Holotopia

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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.jpg 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."

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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."

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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.jpeg
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.

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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 to modify our worldview so that we may not see the difference.

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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.

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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 systemswhere 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.

Bush-Vision.jpg

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.

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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 sweeping 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.

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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.

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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).

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