The printing press revolutionized communication, and enabled the Enlightenment. But the Internet and the interactive digital media constitute a similar revolution. Hasn't the change we are proposing, from 'the candle' to 'the lightbulb', already been completed?

We look at the way in which this new technology is being used. It has remained broadcasting—which suited the printing press. But the new technology was created to enable us to think and create together; as cells in a human mind do.

Our collective mind needs structural change

Knowledge work has a flat tire

We used the brief thread under this title, consisting of two vignettes and a punchline, as a springboard story for launching our Silicon Valley presentation of Knowledge Federation in 2011. We offer it here for the same purpose. An academic and media situation related to the climate crisis, where two esteemed scientists contradict one another on an all-important issue, is described to point to another all-important issue that is less known: 'Pressing the gas pedal and rushing ahead' (publishing and broadcasting insights of leading scientists, even in the media) is unsafe and no longer a way to reach our destination. Our situation demands that we stop and take care of a structural problem. The stories are shared here.

The largest contribution to knowledge

In this story which we used to "evangelize" the inception of Knowledge Federation as a transdiscipline, the story of growth and fragmentation of sociology is used as a parable for the situation in academia at large. Its title is an adapted Pierre Bourdieu's observation, that structural change in sociology, toward making it capable of federating knowledge, might be the largest contribution to its knowledge. It remained to point out that this Bourdieu's observation is far more true when applied to our society at large. A description with links is provided here.

Observe that an even larger contribution to knowledge is possible—which can be achieved by adding to our academic repertoire of capabilities the capability to make structural updates to knowledge-work and other institutions. Which is exactly what our proposal, to institutionalize knowledge federation transdiscipline, is about.

Democracy needs 'headlights'

Communication is the system

It seems rather obvious that the natural "systemic leverage point", or place to begin "a great cultural revival", is to provide (a way to) information that can show the way (as we submitted at the Visions of Possible Worlds conference, at the Triennale di Milano in 2003, see the transcript here.)

But that is also the key insight Wiener was intended to communicate in the mentioned last chapter of his 1948 Cybernetics (a copy of which we provided here). The most elementary fact reaching us from cybernetics is that a system needs "communication (or feedback) and control" ('headlights' and 'steering') to be governable or viable. Communication, Wiener observed, is the system (being what enables a collection of disparate entities to function together as an entity).

We need "evolutionary guidance"

We have introduced Erich Jantsch as a link between the universe of the systems sciences, and the universe where The Club of Rome belongs, where the goal is to secure our civilization's future. Erich Jantsch's final message, however, may be summarized by the formula that intervening into (or "designing for") the evolution is the key to our contemporary situation (see our summaries here and here). Which is, once again, what the bus with candle headlights is pointing to (the 'way' that the 'bus' is following is our society's evolution).

"The invisible hand" won the argument

Coincidentally, Erich Jantsch passed away in the same year when Ronald Reagan became the US president—on an agenda opposite to his and wiener's.

Reagan did not win by the force of the argument, but by having incomparably more "air time" than our two academic heroes.

We may now see who 'keeps Galilei in house arrest', and how. Well before the advent of the Internet, Umberto Eco compared the New York Times and (then the main Soviet communist paper) Pravda in an interview, to argue that while in the latter censorship was achieved directly, in the former overabundance of information had the same effect.

Information technology was meant to be the remedy

Vannevar Bush's call to action

Wiener developed his argument in the last chapter of Cybernetics partly by quoting Vannevar Bush—at the time the academic strategist par excellence, who already in 1945 pointed to the issue at hand as the one to which the scientists must give the highest priority, (see our summary here).

Doug Engelbart's response

In 1968, Doug Engelbart and his SRI team provided demonstrated a prototype answer to Bush's call to action, which was well beyond what Bush was able to envision. The congruence between Engelbart's vision and Wiener's and Jantsch's is striking. We highlight it by showing the above four Engelbart's slides, which were intended to present his vision to the world at its 2007 presentation at Google. In Slide 3 Engelbart even used the metaphor of steering and headlights frame his call to action! The longer story will be presented in the book titled "Systemic Innovation", whose tentative subtitle is "The future of democracy". A short outline of Engelbart's story and vision is provided here. In 2013, Engelbart passsed away decorated and celebrated, but feeling himself a failure (as we explained here; his vision (whose essence we presented here) failed to be understood, or attended to.

Our civilization is like an organism that has recently grown beyond bounds ("exponentially")—and now represents a threat to its environment, and to itself. By a most fortunate mutation, this creature has recently developed a nervous system, which could allow it to comprehend the world and coordinate its actions. But it uses it only to amplify its most primitive, limbic impulses.

Collective mind

We use this keyword to point to the core of Doug Engelbart's vision, as rendered in the shown four slides. When each of us is connected through an interactive interface to a digital computer, and when those computers are linked together into a network, we are in effect connected as cells in a single nervous system are. Imagine if your own cells were using your nervous system to broadcast messages—and you will see why broadcasting on a collective mind leads to collective insanity, not to "collective intelligence" (capability to cope with the complexity and urgency of our problems) as Engelbart intended.