Holotopia

HOLOTOPIA

An Actionable Strategy

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

Socialized reality

Scope

"Act like as if you loved your children above all else",

Greta Thunberg, representing her generation, told the political leaders at Davos. Of course the political leaders love their children—don't we all? But what Greta was asking them to do was to 'hit the brakes'; and when the 'bus' they are believed to be 'driving' is inspected, it becomes clear that its 'brakes' too are missing. The job of the politicians is to keep the 'bus on course' (the economy growing) for yet another four-year term. Changing the 'course', or the system, is well beyond what they can do, or even conceive of.

The COVID-19 pandemic may require that we update some of our systems, and ways in which we collaborate—now.

So who, what institution or system, will lead us through our next evolutionary task—where we will learn how to recreate the systems in which we live and work; first in knowledge work, and then beyond?

Both Jantsch and Engelbart believed that "the university" would have to be the answer; and they made their appeals accordingly. But the universities ignored them—just as they ignored Bush and Wiener before them, and others who followed.

Why?

Isn't restoring agency to information and power to knowledge a task worthy of academic attention?

It is tempting to conclude that the university institution followed the general trend, and evolved as a power structure. But to see solutions, we need to look at deeper causes.

We readily find them in the way in which the university institution developed.

The academic tradition did not originate as a way to practical knowledge, but to freely pursue knowledge for its own sake, in a way that is disciplined only by the knowledge of knowledge (what we learned about the meaning and purpose of information and knowledge, and about their relationship with truth and reality), which the academic tradition has been developing since antiquity. Wherever the free-yet-disciplined pursuit of knowledge took us, we followed. And as we pointed out in the opening paragraphs of this website, by highlighting the iconic image of Galilei in house arrest,

it was this free pursuit of knowledge that led to the last "great cultural revival".

We asked:

Could a similar advent be in store for us today?

The key to the answer is in the historicity of "the relationship we have with knowledge"—which we let Stephen Toulmin represent. And that is what we here focus on.

To reach an answer, we follow the lead that Stephen Toulmin left us in the above excerpt, quoted from his last book, "Return to Reason". At the point where the modern university was taking shape, it was the Church and the tradition that had the prerogative of telling the people how to conduct their daily affairs and what to believe in. And as the image of Galilei in house arrest might suggest—they held onto that prerogative most firmly! But the censorship and the prison could not stop an idea whose time had come. They were unable to prevent a completely new way to explore the world to transpire from astrophysics, where it originated, and transform first our pursuit of knowledge—and then our society and culture at large.

It is therefore natural that at the universities we consider the curation of this approach to knowledge to be our core role in our society. At the universities, we are the heirs and the custodians of a tradition that has historically led to some of the most spectacular evolutionary leaps in human history. Naturally, we remain faithful to that tradition. We do that by meticulously conforming to the methods and the themes of interests of mathematics, physics, philosophy, biology, sociology, philosophy and other traditional academic disciplines, which, we believe, embody the highest standards of knowledge of knowledge. People can learn practical skills at professional schools. It is the university education and the university education alone that can give them up-to-date knowledge of knowledge—and with it the ability to pursue knowledge in the right way in any domain of interest.

We must ask:

Can the evolution of the academic tradition, and of our handling of information and knowledge, continue still further?

Could the academic tradition, once again, give us a completely new way to explore the world?

Can the free pursuit of knowledge, curated by the knowledge of knowledge, once again lead to "a great cultural revival" ?

Can "a great cultural revival" begin at the university?

Diagnosis

I the course of our modernization, we made a fundamental error—whose disastrous long-term consequences cannot be overstated.

From the traditional culture we have adopted a myth far more disruptive of modernization than the creation myth—the myth is that "truth" means "correspondence with reality"; and that the purpose of information, and of our pursuit of knowledge, is to "know reality objectively", as it truly is.

During modernization, we only learned to use this myth in a new way. As the members of the homo sapiens species, we've been told, we have the evolutionary prerogative to reach "objective" or "true" knowledge by using our rational faculties (not by Divine revelation)—and based on it, to direct our personal affairs and our society, by making rational decisions. Give us a "true picture of reality"—and we'll know what is best for us, and what is to be done.

It may take a moment of reflection to see how much this myth permeates our popular culture, our society and institutions; how much it marks "the relationship we have with information"—in all its various manifestations.

This error has subsequently been detected and reported, but not corrected. (Yes, once again we witness that the link between information and action has been severed.)

