Holotopia
Contents
Holotopia
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
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."
The objective of our proposal is to restore agency to information, and power to knowledge.
Neil Postman
In detail
What would it take to repair the tie between information and action?
What would information and our handling of information be like, if we changed the relationship we have with information and treated it as we treat other human-made things—if we adapted it to the purposes that need to be served?
What would our world be like, if academic researchers retracted the premise that when an idea is published in a book or an article it is already "known"? If the other half of this picture were treated with similar thoroughness as academic technical work? If the question "What do people actually need to know?" led to a "social life of information" that allows each of us to benefit from what the others have seen and understood; and our society to perceive the world correctly, and navigate it safely?
What would the academic field that develops this approach to information be like? How would information be different? How would it be used? By what methods, what social processes, and by whom would it 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, by which those and other related questions are answered.
The Knowledge Federation prototype is conceived as a portfolio of about forty smaller prototypes, which cover the range of questions that define an academic field—from epistemology and methods, to social organization and applications.
We use our main keyword, knowledge federation, in a similar way as the words "design" and "architecture" are used—to signify both a praxis (informed practice), and an academic field that develops it and curates it.
Our call to action is to institutionalize and develop knowledge federation as an academic field, and as real-life praxis.
Technically, we are proposing a paradigm. The proposed paradigm is not in a specific scientific field, where paradigm changes are relatively common, but in "creation, integration and application of knowledge" at large.
A challenge
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".
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 to point to the cultural and social order of things that will result.
To begin the Holotopia project, we are developing an initial prototype, which includes both a vision and a project infrastructure. That 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 adverse 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.
The holotopia vision is made concrete, and substantiated or justified, in terms of five insights, as explained below.
Making things whole
What do we need to do to change course toward the holotopia?
From a comprehensive volume 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.
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—including, of course, our own 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 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 described in the mentioned prototype affords that very capability, to see things whole, in the context of the holotopia we refer to it by the pseudonym holoscope.
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 characteristic, however, must be made clear from the start.
Looking in new ways
Holoscope ideogram
The key novelty in the holoscope is the capability it affords to deliberately choose the way in which we look at an issue or situation, which we call scope. Just as the case is when inspecting a hand-held cup to see if it is whole or cracked, and in projective geometry, the art of using the holoscope will to a large degree consist in finding a suitable way of looking. This is, of course, also suggested with the bus with candle headlights metaphor.
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.
This capability to create views by choosing scopes, on any desired level of detail, adds to our work with contemporary issues a whole new 'dimension' or "degree of freedom"—where we choose what we perceive as issues, so that the issues can be resolved, and wholeness can be restored.
Thinking outside the box
That we cannot solve our problems by thinking as we did when we created them is a commonplace. But this presents a challenge when academic rigor needs to be respected.
When our goal is to put a new piece into an existing "reality picture", then whatever challenges the reality of that picture will be considered "controversial".
When, however, our goal is to "find a way to change course"—then challenging the "conventional wisdom" is our very job.
The views we are about to share may make you leap from your chair. You will, however, be able to relax and enjoy our presentation if you bear in mind its meaning and purpose.
While we did our best to ensure that the presented views accurately represent what might result when we 'connect the dots' or federate published insights and other relevant cultural artifacts, we do not need to make such claims; and we are not making them. It is a paradigm we are proposing; it is the methodology by which our views are created that gives them rigor—as "rigor" is understood in the paradigm.
The methodology itself is, to the best of our knowledge, flawlessly rigorous and coherent. But we don't need to make that claim either.
Everything here is offered as a collection of prototypes. The point is to show what might result if we changed the relationship we have with information, and developed, both academically and on a society-wide scale, the approach to information and knowledge we are proposing.
Our goal when presenting them is to initiate the dialogs and other social processes that may lead to such development.
Five Insights ideogram
Illuminating problems to see solutions
What theme, what evidence, what sort of conclusions might have enough power as to affect the vast momentum with which our 'bus' is currently rushing onward? We offer the five insights as a prototype answer. They complete the holotopia vision, by making it concrete and actionable.
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. And also "five anomalies", because they constitute the anomalies that motivate our proposal to develop a new paradigm. We call them "insights" to emphasize that, as we shall see, they not only can be resolved—but their resolutions naturally lead to improvements that are more to the point than the problems they create.
In the spirit of the holoscope, we here only summarize each of them as a big picture—and provide the supporting evidence and details separately.
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 or "survival of the fittest" to find and follow the way, not information. The popular belief that "the free competition" or "the free market" is our best guide is what habitually makes our "democracies" choose the "leaders" who represent that view. But is this belief warranted?
