotopia.

One of them we have already seen, at the very beginning when we showed you the Modernity ideogram: We have not yet developed the habit of seeing things whole. When we look in our conventional ways, such uncanny errors as 'using candles as headlights' can develop without us noticing.

A bit subtler reason, why we tend to ignore the possibility of adapting systems to their systemic purposes, is they serve an entirely different purpose—they provide structure to our various turf strifes and power battles. Within a system, they lend us "objective" criteria for competing for positions; and across systems, they improve our chances to prevail.

The most interesting reason, however, is that the systems have the power to socialize us in certain specific ways, as it may suit their needs. That they are capable of adapting to their needs both our culture (values, beliefs, the way we see the world) and our "human quality". The power structures co-opt our sense of duty, of commitment, and even of heroism and honor—and make us apply them as it serves them, not us. And they give us a way to see the world that keeps us from even seeing the difference.

The net result is that the power structures are the modernity's unrecognized evil.

When we recognize them as our "enemy"—our very idea of politics changes entirely. The power structure is us! The old idea of politics as "us against them" turns into all of us against the power structure.

The fact that we will not "solve our problems" unless we learn to adapt our systems to their contemporary systemic purposes has, of course, not remained unnoticed.

In 1948, in his seminal Cybernetics, Norbert Wiener presented an argument why "free competition" cannot be trusted in the role of the guidance. Cybernetics was envisioned as a transdisciplinary field that will provide the required know-how for understanding and changing systems.

The very first step The Club of Rome's founders did after its inception, in 1968, was to gather a team of experts and develop a suitable methodology. They gave the holotopia's motto, to make things whole, the technical name "systemic innovation", and we adopted systemic innovation as one of our keywords.

Collective mind

If our key evolutionary task is to learn make things whole at the level of systems—where i.e. with what system 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 suited to that purpose.

This too has, of course, not remained unnoticed. The full title of the mentioned Norbert Wiener's book was "Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine". The main message that (should have) reached us from cybernetics is that in order to have control (Wiener preferred the technical term "homeostasis", which may be interpreted within our metaphor as "viable direction", and in contemporary political language as "sustainability"), we must have suitable communication. Communication, Wiener observed, is what turns humans and animals into "systems", by connecting them together. Wiener too observed that the tie between information and action (or between communication and control) had been severed.

To make that point, Wiener cited a still earlier work, Vannevar Bush's 1945 article "As We May Think", where Bush issued the call to action to the scientists, to make the task of revising the system by which they handle their knowledge their next highest priority (the World War Two having just been won).

Why hasn't this been done yet?

"As long as a paradox is treated as a problem, it can never be dissolved," observed David Bohm. The reason is, of course, that the tie between information and action has been severed!

The evidence that is part of the holotopia portfolio shows that academic publishing influences the public opinion and policy only exceptionally; and as a rule—not at all!

To see the best ideas of our best minds unable to benefit our society—even when they are pointing to this tendency, and urging the society to take action—may feel disheartening, especially to an academic researcher. But not when one sees the vast creative frontier that is opening up—where we are invited to, even compelled to, recreate the very systems by which we pursue our profession; just as the founding father of academia and of science did, centuries ago.

Optimism turns into enthusiasm when we realize that characteristic parts of contemporary information technology have been created to enable a breakthrough on this frontier—by Doug Engelbart and his SRI team; and demonstrated in their famous 1968 demo. When each of us are connected to a digital device through an interactive interface, and when those devices are connected together into a network, we are in effect equipped with a 'nervous system', which allows us to think and create together, as cells in a human organism do.

When, however, that 'nervous system' is used to only implement the processes and systems that have evolved through the centuries of use of the printing press, which only broadcast data—the consequences for our collective mind are disastrous.

We let the above observation by Anthony Giddens point to the cultural consequences this has had. In an increasingly complex reality, dazzled by the overflow of data, while knowing that most of what's relevant we will never see, we are compelled to ignore the systems in which we live and work, and resort to "ontological security"; learn a profession, and pursue in it a career competitively.

