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

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

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?

By what methods, what social processes, and by whom would information be created? What new information formats would emerge, and supplement or replace the traditional books and articles? How would information technology be adapted and applied? What would public informing be like? And academic communication, and education?

The substance of our proposal is a complete prototype of knowledge federation, where initial answers to relevant questions are presented, and in part implemented in practice.

Our call to action is to institutionalize and develop knowledge federation as an academic field, and a real-life praxis (informed practice).

Our purpose is to restore agency to information, and power to knowledge.

A proof of concept application

The Club of Rome's assessment of the situation we are in, provided us with a benchmark challenge for putting 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 we are in a state of crisis that 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:

"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".

Could the change of 'headlights' we are proposing be "a way to change course"?

A vision

Holotopia is a vision of a possible future that emerges when proper light has been turned on.

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 adverse and contrasting realities, the word "utopia" acquired the negative meaning of an unrealizable fancy.

As the optimism regarding our future waned, 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.

The holotopia vision is made concrete in terms of five insights, as explained below.

A principle

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

The five insights point to a simple principle or rule of thumb—making things whole.

This principle is suggested by the holotopia's very name. And also 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 of systems; and we self-organize, and act, as it may best suit the wholeness of it all.

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

A method

"The arguments posed in the preceding pages", Peccei summarized 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."

To make things whole—we must be able to see them whole!

To highlight that the knowledge federation methodology described and implemented in the proposed prototype affords that very capability, to see things whole, in the context of the holotopia we refer to it by the pseudonym holoscope.

While the characteristics of the holoscope—the 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 of them must be made clear from the start.

Holoscope ideogram

To see things whole, we must look at all sides.

The holoscope distinguishes itself by allowing for multiple ways of looking at a theme or issue, which are called scopes. The scopes and the resulting views have similar meaning and role as projections do in technical drawing.

This modernization of our handling of information—distinguished by purposeful, free and informed creation of the ways in which we look at the world—has become necessary in our situation, suggests the bus with candle headlights metaphor. But it also presents a challenge to the reader—to bear in mind that the resulting views are not offered as "reality pictures", contending for that status with one another.

In the holoscope, the legitimacy and peaceful coexistence of multiple ways to look at a theme is axiomatic.

We shall continue to use the conventional language and say that X is Y—although it would be more correct to say that X can or must (also) be seen as Y. The views we offer are accompanied by an invitation to genuinely try to look at the theme at hand in a certain specific way; and to do that collaboratively, in a dialog.

To liberate our worldview from the 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 insights reached in 20th century 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.

A discovery of a new way of looking—which reveals a structural problem, and helps us reach a correct general assessment of an object of study or a situation (whether the 'cup' is 'whole' or 'broken') is a new kind of result that is made possible by the general-purpose science, which is modeled by the holoscope

To see more, we take recourse to the vision of others. The holoscope combines scientific and other insights to enable us to see what we ignored, to 'see the other side'. This allows us to detect structural defects ('cracks') in core elements of everyday reality—which when we see them in our habitual way ('in the light of a candle'), appear to us as just normal.

All elements in our proposal are deliberately left unfinished, rendered as a collection of prototypes. Think of them as composing a cardboard map of a city, and a construction site. By sharing them, we are not making a case for building a specific 'city'—but for 'architecture' as an academic field, and a real-life praxis.

Scope

What is wrong with our present "course"? In what ways does it need to be changed? What benefits will result?

Five Insights ideogram

We use the holoscope to illuminate five pivotal themes, which determine the "course":

• Innovation—the way we use our ability to create, and induce change
• Communication—the social process, enabled by technology, by which information is handled
• Epistemology—the fundamental assumptions we use to create truth and meaning, or "the relationship we have with information"
• Method—the way in which truth and meaning are constructed in everyday life, or "the way we look at the world, try to comprehend and handle it"
• Values—the way we "pursue happiness", which in the modern society directly determines the course

In each case, we see a structural defect, which led to perceived problems; a structural defect that can be remedied. And whose removal naturally leads to improvements that are well beyond the removal of symptoms.

The holotopia vision results.