Genuine revolutions often result from a new way in which the perennial issues of power and freedom are perceived. We offer this keyword, power structure as a means to that end (keywords are custom-defined concepts, which offer a certain specific way of looking or scope). Think of the power structure as a new way to conceive of the intuitive notion "power holder", which, we suspect, might in some way obstruct our freedom, or cause us harm and 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 a bit 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 the power 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 is obvious: the evolution by "the survival of the fittest" tends to favor those systems that are more predatory by nature, at the detriment of the ones that are more docile toward the people and their environment. See this excerpt from Joel Bakan's documentary "The Corporation" (which Bakan, a law professor created to federate an insight he considered essential), where it is explained that "the corporation is an externalizing machine just as the shark is a killing machine" (as explained in more detail in the excerpt, "externalization" means maximizing profits by letting someone else, notably the people and the environment, bear the costs). But, we show, the nature of the systems that tend to win in competition has always been predatory; it's only their form that keeps changing.
And how do systems affect us who live and work in them, directly? This excerpt from Sidney Pollack's 1969 film "They Shoot Horses, Don't They?" will answer that question vividly.
So why do we put up with such systems? Why don't we treat them 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, and they'll be a recurring theme in holotopia.
One of the reasons we have already seen: We have no habit of, and no means for seeing things whole. When we look in our conventional ways, even such uncanny errors as 'using candles as headlights' can develop without us noticing, on the large scale that is beyond our field of vision.
A subtler reason why we tend to ignore the possibility of adapting the systems in which we live and work to their roles in larger systems, is they perform for us a different role—of providing structure to our various turf strifes and power games. Within our system, they provide us "objective" and "fair" criteria for competing for positions; and in the competitive world outside, they organize us in ways that give us a better chance to prevail.
Why don't, to name an example, our media agencies combine their resources, and give us the information we need? The answer is obvious: They are competing with one another for our attention, and use whatever means they have at their disposal. And our attention, needless to say, is a resource that requires no less care and attention than our material resources, such as clean air and energy.
The most interesting collection of reasons, however, have to do with the uncanny and yet so poorly understood (by the general public) power of the power structures to socialize us in certain specific ways, as it may suit their interests. The power to adapt to their interests both our culture and our "human quality"—our sense of duty, commitment, heroism and honor.
Evil intention is no longer needed; even civilization-wide self-destruction can result by us doing no more than "our job"; not because we violated, but because we followed "the rules".
The fact that we will not "solve our problems" unless we learned how to team up and adapt our systems to their contemporary larger systemic roles has, of course, not remained unnoticed.
In 1948, in his seminal Cybernetics, Norbert Wiener explained why "free competition" cannot be trusted in the role of 'headlights and steering'. Cybernetics was envisioned as a transdisciplinary academic effort to provide the required know-how for understanding systems, and restoring them to their function.
The very first step the founders of The Club of Rome's did after its inception in 1968 was to gather a team of experts (in Bellagio, Italy) and develop a suitable methodology. They gave "making things whole" on scale of socio-technical systems the name "systemic innovation"—which we've adopted as one of our keywords.
Collective mind
If our key evolutionary task is to (develop the ability to) make things whole at the level of systems—where 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 competition to guide our society's evolution, our information will have to be different. Another reason is that when the system at hand is a system of individuals, then communication is what brings the individuals together and in effect creates the system. So the nature of communication largely determines what a system will be like. In Cybernetics, Wiener makes that point by talking about ants, bees and other animals.
The complete title of Wiener's book was "Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine". To have control over its impact on its environment and vice versa (Wiener preferred the technical keyword "homeostasis", which we may interpret as "sustainability"), a system must have suitable communication. But the tie between information and action has been severed, Wiener too noted, and 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 issued the call to action to the scientists to make the task of revising their system their next highest priority (the World War Two having just been won).
So why haven't we done that yet?
"As long as a paradox is treated as a problem, it can never be dissolved," observed David Bohm. The reason for our inaction is, of course, that the tie between information and action has been severed...
It may feel disheartening, especially to an academic researcher, to see the best ideas of our best minds unable to benefit our society; to see again and again (our portfolio has a wealth of examples) that when a researcher's insight challenges the "course"—it will as a rule be ignored.
But the pessimism readily changes to holotopia–style optimism when we look at the other side of this coin—the vast creative frontier that this insight is pointing to (for which our prototype portfolio may serve as an initial map).
This 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!
By connecting each of us to a digital device through an interactive interface, and connecting those devices into a network, this technology in effect connects us together in a similar ways as cells in a higher-level organism are connected together by a nervous system—for the first time in history. The printing press too enabled a breakthrough in communication—but the process it enabled was entirely different. We can now "create, integrate and apply knowledge" concurrently (to use Engelbart's keywords), as cells in a human organism do; we can think, and create, together, as cells in a well-functioning mind do.