But this, of course, is what makes us part of the power structure.

Instead of liberating us from the power structure, our information, and information technology, have conspired to bind us to it

Socialized reality

Our next question is who, that is what institution, will guide us through the next urgent task on our evolutionary agenda—developing systemic innovation in knowledge work?

Both 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 Vannevar Bush and Norbert Wiener before them, and Neil Postman and numerous others later on.

Why? Isn't restoring agency to information and power to knowledge a task worthy enough of academic attention?

It is tempting to conclude, simply, that the academia's evolution followed the general trend; that the academic disciplines evolved as power structures; that their real function is to provide the insiders clear, rational rules for competing for promotions, and to keep the outsiders outside. But to be able to see solutions, one would need to look at deeper 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 (let's call it that) "right" knowledge. When Socrates engaged people in dialogs, his goal was not to correct their handling of practical matters, but to question their very way of "knowing". And that was, of course, also what Galilei was doing to his contemporaries, and the reason why he was in house arrest. And yet the house arrest was unable to prevent this new way of knowing, whose time had come, to spread from astrophysics where it originated, and ignite a comprehensive change.

We asked: "Could a similar advent be in store for us today?"

The socialized reality insight is fundamental; it shows why the answer to this question is affirmative.

We show that a fundamental error was made during our modernization—whose consequences cannot be overrated. This error was subsequently detected and reported, but it has not been corrected yet.

During the Enlightenment, when Adam and Moses as cultural heroes and forefathers were gradually replaced by Darwin and Newton, an "official narrative" emerged that the prupose of information, and hence of our pursuit of knowledge, is to give us an "objectively true representation of reality". The traditions and the Bible got it all wrong; but science corrected their errors.

A self-image for us as the "homo sapiens" developed as part of this narrative, according to which we, humans are rational decision makers, whom nature has endowed with the capability to know "the reality" correctly. Given correct data, the "objective facts" about the world, our rational faculties will suffice to guide us to rational choices, and subdue the natural forces to our own interests.

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

It is beyond our power to 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; it's what keeps the society together, and enables it to function.

"Reality" turned out to be (came to be perceived as, in the light of 20th century science and philosophy) 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.

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 production of culture.

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).

Narrow frame

The narrow frame insight is what the Modernity ideogram is pointing at: The way we look at the world, which we've largely inherited from a completely different society where it may have served us well, has become too narrow to provide us the vision we now must have.

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 creating basic information—which we need in order to understand and handle the practical world, and make basic lifestyle and other choices. Simple causality, which in science and technology led to astounding successes (but had to be disown and transcend, for science to evolve further)—caused disasters when it was applied to culture. It made our ancestors abandon whatever support for ethics and "human development" they had, notably the traditional mores and the religion; and develoop "instrumental" or (as Bauman called it) "adiaphorized" thinking—which binds them to power structure.

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.

In the social sciences, similarly, it was understood that our inherited ways of looking prevent us from comprehending 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 as yet led to practical change.

Convenience paradox

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 or the "human quality".

Already a superficial glance will allow us to 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 Darwin's theory of evolution (we serve "our own interests").

The convenience paradox insight is that convenience is a paradoxical and deceptive value, whose pursuit leaves as a rule less whole. And that important, however is that in its shadow, immense opportunities for improving our condition remained ignored. The point here is to show that there is a radically better human experience, than what our culture has allowed us to experience. Wholeness does exist; and it does feel incomparably better than what the deception of convenience, amplified by advertising, might allow us to believe. But the way to it is paradoxical, and needs to be illuminated by suitable information.

The way to happiness, or wholeness or whatever may reasonably be the final destination of our life's pursuits—must be illuminated by suitable information.

this insight, of course, restores knowledge, including "the wisdom of the traditions", to their proper role.