From the five insights a sixth insight follows—that the more basic problem that underlies our problems is that "the tie between information and action has been severed". And that the key to solution, the "systemic leverage point" for "changing course" and continuing to evolve culturally and socially, in a new way, is the same as it was in Galilei's time: We must once again "change the relationship we have with information".

A case for our proposal is thereby also made.

In the spirit of the holoscope, we here only summarize each of the five insights—and provide evidence and details separately.

Power structure

Scope

What do we need to do, to become capable of "changing course"?

"Man has acquired such decisive power that his future depends essentially on how he will use it", observed Peccei. Imagine if some malevolent entity, perhaps an insane dictator, took control over that power.

The power structure insight shows that no dictator is needed.

Albeit in democracy, we are in that situation already.

While the nature of the power structure will become clear as we go along, imagine it, to begin with, as our institutions; or more accurately, as the systems in which we live and work (which we simply call systems).

Notice that systems have an immense power—over us, because we have to adapt to them to be able to live and work; and over our environment, because by organizing us and using us in a certain specific way, they decide what the effects of our work will be.

The power structure determines whether the effects of our efforts will be problems, or solutions.

Diagnosis

How suitable are the systems in which we live and work for their all-important role?

Evidence shows that they waste a lion's share of our resources. And that they either cause problems, or make us incapable of solving them.

The reason for this malady is readily found in the way in which systems evolve.

"Survival of the fittest" favors the systems that are predatory, not the ones that are useful.

This excerpt from Joel Bakan's documentary "The Corporation" (which Bakan as a law professor created to federate an insight he considered essential) explains how the most powerful institution on our planet evolved to be a perfect "externalizing machine" ("Externalizing" means maximizing profits by letting someone else bear the costs, notably the people and the environment), just as the shark evolved to be a perfect "killing machine". This scene from Sidney Pollack's 1969 film "They Shoot Horses, Don't They?" will illustrate how the power structure affects our own condition.

The systems provide a certain ecology, which in the long run shapes our values, and our "human quality". They have the power to socialize us in certain specific ways. "The business of business is business"—and if our business is to succeed in competition, we must act in a certain way. We can bend and comply—or get replaced. The effect on the system will be the same.

An overall result, Zygmunt Bauman diagnosed it, is that bad intentions are no longer needed for cruelty and evil to result. Through socialization, the power structure can co-opt our duty and commitment; and even our heroism and honor.

Bauman's insight that the concentration camp was only a special case, however extreme, of (what we are calling) the power structure, calls for careful contemplation: Even the concentration camp employees were only "doing their job"—in a system whose nature and purpose was beyond their ethical sense, and power to change.

While our ethical sensitivity is tuned to the power structures of the past, we are committing, in all innocence, the greatest massive crime in human history.

Remedy

The fact that we will not be able to "solve our problems" unless we learn how to update our systems has not remained unnoticed.

The very first step the founders of The Club of Rome did after its inception in 1968 was to convene a team of experts, in Bellagio, Italy, and develop a suitable methodology. They gave "making things whole" on the scale of socio-technical systems the name "systemic innovation"—and we adapted that as one of our keywords.

The work and the conclusion of this team was based on results in systems science—a transdisciplinary scientific effort, where natural and human systems are studied, in order to understand how the structure of a system, any system, drives the system's behavior.

In the year 2000, in "Guided Evolution of society" and in a distinctly holotopian tone, Béla H. Bánáthy summarized our generation's general challenge and opportunity, which the study of systems has revealed:

We are the first generation of our species that has the privilege, the opportunity and the burden of responsibility to engage in the process of our own evolution. We are indeed chosen people. We now have the knowledge available to us and we have the power of human and social potential that is required to initiate a new and historical social function: conscious evolution. But we can fulfill this function only if we develop evolutionary competence by evolutionary learning and acquire the will and determination to engage in conscious evolution. These two are core requirements, because what evolution did for us up to now we have to learn to do for ourselves by guiding our own evolution.

We have adopted from Bánáthy his elegant keyword the systems in which we live and work.

In 2010, Knowledge Federation began to self-organize to become able to make make further progress on that creative frontier. The procedure we developed is simple: We create a prototype of a system, and organize a transdisciplinary community and project around it, to update it continuously. This enables the insights reached in the participating disciplines to have real or systemic impact directly.

