Holotopia: Collective mind

H O L O T O P I A:    F I V E    I N S I G H T S

Collective mind

The printing press revolutionized communication, and enabled the Enlightenment. But we too are witnessing a similar revolution—the advent of the Internet, and the interactive digital media. Are we really calling that a pair of candle headlights?

We look at the way in which this new technology is being used. And at the principle of operation that underlies this use. Without noticing, we have adopted the principle of operation that suited the old technology, the printing press—broadcasting. But the new technology, by linking us together in a similar way as the nervous system links the cells in an organism, enables and even demands completely new modalities of collaboration. Imagine if your own cells were using your nervous system to merely broadcast data! In a collective mind, broadcasting leads to collective madness—and not to "collective intelligence" as the creators of the new technology intended.

Stories

We are in an emergency

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 but less known issue. Our point was that, metaphorically speaking, pressing the gas pedal and rushing forward (writing up, publishing and broadcasting our ideas and opinions) was out of tune with the nature of our situation. Our situation demands that we stop and take care of a structural issue. The stories are shared here.

Academic publishing has no effect

Wiener's paradox

We use this keyword, the Wiener's paradox, and the associated thread, to point to a general phenomenon—that academic publishing, especially when it offers ideas that can and should have a large social impact, tends to remain without effect on public opinion and policy (it was told here). The story begins with Norbert Wiener giving, in 1948, in essence the same message that we have been echoing with our Modernity ideogram—namely that our systems lack the steering and control that would make them whole or viable. Then comes Erich Jantsch, to connect this insight with the mission of The Club of Rome, and do what was necessary to take care of the problem. The story ends with Ronald Reagan obliterating their efforts—not with the strength of argument, but by having simply incomparably more media visibility or "air time" than our two academic heroes. This situation has the irony of a paradox because Norbert Wiener's core message was that academic publishing has no effect, because our communication-and-control system is broken; and yet he committed his own insight to that same broken system.

What do we need to do to break this spell?

The new information technology was intended to be the remedy

The in principle answer to this question was given by Vannevar Bush, at the time the academic strategist par excellence, already in 1945 (as we summarized here. Doug Engelbart and his SRI team provided a de facto answer, in 1968, which was also 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. The longer story will be presented in the book tentatively titled "Systemic Innovation", and subtitled "The future of democracy". A short outline of Engelbart's story and vision is provided here. We also offer two 15-minute videotaped lectures presenting an introduction to Engelbart's vision, and explainingits essence.