When, however, this 'nervous system' is used to implement the processes and the systems that have evolved through the centuries of use of the printing press, and only broadcast data—the consequences to our collective mind are disastrous.
The above observation by Anthony Giddens points to an impact this has had on our culture, and "human quality". Dazzled by an overflow of data, in a reality whose complexity is well beyond our comprehsnsion, we have no other recourse but "ontological security"—we find meaning in learning a profession, and performing in it a competitively.
But this is, as we have seen, what binds us to power structure.
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 comprehensive 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.
It turned out that it is beyond our power to assert that our ideas and models correspond to reality. That there is simply no way to look into the supposed "mechanism of nature", and verify that our models correspond to the real thing.
Information is (or more to the point it needs to be perceived as) the central element in another 'mechanism', of our society. It is what organizes the society together; what 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.
By ignoring the subtler, non-factual or implicit information, and the "symbolic power" it bears, we have on the one hand ignored and abandoned core parts of our cultural heritage; and on the other hand, we've ignored the need to secure the evolution of core parts of culture.
Academically ignored, implicit information, "symbolic power", "reality construction" and our socialization only changed hands—from one power structure (the kings and the clergy) to the next (the corporations and the media).
Narrow frame
The narrow frame insight is what the Modernity ideogram is pointing at: The way we look at the world, which we've largely inherited from a completely different society where it may have served us well, has become too narrow to provide us the vision we now must have.
We reach the narrow frame insight when we look at the way in which the homo sapiens goes about exploring "the reality" in order to comprehend it and handle it. We again see that a patchwork of popular habits and myths emerged when our 19th century ancestors attempted to adapt the "scientific worldview", as it was then, to the all-important task of creating basic information—which we need in order to understand and handle the practical world, and make basic lifestyle and other choices. Simple causality, which in science and technology led to astounding successes (but had to be disown and transcend, for science to evolve further)—caused disasters when it was applied to culture. It made our ancestors abandon whatever support for ethics and "human development" they had, notably the traditional mores and the religion; and develoop "instrumental" or (as Bauman called it) "adiaphorized" thinking—which binds them to power structure.
We adopted and adapted this keyword from Werner Heisenberg, who observed that the "narrow and rigid frame" of concepts and ideas that the general culture adopted from the 19th century science was damaging to culture; and that the experience of 20th century's physics constituted a scientific disproof of the narrow frame.
In the social sciences, similarly, it was understood that our inherited ways of looking prevent us from comprehending our new realities. "Max Weber’s ‘iron cage’ – in which he thought humanity was condemned to live for the foreseeable future," Ulrich Beck continued the above observation, "is to me a prison of categories and basic assumptions of classical social, cultural and political sciences.”
But "the tie between information and action" having been severed—none of this has as yet led to practical change.
Convenience paradox
Another way to look at the 'movement' of our metaphorical 'bus' is to perceive it as a result of our consumer and lifestyle choices. And on a deeper level—of our values or the "human quality".
Already a superficial glance will allow us to see that the narrow frame (the way of looking at the world that our general culture adopted willy-nilly from the 19th century science) put convenience as value into 'the driver's seat'. This way of making choices approximates both Newtonian causality (we look for "instant reward") and Darwin's theory of evolution (we serve "our own interests").
The convenience paradox insight is that convenience is a paradoxical and deceptive value, whose pursuit leaves as a rule less whole. And that important, however is that in its shadow, immense opportunities for improving our condition remained ignored. The point here is to show that there is a radically better human experience, than what our culture has allowed us to experience. Wholeness does exist; and it does feel incomparably better than what the deception of convenience, amplified by advertising, might allow us to believe. But the way to it is paradoxical, and needs to be illuminated by suitable information.
The way to happiness, or wholeness or whatever may reasonably be the final destination of our life's pursuits—must be illuminated by suitable information.
this insight, of course, restores knowledge, including "the wisdom of the traditions", to their proper role.
In the light of that knowledge, a most interesting consequence of the convenience paradox emerges in the light of day—that overcoming egocentricity (the value that binds us to power structure) also directly obstructs our pursuit of wholeness. And hence that in an informed society, our inner quest for personal wholeness, is perfectly confluent with our outer quest for systemic wholeness.
Lao Tzu (often considered as the progenitor of Taoism) appears in holotopia as an icon for using knowledge to understand "the way" to wholeness ("tao" literally means "way"). He is often pictured as riding a bull, which signifies his tamed ego.