Our very first project of this kind, the Barcelona Innovation Ecosystem for Good Journalism in 2011, developed a prototype of a public informing that turns perceived problems (that people report directly, through citizen journalism) into systemic understanding of causes and recommendations for action (developed by involving academic and other domain experts, and having their insights made accessible by a communication design team).

The experience with this prototype revealed a pervasive issue we were not aware of: The senior domain experts we brought together to represent (in this case) journalism cannot change their own system. What they, however, can and need to do is empower their students (or junior colleagues, or entrepreneurs) to do that. A year later we created The Game-Changing Game as a generic way to do that—and as a "practical way to craft the future". We subsequently created The Club of Zagreb, as a necessary (according to this insight) update to The Club of Rome, in its all-important mission. The Holotopia project builds further on that work.

Our portfolio contains about fortyprototypes, each of which illustrates systemic innovation in a specific domain. Each prototype is composed by weaving together design patterns—problem-solution pairs, which are ready to be adapted to other design challenges and domains.

The Collaborology prototype, in education, will highlight this approach's advantages.

An education that prepares people for yesterday's professions, and only in a certain stage of life, is obviously an obstacle to systemic change. Collaborology implements an education that is in every sense flexible (self-guided, life-long...), and in an emerging area of interest (collaborative knowledge work, as enabled by new technology). By being collaboratively created itself (Collaborology is created and taught by a network of international experts, and offered to learners world-wide), the economies of scale result that dramatically reduce effort. This in addition provides a sustainable business model for developing and disseminating up-to-date knowledge in any domain of interest. By conceiving the course as a design project, where everyone collaborates on co-creating the learning resources, the students get a chance to exercise their "human quality". This in addition gives the students an essential role in the resulting 'knowledge-work ecosystem' (as 'bacteria', extracting 'nutrients') .

Collective mind

Scope

We have just seen that our evolutionary challenge and opportunity is to develop the capability to update our institutions or systems, to learn how to make them whole.

Where—with what system—shall we begin?

The handling of information, or metaphorically our society's 'headlights', suggests itself as the answer for several reasons.

One of the reasons is obvious: If we should use information as guiding light and not competition, our information will need to be different.

In his 1948 seminal "Cybernetics", Norbert Wiener pointed to another reason: In social systems, communication is what turns a collection of independent individuals into a system. Wiener made that point by talking about ants and bees. It is the nature of the communication that determines a social system's properties, and behavior. Cybernetics has shown—as its main point, and title theme—that "the tie between information and action" has an all-important role, which determines (Wiener used the technical keyword "homeostasis, but let us here use this more contemporary one) the sustainability of a system. The full title of Wiener's book was "Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine". To be able to correct their behavior and maintain inner and outer balance, to be able to "change course" when the circumstances demand that, to be able to continue living and adapting and evolving—a system must have suitable communication and control.

Diagnosis

That is presently not the case with our core systems; and with our civilization as a whole..

The tie between information and action has been severed, Wiener too observed.

Our society's communication-and-control is broken; it needs to be restored.

To make that point, Wiener cited an earlier work, Vannevar Bush's 1945 article "As We May Think", where Bush urged the scientists to make the task of revising their communication their next highest priority—the World War Two having just been won.

These calls to action remained, however, without effect.

"As long as a paradox is treated as a problem, it can never be dissolved," observed David Bohm. Wiener too entrusted his insight to the communication whose tie with action had been severed.

We have assembled a formidable collection of academic results that shared the same fate—to illustrate a general phenomenon we are calling Wiener's paradox. The link between communication and action having been broken—the academic results will tend to be ignored whenever they challenge the present "course" and point to a new one!

To an academic researcher, it may feel disheartening to see so many best ideas of our best minds ignored. Why publish more—if even the most elementary insight that our field has produced, the one that motivated our field and our work, has not yet been communicated to the public?

This sentiment is transformed into holotopian optimism when we look at 'the other side of the coin'—the creative frontier that is opening up. We are invited to, we are indeed obliged to reinvent the systems in which we live and work, by recreating the very communication that holds them together. Including, of course, our own, academic system, and the way in which it interoperates with other systems—or fails to interoperate.