In the light of that knowledge, a most interesting consequence of the convenience paradox emerges in the light of day—that overcoming egocentricity (the value that binds us to power structure) also directly obstructs our pursuit of wholeness. And hence that in an informed society, our inner quest for personal wholeness, is perfectly confluent with our outer quest for systemic 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 issues can be resolved

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

• The power structure issue is resolved by developing systemic innovation, as Jantsch and his colleagues observed; the Knowledge Federation transdiscipline is conceived as an institutional infrastructure capable of federating academic and other insights into concrete systemic solutions, through creation of prototypes; example prototypes are in pivotal domains including corporate organization, health and education; and of course in science, public informing and other areas that constitute the 'headlights'
• The collective mind issue is resolved by developing systemic innovation in knowledge work; knowledge federation as an activity or process can be understood as 'collective thinking' or more accurately as a correct functioning of a 'collective mind'; and as a principle of operation of the socio-technical 'lightbulb'
• The socialized reality issue is resolved through consistent use of truth by convention; a prototype called design epistemology shows how a rigorous foundation for social creation of truth and meaning, which empowers us to "change the relationship we have with information", can be developed in that way
• The narrow frame issue is resolved by developing a general-purpose methodology, based on design epistemology as foundation; a prototype called polyscopy offers an academically coherent way to create information about any theme of choice, and on a freely chosen level of generality or detail, by combining insights from disparate academic and cultural traditions
• The convenience paradox issue is resolved by applying polyscopy to illuminate the pivotal issue of values; a side effect is to show how the values can be restored, and hence also culture as pursuit of "human quality"

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 new paradigm enables a cultural revival

The five insights were deliberately chosen to represent the main five aspects of the cultural and social change that marked the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. They show how similar 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 a revolution in communication, similar to the one that the invention of the printing press made possible
• The socialized reality insight points to a revolution in our very relationship with information and knowledge, similar to the one that marked 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 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 the problems we are facing can be solved.

Margaret Mead

Hear Dennis Meadows (the leader of the team that produced The Club of Rome's seminal 1972 report Limits to Growth) diagnose, based on 44 years of experience on this frontier, that our pursuit of "sustainability" falls short of avoiding the "predicament" they were warning us about back then:

"Will the current ideas about "green industry", and "qualitative growth", avoid collapse? No possibility. Absolutely no possibility of that. (...) Globally, we are something like sixty or seventy percent above sustainable levels."

Yes, we've wasted a precious half-century pursuing the neoliberal dream (hear Ronald Reagan set the tone for it, in a most charming tone, in the role of "the leader of the free world"). But we must forgive our political leaders for leading us into an abyss; they didn't know what they were doing. To be successful in politics, they had to genuinely believe what the power structure made them believe.

Just as we must forgive our academic leaders for not leading us to a transformation of our knowledge work. To be successful in academia, they had to either "publish, or perish".

We do not claim our problems can be solved. But neither do we deny them.

There is a sense of sobering up, of a catharsis, that needs to reach us from the depth of our problems. That must be our very first step.

We take a deep dive into the depth of our problems. But we do not dwell there.

We will begin "a great cultural revival"

Ironically, our problems can only be solved when we no longer see them as problems—but as symptoms of much deeper, structural or systemic defects, which can and must be corrected to continue our evolution, or "progress", irrespective of problems.

And most interestingly, our evolution, or "progress", can and must take a completely new—cultural—direction and focus. <p>Hear Meadows say, in the same interview:

"Will it be possible, here in Germany, to continue this level of energy consumption, and this degree of material welfare? Absolutely not. Not in the United States, not in other countries either. Could you change your cultural and your social norms, in a way that gave attractive future? Yes, you could."

Margaret Mead encouraged us, with her best known motto:

"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 also 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."

It is that "creating" that the Holotopia project is about. We set it up as a research lab, for resolutely working on that goal. We create a transformative 'snowball', with the material of our own bodies, and we let it roll.

"(W)e take the position that the unit of cultural evolution is neither the single gifted individual nor the society as a whole", Mead wrote, "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 will see, the "single gifted individuals" have already offered us their gifts, already a half-century ago. But their insights failed to incite the kind of self-organization and action that would enable them to make a difference.

