Holotopia

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

A method

We see 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."

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 of them, however, must be made clear from the start.

We look at all sides

Holoscope ideogram

If our goal would be to put a new "piece of information" into an existing "reality picture", then whatever challenges that reality picture would be considered "controversial". But when our goal is to see whether something is whole or 'cracked', then this attitude must be changed.

To see things whole, we must look at all sides.

Some of the views we are about to share may make you leap from your chair. You will, however, be able to calmly enjoy this presentation, if you bear in mind that while what is being presented is academically rigorous, but with a different idea of rigor (in the holoscope we take no recourse to "reality"; coexistence of multiple ways of looking at any theme or issues, which are called scopes, is axiomatic) we do not need to make that claim. And we are not making it! Consider what you are looking at as a cardboard map of a city, and a construction site—deliberately and necessarily unfinished, left in a form of sketches. By sharing it we are not making a case for building a specific city—but to develop 'architecture', as an academic field and a real-life praxis. And to use it to rebuild and revive whatever is now falling apart.

Holotopia is not our project; it is the project of our generation. It is what we owe to our next generation, and to our home planet. We have only given it a name, to expedite its development. And we are creating a space for it, where it can develop and make a difference.

Everything we are presenting is just prototypes. Our invitation is, to begin with, to a dialog about the holotopia vision they compose. A dialog—the change of attitude that brings us a significant distance into the emerging paradigm—is genuine sharing, communication and co-creation. It involves a genuine striving to overcome our socialized habits of thought to see things in new ways.

To show up in that co-creative dialog space wearing boxing gloves, to defend old worldviews and power relationships, would be as ill-advised as claiming, in an academic setting, that a certain claim must be true, because it was revealed to the author in a vision.

We modified science

To liberate our thinking from the 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 insights reached in 20th century 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.