Optimism will turn into enthusiasm, when we consider also this commonly ignored fact:

The information technology we now commonly use to communicate with the world was created to enable a paradigm change on that very frontier.

'Electricity', and the 'lightbulb', have just been created—in order to enable the development of the new kinds of 'socio-technical machinery' that our society now urgently needs.

Vannevar Bush pointed to the need for this new paradigm already in his title, "As We May Think". His point was that "thinking" really means making associations or "connecting the dots". And that—given the vast volumes of our information—our knowledge work must be organized in a way that enables us to benefit from each other's thinking. That technology and processes must be devised to enable us to in effect "connect the dots" or think together, as a single mind does. Bush described a prototype system called "memex", which was based on microfilm as technology.

Douglas Engelbart, however, took Bush's idea in a whole new direction—by observing (in 1951!) that when each of us humans are connected to a personal digital device through an interactive interface, and when those devices are connected together into a network—then the overall result is that we are connected together as the cells in a human organism are connected by the nervous system.

Notice that the earlier innovations in this area—including both the clay tablets and the printing press—required that a physical object be transported; this new technology allows us to "create, integrate and apply knowledge" concurrently, as cells in a human nervous system do.

We can now develop insights and solutions together! We can have results instantly!

Engelbart saw in this new technology exactly what we need to become able to handle the "complexity times urgency" of our problems, which grows at an accelerated rate.

This three minute video clip, which we called "Doug Engelbart's Last Wish", offers an opportunity for a pause. Imagine the effects of improving the planetary systems, and our "development, integration and application of knowledge" to begin with. Imagine "the effects of getting 5% better", Engelbart commented with a smile. Then our old man put his fingers on his forehead, and looked up: "I've always imagined that the potential was... large..." The potential is not only large, it is staggering. The improvement that is both necessary and possible is qualitative—from a system that doesn't work, to one that does.

To Engelbart's dismay, this new "collective nervous system" ended up being use to only make the old processes and systems more efficient. The ones that evolved through the centuries of use of the printing press. The ones that broadcast information.

The above observation by Anthony Giddens points to the impact this has had on our culture; and on "human quality".

Dazzled by an overload of data, in a reality whose complexity is well beyond our comprehension—we have no other recourse but "ontological security". We find meaning in learning a profession, and performing in it a competitively.

But that is exactly what binds us to power structure.

Remedy

What is to be done, to restore the severed link between communication and action?

How can we begin to change our collective mind—as our technology enables, and our situation demands?

Engelbart left us a clear and concise answer; he called it bootstrapping.

His point was that only writing about what needs to be done would not have an effect (the tie between information and action having been broken). Bootstrapping means that we consider ourselves as a part in a larger whole; and that we self-organize, and behave, as it may best serve to restore its wholeness. Which practically means that we either create a new system by using our own minds and bodies, or help others do that.

The Knowledge Federation transdiscipline was created by an act of bootstrapping, to enable bootstrapping. What we are calling knowledge federation may now simply be understood as the functioning of a proper collective mind; including all the functions and processes this may require. Obviously, the impending collective mind re-evolution itself requires a system, or an institution, which will assemble and mobilize the required knowledge and human and other resources toward that end. Our first priority must be to secure that. Presently, Knowledge Federation is (a complete prototype of) the transdiscipline for knowledge federation—ready for inspection and deployment. We offer it as a proof-of-concept implementation of our call to action.

The praxis of knowledge federation itself must be federated. In 2008, when Knowledge Federation had its inaugural meeting, two closely related initiatives were formed: Program for the Future (a Silicon Valley-based initiative to continue and complete "Doug Engelbart's unfinished revolution") and Global Sensemaking (an international community of researchers and developers, working on technology and processes for collective sense making).

Patty Coulter, Mei Lin Fung and David Price speaking at the 2011 An Innovation Ecosystem for Good Journalism workshop in Barcelona

We use the above triplet of photos ideographically, to show that the IEJ2011 public informing prototype was created through suitable transdisciplinary collaboration (Patty Coulter was the Director of Oxford Global Media, Fellow of Green College Oxford and former Director of Oxford University's Reuter Program in Journalism; Mei Lin Fung was the founder of Program for the Future; David Price co-founded both the Global Sensemaking R & D community, and Debategraph, the leading global platform for collective sense making).

