Holotopia

Holotopia

Imagine...

You are about to board a bus for a long night ride, when you notice two flimsy, flickering streaks of light emanating from two wax candles, placed in the circular holes where the headlights of the bus are supposed to be. Candles? As headlights? You rub your eyes in disbelief. What sort of nonsense is this? A weird joke? An art project?

Well of course, the idea of candles as headlights is absurd. So why talk about it? The reason is that on a much larger scale—where the things such as our society, and the way we handle information, are so large that we cannot see them with naked eye—this absurdity has become reality.

Our handling of information needs an update.

Our proposal

The crux of our knowledge federation proposal, which is detailed on this website, is to change the relationship we have with information; and with knowledge. And by doing that, to change the relationship we have with the world; and with ourselves.

What is the relationshnip we have 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

Suppose we handled information as we tend to handle other man-made thing—by suiting it to the purposes that must be served. What would 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 would emerge? How would the information technology be applied? What would our public informing be like? And our academic communication, and education?

The substance of our knowledge federation proposal is a complete and academically coherent answer to those and other related questions; an answer that is not only described and explained, but also implemented—as a collection of real-life embedded prototypes.

In the language of our metaphor, what we proposed is a complete prototype of the 'lightbulb'.

Seeing things whole

The Information ideogram, shown on the right, serves to explain the general idea of the information that will emanate from the proposed 'lightbulb'. And also its principle of operation of 'the lightbulb'. The ideogram shows an "i", which stands for "information", as composed of a circle placed on top of a square. The square represents the details; the circle represents the function (an insight into the nature of a situation and how it may need to be handled, a rule of thumb, a project that implements the function...), which is the point of it all. The whole ideogram is an illustration of the idea (which is an adaptation of a very basic idea in computer programming called "object orientation") that the details need to be hidden, so that the function may be offered to the next larger whole. This idea can easily be understood if you think of the automobile, where the details (the engine, the electrical circuitry...) are hidden under the hub, so that only what is needed for operating the vehicle (the steering wheel, the instruments...) is offered and visible to the driver.

Information ideogram.

We call this principle, and the various activities that constitute its implementation, knowledge federation.

Political federation brings smaller units together, to give them visibility and impact. Knowledge federation does that to information. Its goal is to turn information into effective knowledge; and to restore knowledge to power.

We here refer to the proposed 'lightbulb' by its pseudonym holoscope, to highlight its distinguishing characteristic: It helps us see things whole.

Every whole has sides that are obvious, and sides that are hidden. A purpose of the holoscope is to illuminate what has remained obscure, so that we may correctly see our object of interest's shape and proportions.

The holoscope complements the usual approach in the sciences:

Science gave us new ways to look at the world, and our vision expanded beyond bounds. The telescope and the microscope enabled us to see the things that were too distant or too small to be seen by the naked eye. At the same time, 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 big things 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 correct proportions.

A proof of concept application

What difference could the holoscope make? The Holotopia prototype, which is currently under development, is a proof of concept application.

An assessment of the general condition we are in, which has been produced by The Club of Rome, provides us a benchmark challenge for putting the holoscope to a test. Based on a decade of this global think tank's research into the future prospects of mankind, a half-century ago, Aurelio Peccei issued the following warning:

"It is absolutely essential to find a way to change course."

Can the 'headlights' we are proposing help our society "change course"? And if they can—what new course would result?

Aurelio Peccei.

A vision

As a vision of a possible future, the holotopia presents an affirmative answer to the question posited in this website's preamble:

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 whole new order of things or paradigm is ready to emerge.

Like the familiar utopias, the holotopia is a vision of a highly desirable or one could say "idealized" future. This future is indeed more desirable than what's been offered by the utopias—whose authors lacked the requisite information to see what is possible. But unlike the utopias, the holotopia is practically realizable—because we already own the information that is needed for its fulfillment.

Put simply, the holotopia is the future that is now available to us—if we used knowledge, rather than habit, to orient our handling of information. And if we used the resulting information to handle our affairs.

An initiative

The goal of the Holotopia as an initiative is to streamline the realization of the holotopia vision.

Margaret Mead's familiar dictum points to the Holotopia project's core mission:

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has."

It is, however, the 'small print' that we found most relevant—Mead's insights (based on her research) into what exactly distinguishes "a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens" that is capable of making a large difference.

The following Mead's observation, made more than fifty years ago, points to a difference that this project undertakes to make:

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.

Federating the holotopia

To be continued...