It has turned out that it is simply impossible to open up the 'mechanism of nature', and verify that our ideas and models correspond to the real thing!

The "reality", the 20th century's scientists and philosophers found out, is not something we discover; it is something we construct.

Our "construction of reality" turned out to be a complex and most interesting process, in which our cognitive organs and our society or culture interact. From the cradle to the grave, through innumerably many "carrots and sticks", we are socialized to organize and communicate our experience in a certain specific way.

The vast body of research, and insights, that resulted in this pivotal domain of interest, now allows us and indeed compels us to extend the power structure view of social reality a step further, into the cultural and the cognitive realms.

In "Social Construction of Reality", Berger and Luckmann left us an analysis of the social process by which the reality is constructed—and pointed to the role that "universal theories" (which determine the relationship we have with information) play in maintaining a given social and political status quo. An example, but not the only one, is the Biblical worldview of Galilei's persecutors.

To organize and sum up what we above all need to know about the nature of socialization, and its relationship with power, we created the Odin–Bourdieu–Damasio thread, consisting of three short real-life stories or vignettes. (The threads are a technical tool we developed based on Vannevar Bush's idea of "trails"; we call them "threads" because we further weave them into patterns.) These insights are so central to holotopia, that we don't hesitate to summarize them also here, however briefly.

The first, Odin the Horse story, points to the nature of turf struggle, by telling a story that illustrates the turf behavior of horses.

The second story, involving Pierre Bourdieu observing the modernization of Algerian society during and after the 1954-62 Algerian War of Independence, invite us to look at the human culture as, in effect, a turf—similar to the meadow where Odin the Horse history is played out, only more complex—as much as our culture is more complex than the culture of the horses. This story allows us to see how much of what we call "culture" can emerge through sophisticated turf struggle—where no more than "symbolic power" is used.

Bourdieu used interchangeably two keywords—"field" and "game"—to refer to this "turf". Calling it a field invokes the association with something akin to a magnetic field, which orients people's seemingly random or "free" behavior, even without anyone noticing. Calling it a game suggests something that structures or "gamifies" our social existence, by giving everyone a certain role. Those roles, Bourdieu observed, tend to be transmitted from one body to the next—usually without anyone noticing the subtle power play, or "turf behavior", they engender (Bourdieu used the keyword "habitus" to point to the embodied predispositions to act and think in a certain way, which correspond to a role). Everyone bows to the king, and I naturally do that too. For the socialized experience—that our social and natural "reality" is the only one that is possible (which plays a key role in socialization, determining the very structure and the rules of the game), Bourdieu used the keyword doxa.

Antonio Damasio, as cognitive neuroscientist, completes this thread by explaining that we, humans, are not the rational decision makers, as the founding fathers of the Enlightenment made us believe. Each of us has an embodied cognitive filter, which determines what options we rationally consider. This cognitive filter can be programmed through socialization. Damasio's insight shows that socialization, and socialized reality construction, carry far more power than the creators of our laws and institutions were able to imagine.

But socialized reality construction is not only or even primarily an instrument of power struggle. It is, indeed, also the way in which the traditional culture reproduces itself and evolves. It has served as 'cultural DNA', the only one that was available.</p>

We may now perceive the earlier culture's "realities"—the belief in God and the Devil and the eternal punishments—as instruments of domination; and we may also see them as instruments of socialization, by which certain cultural values, and certain "human quality" are maintained. Both are correct, and both are relevant.

By creating for us a whole other "reality"—based on the scientific, rational exploration of natural phenomena—the modernity committed two errors.

The first was that the nature and the value of the cultural heritage—and most importantly the roles it played—were ignored, and abandoned to disrepair. A brief thought experiment—an imaginary visit to a cathedral—will help us see what this entails. There is awe-inspiring architecture; frescos of Old Masters on the walls; we hear Bach cantatas; and there's of course the ritual. All this comprised an ecosystem for people to live and grow—the destruction of which (lacking the equivalent of CO2 and temperature measurements) we are not even able to perceive, and much less to control.

The second is that the creation of symbolic power has been abandoned to new power structures (here the insights and the story of Edward Bernays, Freud's American nephew who became "the pioneer of modern public relations and propaganda", is iconic).

This diagnosis suggests itself.

The Enlightenment did not liberate us from power-related reality construction, as it is believed.

The socialized reality constructions only changed hands—from the kings and the clergy, to the corporations and the media.