Other prototypes contributed other design patterns to the collective mind frontier, and specifically for restoring the severed link between information and action. The Tesla and the Nature of Creativity TNC2015 prototype showed what may constitute the federation of a research result—which is written in an esoteric academic vernacular, and has large potential general interest and impact. The first phase of this prototype, completed through collaboration between the author and our communication design team, turned the academic article into a multimedia object, with intuitive, metaphorical diagrams, and explanatory interviews with the author. The second phase was a high-profile, televised and live streamed event, where the result was made public. The third phase, implemented on Debategraph, modeled proper online collective thinking about the result—including pros and cons, connections with other related results, applications etc.

The Lighthouse 2016 prototype is a conceived as a direct remedy for the Wiener's paradox, created for and with the International Society for the Systems Sciences. This prototype models a system by which an academic community can federate a single message into the public sphere. The message in this case was also relevant—it was whether or not we can rely on "free competition" to guide the evolution and the functioning of our systems (or whether we must use its alternative—namely the knowledge developed in the systems sciences).

Socialized reality

Scope

"Act like as if you loved your children above all else",

So who will lead us through the next and vitally important step on our evolutionary agenda—where we shall learn how to update the systems in which we live and work?

Both Jantsch and Engelbart believed that "the university" would have to be the answer; and they made their appeals accordingly. But they were ignored—and so were Vannevar Bush and Norbert Wiener before them, and the others who followed.

Why?

It is tempting to conclude that the academia too followed the general trend, and evolved as a power structure. But to see solutions, we need to look at deeper causes.

As we pointed out in the opening paragraph of this website, the academic tradition did not develop as a way to pursue practical knowledge, but (let's call it that) "right" knowledge. Our tradition developed from classical philosophy, where the "philosophical" questions such as "How do we know that something is true?" and even "What does it mean to say that something is true?" led to rigorous or "academic" standards for pursuing knowledge. The university's core social role, as we, academic people tend to perceive it, is to uphold those standards. By studying at a university, one becomes capable of pursuing knowledge in an academic way in any domain of interest.

And as we also pointed out, by bringing up the image of Galilei in house arrest, this seemingly esoteric or "philosophical" pursuit was what largely enabled the last "great cultural revival", and led to all those various good things that we now enjoy. The Inquisition, censorship and prison were unable to keep in check an idea whose time had come—and the new way to pursue knowledge soon migrated from astrophysics, where it originated, and transformed all walks of life.

We began our presentation of knowledge federation by asking "Could a similar advent be in store for us today?"

Diagnosis

Here is why we felt confident in drafting an affirmative answer to this rhetorical question.

Early in the course of our modernization, we made a fundamental error whose consequences cannot be overrated. This error was subsequently uncovered and reported, but it has not yet been corrected.

Without thinking, from the traditional culture we've adopted a myth incomparably more disruptive of modernization that the creation myth—that "truth" means "correspondence with reality". And that the role of information is to provide us an "objectively true reality picture", so that we may distinguish truth from falsehood by simply checking whether an idea fits in.

The 20th century science and philosophy disproved and abandoned this naive view.

It has turned out that there is simply no way to open the 'mechanism of nature' and verify that our models correspond to the real thing!

How, then, did our "reality picture" come about?

Reality, reported scientists and philosophers, is not something we discover; it is something we construct.

Part of this construction is a function of our cognitive system, which turns "the chaotic diversity of our sense-experience" into something that makes sense, and helps us function. The other part is performed by our society. Long before we are able to reflect on these matters "philosophically", we are given certain concepts through which to look at the world and organize it and make sense of it. Through innumerable 'carrots and sticks', throughout our lives, we are induced to "see the reality" in a certain specific way—as our culture defines it. As everyone knows, every "normal human being" sees the reality as it truly is. Wasn't that the reason why our ancestors often considered the members of a neighboring tribes, who saw the reality differently, as not completely normal; and why they treated them as not completely human?

