Holotopia
Contents
Holotopia
We have lost the sense of direction
In 1990, when Tim Berners Lee was still writing the code for the World Wide Web, Neil Postman (NYU's distinguished scholar of culture and communication) warned us that our habitual massive outpouring of information tends to have the opposite effect from the one intended. It not only leaves us uninformed—but it damages our very sense of meaning; our very capacity to be informed!
Imagine a world where information and the way we handle it is consciously adapted to its core purpose—the creation of meaning.
What would the resulting information be like? By what methods, in what ways and by whom would it be created? How would information be used? What new information formats, what new kinds of information would emerge? How would the information technology be adapted and applied? In what way would our public informing be different? What would academic communication, and education, be like? By creating the Knowledge Federation prototype, we provided an academically coherent answer to those and other related questions; answers that are not only described and explained, but also implemented, as real-life embedded prototypes.
But having done that, we are still facing the same challenge that our visionary predecessors failed to overcome.
By depicting our civilization as a bus, and our way of handling information as its candle headlights, the Modernity ideogram points to an all-important oversight in our modernization.
We seem unable to make a change
The challenge we are facing is not a problem that can be solved, but a paradox.
In the world where we've all been socialized to "mind our own business" and just publish more, as scientists, and as journalists (because that's what we are paid for, and what our careers and the prestige and the livelihood of our institutions depend on)—we have no incentive, no institution, no established method, and no willpower to make the kind of changes that would put information and knowledge into the service of meaning— which our society now most vitally needs.
A goal of the Holotopia prototype, which is currently in development, is to overcome that obstacle.
What would our world be like, if we elevated the most vital insights from the "information jungle", and combined them together to give us vision? How would our world be different, if the best ideas of our best minds were reflected in the ways we comprehend things—and also acted on?
The purpose of Holotopia is to not only answer those questions by providing suitable insights—but to also empower us to create it.
What would it take to change course?
Based on a decade of The Club of Rome's research into the future prospects of mankind, Aurelio Peccei diagnosed that the humanity is on a collision course with nature. We take his diagnoses as a challenge, and as a natural benchmark test for our project. Can the new 'headlights' we are proposing help us "change course"? And if they can—what will the new course be?
A vision
As a vision of a possible future, the holotopia is a positive answer to the question posited in the Holoscope.org's opening:
Think about the world at the twilight of the Middle Ages and the dawn of the Renaissance: devastating religious wars, terrifying epidemics… Think of the scholastics pondering about the angels dancing on a needlepoint; and Galilei in house arrest, whispering “and yet it moves” into his beard. Observe that the problems of the epoch were not resolved by focusing on those problems, but by a slow and steady development of an entirely new approach to knowledge. Several centuries of comprehensive evolution followed. Could a similar advent be in store for us today?
Just as the case was in Galilei's time, a new order of things or technically a paradigm is ready to emerge—as soon as we once again begin to use the knowledge of knowledge, to update the very way in which our knowledge is being handled.
The holotopia is a more desirable future than the common utopias—whose authors lacked the data to see what might be possible. Yet the holotopia vision is fully realizable—because we already own the knowledge needed for its fulfillment.
Five insights
The holotopia vision is made concrete or federated in terms of the five insights:
- The Convenience Paradox insight points to a revolution in "the pursuit of happiness" and in culture, reminiscent of the Renaissance
- The Power Structure insight points to a revolution in innovation by which human work is made incomparably more effective and efficient, as the Industrial Revolution did
- The Collective Mind insight points to a revolution in communication, analogous to the advent of the printing press
- The Socialized Reality insight points to a new way to create truth and the meaning, analogous to the Enlightenment
- The Narrow Frame insight is about a new way to create knowledge, analogous to science and complementing science
A strategy
While each of the five insights is spectacular in its own right, even more illuminating are their relationships. By exploring them, in the light of further suitable points of reference, we understand that we cannot meaningfully respond to any of them, without responding to them all.
An even larger, overarching insight results, which naturally leads to the strategy that the holotopia is pointing to by its very name:
Comprehensive change can be easy, even when much smaller and obviously necessary changes may be impossible.
Making things whole
We were able to federate the five insights even further. Each of the five larger-than-life opportunities to improve our condition, which the five insights are pointing to, can be fulfilled by following this simple rule of thumb: Instead of seeing the world in the light of our narrowly conceived self-interest, and trusting that "the free competition" or "the invisible hand" of the market will turn our self-serving acts into the greatest common good (which is so markedly Middle Ages, isn't it?)—we see ourselves and what we do as parts in a larger whole or wholes; and act in ways that make all those larger wholes more whole.
Hence this formula (Vibeke didn't like it, but hey—nobody's reading this yet, so let's have it here as Dino's private joke and foible):
But seek ye first the systemic wholeness, in all matters and on all levels of detail; and all these things shall be added unto you.
The initiative
This paper model of a large sculpture represents the holotopia as an intervention into our shared space or "reality". We use it here ideographically, to point to holotopia as intervention into our everyday, which redefines our relationship to it.
The mission of the Holotopia initiative is to develop whatever is needed for "changing course" – and realizing the holotopia.
The box
A paper model of The Box.
Holotopia's box is an object designed for 'initiation' to holotopia, a way to help us 'unbox' our conception of the world and see, think and behave differently; change course inwardly, by embracing a new value.