Holotopia
Contents
Holotopia
Imagine...
You are about to board a bus for a long night ride, when you notice two flickering streaks of light emanating from two wax candles, placed in the circular holes 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.
By depicting our society as a bus without a steering wheel, and the way we look at the world and try to comprehend it and handle it as a pair of candle headlights, the Modernity ideogram renders the essence of our contemporary situation.
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
We are proposing to handle information as we handle other man-made things—by suiting it to the purposes that need to be served.
Or to rephrase this in the language of our metaphor, we are proposing to create the 'headlights'—instead of trying to make use of whatever happens to be there; instead of blindly adopting what we've inherited from the past.
Knowledge federation can now be understood as the principle of operation of the new 'headlights'.
The purpose of knowledge federation is to restore the agency to information, and the power to knowledge.
Knowledge federation achieves this purpose by combining fragmented pieces of information together, to give them visibility and impact. Or as our logo might suggest—by 'connecting the dots'.
By 'connecting the dots', we can reach a new insight—and see an issue or a situation in a new way, show how it may need to be handled. Or we can create a prototype—and give this insight a way to impact reality.
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 substance of our proposal is the Knowledge Federation prototype—a complete and academically coherent answer to those and other related questions. An answer that is not only described and explained, but also implemented—in a collection of real-life embedded prototypes.
An application
What difference will this make? The Holotopia prototype, which is under development, is 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 our ideas to 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 warning:
"It is absolutely essential to find a way to change course."
Aurelio Peccei
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 institutions, as part of their function? Isn't this already showing that we are 'driving with candle headlights'?
Can knowledge federation help us "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."
This conclusion Peccei shared with a number of twentieth century's frontier thinkers. Arne Næss for instance, Norway's most loved philosopher, reached it on different grounds and called it "deep ecology".
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".
A vision
What new 'course' shall we see, when we use knowledge federation to 'illuminate the way'?
The holotopia is an astonishingly positive future scenario.
This future vision is more positive than what the familiar utopias offered—whose authors lacked the information to see what was possible; or lived in the times when the resources we have did not yet exist.
When the evidence offered on these pages has been considered, it will be clear why holotopia is not only "the new black"—but also the new red; and the new green!
Unlike the utopias, the holotopia is readily realizable; we already have all that is needed for its fulfillment. To realize it, we need to "change course" in the direction that is suggested by its name.
We must see ourselves as parts in a larger whole; and act in ways that make this larger whole more whole.
But this is exactly the direction the Modernity ideogram is pointing to.
This direction is a radical departure from our current course—which emerges as a result of everyone pursuing "his our own interests"; and trusting that "the invisible hand" of the "free competition" will turn our self-serving acts into the greatest common good.
The holotopia vision is made concrete in terms of five insights.
When Peccei talked about "a great cultural revival", he was obviously referring to the historical moment when a sweeping change of the human systems began to take place, the Renaissance. Can a similar advent be in store for us today? We answer this question positively, by looking at five main aspects of that historical instance of cultural and social reconstruction:
- Industrial Revolution—a dramatic improvement of the efficiency and effectiveness of human work, made possible by applying human creativity, or innovation
- Revolution in communication—made possible by Gutenberg's innovation, the printing press
- Revolution in the foundations for truth and meaning or epistemology—from unreserved faith in the Scriptures, to reliance on observation and rational understanding
- Revolution in the method for creating truth and meaning, brought by science
- Revolutionary changes of lifestyle and culture, brought by the Renaissance
Considered together, the five insights show that a comprehensive change is ready to take place in our own time as well. That we already own all the information that is needed for such a change.
Comprehensive change can be easy
Furthermore, the anomalies the five insights are pointing to, and the corresponding solutions, are so closely inter-related that taking care of one necessitates resolving all the others. In this way the sixth insight is reached:
Comprehensive change may be easy, even when smaller and obviously necessary changes might seem impossible.
The holotopia strategy follows
With each of the five insights we learn something new and surprising about information, and its relationship with power. We also see how our handling of those pivotal issues can and needs to be entirely different. Gradually, we begin to see who (metaphorically speaking) holds 'Galilei in house arrest' once again in our time, and by what means. We also gradually understand how we ended up with the dysfunctional core value, or 'rule of thumb'—the belief in "the invisible hand" of the competition.
In this way we come to see our own time as we see the time when Galilei was in house arrest—as the time when cultural and historical conditions are ready for a sweeping and comprehensive change.
This reconfirms the characteristic strategy of The Club of Rome—to focus not on the problems, but on the condition as a whole, the "problematique".
This then also justifies the strategy that defines the the Holotopia project (to focus on changing "the whole thing"), as suggested by its name.
Information is the key
Another insight readily follows from the five insights—namely the one suggested by the Modernigy ideogram, the bus with candle headlights. Comprehensive change has its own specific, and different, logic, how it needs to happen. The systems scientists talk about "a leverage point" as the point in a system that affords for the easiest and deepest change. We show that "changing the relationship we have with information" is the leverage point we need.
Just as it was in Galilei's time.
A strategy
Show 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!
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 context newly created, they acquire a whole new meaning. And agency!
Change the collective mind
The action that immediately follows is to organize public dialogs about the five insights, and other themes related to change.
Here the medium in the truest sense is the message; by developing those dialogs, we re-create our collective mind—from something that only receives, which is dazzled by the media, to something that weaves together academic and other insights, and co-creates vision that points to direction.
Also the information technology, and the new media, in this strategy begin to acquire the roles in our public sphere that they need to have.
Tactical assets
Snapshot from our pilot project in Kunsthall 3.14, Bergen.
Holotopia is an art project
The Holotopia project combines contemporary art with contemporary media (tools for "augmenting our collective intellect", creative video recording and editing etc.), to change our collective mind.
The 'reality show'
The dialogs we expect to have 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. When these conversations fail—they reveal to us, in a spotlight, our resistances and our blind spots, our clinging to the obsolete forms of thought. Which is, of course, not any less exciting and relevant.
Stories
We bring together stories (elsewhere called vignettes)—which in attractive and accessible ways share the core insights of leading contemporary thinkers. We tell their stories.
They become 'dots' to connect in our conversations.
Keywords
The Renaissance too, and also science, brought along a whole new way of speaking—and hence a new way to look at the world. All along, and with the five insights in particular, we introduce the keywords which are newly defined. It is in terms of those keywords that we come to understand the core issues and our time in completely new ways.
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. All along we share the prototypes we've already developed, to put the ball in play.
Books and conversations
The ten direct relationships between the five insights provide a context for Ten conversations—where some of the age-old challenges are understood and handled in entirely new ways:
- How to put an end to war
- How to overcome the dichotomy between science and religion
- How education may need to change, to help streamline the larger societal transformation
Occasionally we publish books about those themes, based on our dialogs, and to begin new ones.
Completing the Knowledge Federation prototype
By following the holotopia's rule of thumb, we perceive ourselves as an element in a larger whole. We see that we are those 'headlights' (both when we create information, and when we use it). We then learn to use our creativity in a new way—by self-organizing in new ways, so that we may become 'lightbulbs', not remain 'candles'.
We shall see by inspecting the five insights that deep paradoxes plague our knowledge work, so that mere printing and broadcasting tends to remain without effect, or even has the effect opposite from what's intended (makes the cognitive overload, and confusion, ever greater).
The Holotopia project is seen as necessary for completing the knowledge federation initiative—by federating its own work and resources.