Of various consequences that have resulted from this historical error, we shall here mention two. The first will explain what really happened with our culture, and our "human quality"; why the way we handle them urgently needs to change. The second will explain what holds us back—why we've been so incapable of treating our systems as we treat other human-made things, by adapting them to the purposes that need to be served.

To see our first point, we invite you to follow us in a one-minute thought experiment. To join us on an imaginary visit to a cathedral. No, this is not about religion; we shall use the cathedral as one of our ideograms, to put things in proportion and make a point.

What strikes us instantly, as we enter, is awe-inspiring architecture. Then we hear the music play: Is it Bach's cantatas? Or Allegri's Miserere? We see sculptures, and frescos by masters of old on the walls. And then, of course, there's the ritual...

We also notice a little book on each bench. When we open it, we see that its first paragraphs explain how the world was created.

Let this difference in size—between the beginning of Genesis and all the rest we find in a cathedral—point to the fact that, owing to our error, our pursuit of knowledge has been focused on a relatively minor part, on explaining how the things we perceive originated, and how they work. And that what we've ignored is our culture as a complex ecosystem, which evolved through thousands of years, whose function is to socialize people in a certain specific way. To create certain "human quality". Notice that we are not making a value judgment, only pointing to a function.

The way we presently treat this ecosystem reminds of the way in which we treated the natural ones, at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. We have nothing equivalent to CO2 measurements and quotas, to even try to make this a scientific and political issue.

So how are our culture, and our "human quality" evolving? To see the answer, it is enough to just look around. To an excessive degree, the symbolic environment we are immersed in is a product of advertising. And explicit advertising is only a tip of an iceberg, comprising various ways in which we are socialized to be egotistical consumers; to believe in "free competition"—not in "making things whole".

By believing that the role of information is to give us an "objective" and factual view of "reality", we have ignored and abandoned to decay core parts of our cultural heritage. And we have abandoned the creation of culture, and of "human quality", to power structure.

To see our second point, that reality construction is a key instrument of the power structure, and hence of power, it may be sufficient to point to "Social Construction of Reality", where Berger and Luckmann explained how throughout history, the "universal theories" about the nature of reality have been used to legitimize a given social order. But this theme is central to holotopia, and here too we can only get a glimpse of a solution by looking at deeper dynamics and causes.

To be able to do that we devised a thread—in which three short stories or vignettes are strung together to compose a larger insight.

The first vignette describes a real-life event, where two Icelandic horses living outdoors—aging Odin the Horse, and New Horse who is just being introduced to the herd where Odin is the stallion and the leader—are engaged in turf strife. It will be suffice to just imagine these two horses running side by side, with their long hairs waving in the wind, Odin pushing New Horse toward the river, and away from his pack of mares.

The second story is about sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, and his "theory of practice"—where Bourdieu provided a conceptual framework to help us understand how socialization works; and in particular its relationship with what he called "symbolic power". Our reason for combining these two stories together is to suggest that we humans exhibit a similar turf behavior as Odin—but that this tends to remain largely unrecognized. Part of the reason is that, as Bourdieu explained, the ways in which this atavistic disposition of ours manifests itself are incomparably more diverse and subtle than the ones of horses—indeed as more diverse so as our culture is more complex than theirs.

Bourdieu devised two keywords for the symbolic cultural 'turf'" "field" and "game", and used them interchangeably. He called it a "field", to suggest (1) a field of activity or profession, and the system where it is practiced; and (2) something akin to a magnetic field, in which we people are immersed as small magnets, and which subtly, without us noticing, orients our seemingly random or "free" movement. He referred to it as "game", to suggests that there are certain semi-permanent roles in it, with allowable 'moves', by which our 'turf strife' is structured in a specific way.

To explain the dynamics of the game or the field, Bourdieu adapted two additional keywords, each of which has a long academic history: "habitus" and "doxa". A habitus is composed of embodied behavioral predispositions, and may be thought of as distinct 'roles' or 'avatars' in the 'game'. A king has a certain distinct habitus; and so do his pages. The habitus is routinely maintained through direct, body-to-body action (everyone bows to the king, and you do too), without conscious intention or awareness. Doxa is the belief, or embodied experience, that the given social order is the reality. "Orthodoxy" acknowledges that multiple "realities" coexist, of which only a single one is "right"; doxa ignores even the possibility of alternatives.