Ironically, the carefully cultivated academic self-identity—as "objective" observers of reality—keeps us, academic researchers, and information and knowledge at large, on the 'back seat'—and without real impact.

Remedy

In the spirit of the holoscope, we introduce an answer by a metaphorical image, the Mirror ideogram. As the ideograms tend to, the Mirror ideogram too renders the essence of a situation, in a way that points to a way in which the situation may need to be handled—and to some subtler points as well.

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The point here is that the free pursuit of knowledge for its own sake—the pursuit that distinguishes the academic tradition—has brought us to a certain singular situation—or metaphorically, in front of the mirror. The mirror is inviting us, and indeed compelling us to interrupt what we are doing, and once again self-reflect—about the nature, purpose and limits of our knowledge; just as Socrates was inviting his contemporaries at the point of the Academia's inception, many centuries ago.

When we look at the mirror, we see ourselves in the world that surrounds us. We are then impelled to acknowledge that we are not above the world, looking at it "objectively".

END OF REIFICATION

BEGINNING OF ACCOUNTABILITY

Two consequences are intended.

Mirror ideogram

The first consequence is the ending of reification. We realize, by self-reflecting in front of the mirror, that the ways in which we look at the world, and the systems that organize us together, are no "objectively" given and only "discovered". We, humans, created them.

The second consequence is the beginning of accountability. The world we see ourselves in is a world that needs new ideas, new ways of thinking, and of being. It's a world in dire need for creative yet structured and accountable change. We see the key role that information and knowledge have in that world, and that situation.

We see ourselves holding the key.

We propose that this situation can and needs to be resolved—in an academically rigorous and socially accountable way—by, metaphorically speaking walking right through the mirror. And to begin a completely new academic and social reality on the other side.

Philosophically, and practically, this seemingly impossible or 'magical' feat, to walk through the mirror, can be done in only two steps.

The first is to use what philosopher Villard Van Orman Quine called "truth by convention"—which we adapted as one of our keywords.

Quine opened "Truth by Convention" by observing:

"The less a science has advanced, the more its terminology tends to rest on an uncritical assumption of mutual understanding. With increase of rigor this basis is replaced piecemeal by the introduction of definitions. The interrelationships recruited for these definitions gain the status of analytic principles; what was once regarded as a theory about the world becomes reconstrued as a convention of language. Thus it is that some flow from the theoretical to the conventional is an adjunct of progress in the logical foundations of any science."

But if truth by convention has been the way in which the sciences repair their logical foundations—why not use it to update the logical foundations of knowledge work at large?

As we are using this keyword, the truth by convention is the kind of truth that is common in mathematics: "Let X be Y. Then..." and the argument follows. Insisting that x "really is" y is obviously meaningless. A convention is valid only within a given context—which may be an article, or a theory, or a methodology.

The second step is to use truth by convention to define an epistemology

We defined design epistemology by turning the core of our proposal (to change the relationship we have with information—by considering it a human-made thing, and adapting information and the way we handle it to the functions that need to be served) into a convention.

In the "Design Epistemology" research article (published in the special issue of the Information Journal titled "Information: Its Different Modes and Its Relation to Meaning", edited by Robert K. Logan) where we articulated this proposal, we made it clear that the design epistemology is only one of the many ways to manifest this approach. We drafted a parallel between the modernization of science that can result in this way and the emergence of modern art: By defining an epistemology and a methodology by convention, we can do in the sciences as the artists did—when they liberated themselves from the demand to mirror reality, by using the techniques of Old Masters.

As the artists did—we can become creative in the very way in which we practice our profession.

To complete this proposal—to the academia to 'step through the mirror' and to guide our society to a new reality—we developed the two prototypes—of the holoscope (to model the academic reality on the other side) and of the holotopia (to model the social reality).

We bring these lofty and "up in the air" possibilities down to earth, by discussing one of the more immediately practical consequences of the proposed course of action.

Beck continued the above observation:

"Max Weber's 'iron cage' – in which he thought humanity was condemned to live for the foreseeable future – is for me the prison of categories and basic assumptions of classical social, cultural and political sciences."

Reification is what keeps us in 'iron cage'.

Truth by convention is an academically rigorous way out.

The keywords we've been using all along are all defined by convention.

The discussions of two examples—of design and implicit information—which we offer separately, will illustrate subtle yet central advantages this approach offers. Each of those keywords has been proposed to corresponding academic communities, and well received. Hence they are also prototypes—illustrating the possibility and the need for assigning purpose, by convention, to already existing academic fields and practices.