Here the holotopia's "rule of thumb", to "make things whole", which is really an ethical stance, plays a central role. While we are creating a small 'snowball' and letting it roll, the cohesive force that holds it together is of a paramount importance. We are not developing this project to further our careers; nor to earn some money, or get a grant. We are doing that because it's beautiful. And because it's what we need to give to our next generation.

We are developing the holotopia as (what Gandhi would have called) our "experiments with truth".

Our mission

By mission we mean the practical changes we undertake to achieve, to implement our strategy and pursue our vision.

Our mission is to change the relationship we have with information.

So that information will no longer be controlled by power structure, but be an instrument of our liberation; and our cultural re-evolution.

Don't be deceived by the apparent modesty of this mission, compared to the size of our vision. "In all humility",

the creative space this mission opens up to is unique is human history.

Before we begin

Before we share the "tactical assets" we've put together to prime the Holotopia project, a couple of notes are in order to explain how exactly we want them to be understood and received.

A 'cardboard model'

While each of these "assets" is created, to the best of our ability, to serve as a lasting template or an actual solution, we do not need to make that claim, and we are not making it. Everything here is just prototypes. Which means models, each made to serve as a "proof of concept", to be experimented with and indefinitely improved.

Think of what's presented here as a cardboard model of a city.

It includes a 'school', and a 'hospital', a 'main square' and 'residential areas'. The model is complete enough for us to see that this 'city' will be a wonderful place to be in; and to begin building. But as we build—everything can change!

This will all make sense when you consider that the core of our proposal is not to build a city; it is to develop 'architecture'!

A 'business plan'

No, we are not doing this to start a business, or to make money. But a 'business plan' is still a useful metaphor, because we do "mean business". The purpose of the Holotopia project is to make a difference. In the social and economic reality we are living in.

These "tactical assets" can then also be read as points in a business plan—which point to the realistic likelihood of it all to achieve its goals.

The mirror

The mirror metaphor has several interpretations, all of which revolve around the central theme of spistemology

A 'magical' way out

That there is an unexpected, seemingly magical way into a new cultural and social reality is really good news. But is it realistic?

We here carefully develop the analogy with Galilei's time, when a new epistemology was ready to change the world, but still kept in house arrest. All we need to do is to set it free.

The discovery of ourselves

The mirror symbolizes the ending of reification (when we see ourselves in the world, we realize that we are not above it and observing it "objectively"); and the beginning of accountability (we see the world in dire need for creative action; and we see our own role in it).

This insight extends into ending of the reification of our personal preferences, feelings, tastes... What we are able to feel, think, create... is determined, to an astounding degree, by the degree in which our "human quality" has been developed. And our ability to develop it depends in an overwhelming degree on the way in which our culture has been developed.

The academia's situation

The mirror symbolizes also the academia's situation, just as the bus with candle headlights symbolizes our civilization's situation. The point is that the hitherto development of the academic tradition brought us there, in front of the mirror.

An enormous liberation of our creative abilities results when we realize they must not be confined to traditional disciplinary pursuits and routines.

Especially important is the larger understanding of information that the self-reflection in front of the mirror brings us to; information is no longer only printed text; it includes any artifacts that embody human experience, refined by human ingenuity.

Five insights

They provide us a frame of reference, around which the city is built. They serve as foundation stones, or as 'five pillars' lifting the emerging construction up from the mundane reality, and making it stand out.

In our challenge to come through the sensationalist press and reach out to people, each of them is a sensation in its own right; but a real sensation, which merits our attention.

In our various artistic, research, media... projects—they provide us building material.

Ten themes

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 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!

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.

These titles will change

Art leads science

How the action began...

Seeing differently

Up and down

The vault

Precious space for reflection—where the stories are told, and insights begin to take shape.

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.

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.

Going online

Debategraph was not yet implemented. But David was there!