Hence we may understand socialized reality as something that 'gamifies' our social behavior, by giving everyone an 'avatar' or a role, and a set of capabilities. Doxa is the 'cement' that makes such socialized reality relatively permanent.

A vignette involving Antonio Damasio as cognitive neuroscientist completes this thread, by helping us see that the "embodied predispositions" that are maintained in this way have a decisive role, contrary to what the 19th century science and indeed the core of our philosophical tradition made us believe. Damasio showed that our socialized embodied predispositions act as a cognitive filter—determining not only our priorities, but also the options we may be able to rationally consider. Our embodied, socialized predispositions are a reason, for instance, why we don't consider showing up in public naked (which in another culture might be normal).

This conclusion suggests itself: Changing the systems in which we live and work—however rational, and necessary, that may be—is for similar reasons inconceivable.

We are incapable of changing our systems, because we have been socialized to accept them as reality.

We may now condense this diagnosis to a single keyword: reification. We are incapable of replacing 'candle headlights' because we have reified them as 'headlights'! "Science" has no systemic purpose. Science is what the scientists are doing. Just as "journalism" is the profession we've inherited from the tradition.

But reification reaches still deeper—to include the very language we use to organize our world. It includes the very concepts by which we frame our "issues". Ulrich Beck continued the above observation:

"Max Weber's 'iron cage' – in which he thought humanity was condemned to live for the foreseeable future – is for me the prison of categories and basic assumptions of classical social, cultural and political sciences."

We may now see not only our inherited physical institutions or systems as 'candles'—but also our inherited or socialized concepts, which determine the very way in which we look at the world.

Reification underlies both problems. It is what keeps us in 'iron cage'.

Remedy

Notice the depth and the beauty of our challenge.

When we write "worldviews", our word processor underlines the word in red. Even grammatically, there can be only one worldview—the one that corresponds with the world! Whatever we say, even when that is "we are constructing reality", by default we are making a statement about reality, we are saying how the things "really are" out there. But in this latter case, of course, the result is a paradox.

We are in a paradox; how can we ever come out?

The answer we proposed is in two steps.

The first – pointed to by the metaphor of the mirror, and the Mirror ideogram – is to self-reflect. We are proposing the kind of self-reflection that Socrates championed, which was the academic tradition's very source, and point of inception. We believed that something was the case, and it turned out that it was not. Meanwhile, we built on that assumption our institutional organization, our ethos and our self-image. We built on it even a formal logic, which excludes the middle.

The mirror reflects the fact that we are not above the world, looking at it objectively. However it might have seemed otherwise, the procedures we use were not objectively existing ways to objectively see the world, which were only discovered by our predecessors. We cannot forever continue being busy doing the work that is defined by those procedures. The evolution of our system must be allowed to continue.

The mirror warns us that we are now 'keeping Galilei in house arrest'—by using only "symbolic power", of course, and without being aware of that.

Our self-reflection in front of the mirror is not from a power position, but in the manner of the dialog. Which means—in a completely different tone of voice, which reflects genuine intention to see what goes on, correct errors, and make improvements.

The Mirror ideogram points to the nature of our contemporary academic situation, in a similar way as the Modernity ideogram points to our general one. The spontaneous evolution of knowledge of knowledge has brought us here, in front of the mirror. Seeing ourselves in the mirror means seeing ourselves in the world. It means the end of reification—and the beginning of accountability. The world we see in the mirror is a world in dire need—for new ways to be creative. The role in which we see ourselves, in that world, by looking at the mirror is all-important.

Imagine what it will mean to liberate the vast academic 'army', all of us who have been selected, trained and publicly sponsored to produce new ideas—from disciplinary constraints, to empower us to see ourselves as the core part of our society's 'headlights', and to self-organize and be creative accordingly!

But how shall we do that, how shall we step into that so much larger and freer yet more responsible role—without sacrificing the core element of our tradition; which is logical and methodological rigor?

Mirror ideogram

The answer, and the second step we are proposing, is unexpected; even seemingly impossible, or magical.

We can go through the mirror—into a completely new academic and social reality.

Symbolically, that means liberating ourselves from the entrapment of reification—and liberating the people, the oppressed. We all must be liberated from reifying the way we see our world, from reifying our systems or institutions, and the very concepts we use to make sense of our world. We must all move to a world where what constitutes our society, and our culture, is given the kind of status that the technology has—of humanly created things; which must continue to evolve, by being adapted to their purposes.

Academically or philosophically, this crucial step, through the mirror, is made possible by what philosopher Villard Van Orman Quine called "truth by convention"—which we adapted as one of our keywords.

Quine opened "Truth by Convention" by observing:

"The less a science has advanced, the more its terminology tends to rest on an uncritical assumption of mutual understanding. With increase of rigor this basis is replaced piecemeal by the introduction of definitions. The interrelationships recruited for these definitions gain the status of analytic principles; what was once regarded as a theory about the world becomes reconstrued as a convention of language. Thus it is that some flow from the theoretical to the conventional is an adjunct of progress in the logical foundations of any science."

But if the switch to truth by convention is the way in which the sciences repair their logical foundations—then why not use it to update the logical foundations of our knowledge work at large?

Truth by convention, as we use this keyword, is the kind of truth that is common in mathematics: "Let x be y. Then..." and the argument follows. Obviously, the claim that x "really is" y is unintended, and meaningless. Only a convention has been made—which is valid within the given context, of an article, or a theory, or a methodology.

In our prototype we used truth by convention to define an epistemology; and a methodology.

The epistemology, called design epistemology, turns the core of our proposal (to change the relationship we have with information, as we described above) into a convention.

In the "Design Epistemology" research article, where we articulated this proposal, we drafted a parallel between the modernization of knowledge work we are proposing, and the emergence of modern art. By defining an epistemology and a methodology as conventions, we academic researchers can do as the artists did, when they liberated themselves from the demand to faithfully depict the reality, by using the techniques of Old Masters—we can be creative in the very way in which we practice our profession. We made it clear that the approach we proposed was a general one, and that our design epistemology was only an example showing what might be possible when the approach is developed.

Notice that logically anything can be turned into a convention. The "proof of the pie" is that it works! truth by convention. We, however, chose to use truth by convention to codify the state-of-the-art epistemological insights; the ones that now serve as anomalies, challenging the epistemological and methodological status quo, and demanding change. In this way, by weaving those insights into a prototype methodology, and configuring a system that will continuously keep them up to date (we are doing that as we speak)—we use knowledge federation to give information the agency to modify the epistemology and the methods; and to enable the latter to evolve.

A vast creative frontier opens up before us on the other side of the mirror, both academic and cultural. We developed the holoscope and the holotopia as prototypes, to show what might be possible if we pursued this new course.

By using truth by convention, language too can be liberated from reification and tradition; and so can our professional and specifically disciplinary-academic pursuits. We conclude here by only mentioning two examples, each of which illustrates both possibilities (both were proposed to corresponding communities of interest, where they proved welcome, and useful).

Our definition of design, as "the alternative to tradition", introduced design and tradition as two alternative ways to wholeness. Here tradition means relying on what we've inherited from the past, and relying on small changes and "the survival of the fittest"; design is the alternative, where we consciously and intentionally "make things whole". The point is that when tradition can no longer be relied on, design must be used. This pair of keywords allows us to understand the Modernity ideogram, and our situation or the "world problematique" in simple terms: We are no longer traditional; and yet we are not yet designing. We are caught up in an unstable way of evolving, where neither of the options work. Our technology is developed by design—and progressed at an accelerated rate; our culture (represented by the headlights) has remained traditional, and fallen behind.

Our definition of implicit information as information that is not making a factual statement, but is implicit in cultural artifacts, mores etc., and of visual literacy (a definition for the International Visual Literacy Association), as "literacy associated with implicit information", opens up a whole realm of possibilities to be developed. While our ethics, legislature and academic production have been focused on factual, explicit information, we have been culturally (and ethically and politically) dominated by the subtle implicit information, which we have not yet learned to decode, or control. The creation of prototypes—the core activity on the other side of the mirror, by which agency is restored to information—opens up a myriad possibilities for combining art and science. As we shall see, in the Holotopia project this will be our core approach.