Powered by ingenuity of innovation, the Industrial Revolution revolutionized the efficiency of human work. Where could the next revolution of this kind be coming from?

System ideogram

We look at the systems in which we live and work. Imagine them as gigantic machines, comprising people and technology. Their function is to take people's daily work as input, and turn it into socially useful effects.

While the ingenuity of our innovation has been focused on small gadgets we can hold in our hand—we have overlooked this incomparably more important creative frontier.

We will here be taking about the very heart of our matter: Innovation, understood as "using our creative abilities", is what drives our civilization or 'bus' or societal and cultural evolution forward. The value or the rule of thumb we are using to direct our creativity is to rely on free competition, or the market. How well does this serve us?

Power structure wastes resources

A costly oversight

How much is ignoring "the systems in which we live and work" costing us?

On Page 4 of the article The Game-Changing Game–A Practical Way to Craft the Future we answered this question by a summary of our Ferguson–McCandless–Fuller thread, of which we here provide highlights.

The costs are systemically caused

A quick look at David McCandless' Billion-Dollar-o-Gram 2009 will show that the costs of two issues ("Worldwide cost of financial crisis" and "Iraq & Afganistan wars total eventual cost") dominate the image so dramatically, that the costs of issues such as "to lift one billion people out of extreme poverty", "African debt" and to "save the amazon" seem insignificant in comparison.

We tell the story of Charles Ferguson's two award-winning documentaries to highlight—as he did in his films—that those two issues were systemically caused. Or in other words "inside jobs", as the title of Ferguson's second film suggested.

Fuller may have been right

Having predicted that by the end of the century science and technology would have advanced sufficiently to enable us, the people on the planet, to "end scarcity" and scarcity-driven competition. The other two stories in this thread suggest that Fuller may have been right.

In which case our real problem would be the system by which the use of our resources are directed. And the very values or the rule of thumb used.

In 1969 Fuller was proposing to the American Senate his a computer-based solution called the World Game, whose purpose was to enable the global policy makers to see the world as one, and collaborate instead of competing.

Power structure devolution

Competition vs. collaboration

We rely on "the survival of the fittest" or the "free competition", to direct our creative efforts, give direction to our 'bus', and even decide how the systems in which we live and work are to be structured. How well does this serve us?

On The Paradigm Strategy Poster (which was one of the forerunner prototypes to Holotopia) we used the homsky–Harari–Graeber thread to provide a poignant answer to this all-important question. Once again we provide only highlights.

The "fittest" systems are not the best

The real-life history of "Alexander the Great", as told by Graeber, has all the elements we may want from a parable: The "fittest" system of its era (Alexander's army, with its corresponding "business model") was destroying freedom, culture, and life itself. It even had "financial innovation" as one of its core elements!

We supplemented a reflection on Joel Bakan's "the Corporation", to show that while today the most powerful power structure may look entirely different than it did twenty-five centuries ago, its essential nature has remain unchanged.

The stories of Noam Chomsky and Noah Yuval Harari allow us to deepen our understanding of the dynamics that underlie the power structure devolution. We'll return to them when discussing the socialized reality insight.

power structure as evil doer

The enemy is us

"We have seen the enemy, and he is us" said famously Pogo, Walt Kelly's cartoon hero. A funny-enough idea for a cartoon; but could it be real?

Cruelty has been modernized

The cruelty in modernity has changed its form, observed Bauman. It no longer requires cruel people; "normal" people, "doing their jobs"—within the structure of a modern organization, will do just fine.

Perhaps the most daring of Zygmunt Bauman's aring ideas is that even the concentration camps were only extreme cases of cruelty that resulted in this way.

This has not been understood

The movie "The Reader" allows us to extend Bauman's observations. And indeed in several most interesting ways.

By telling the story of a woman who, as a concentration camp guard, was part of an unthinkable cruelty because she was "only doing her job", and because "otherwise there would be chaos", the movie gives a vivid confirmation of Bauman's ideas.

Then there is scapegoating. As this film showed, while the order of things or the power structure was as it was, people simply adjusted to it and obeyed it. When, however, the order of things changed, they woke up as if from a dream—and started looking for a scapegoat. The culprit ended up being XX—perhaps the most naive and relatively most honorable of them all.

Finally, and perhaps the most striking, were the critical reactions to this film. While its Wikipedia page listed a number of descriptions, and quotations of critical responses, there is not a single word about this film's real and all-important theme. An issue to which we've given the name power structure—and endeavor now to legitimize it as an issue, and perhaps as the issue.

Systemic innovation as solution

Erich Jantsch's insight

Having delivered the opening keynote at the inaugural meeting of The Club of Rome, Erich Jantsch clearly saw what needed to be done, if the "problematique" was to be resolved (see it outlined here and here).

Our society needs a new capability—to update the systems in which we live and work. Jantsch called it "systemic innovation", and we adopted from him this keyword.

We let Jantsch be the symbol of a missing link between two bodies of work and lines of interest: cybernetics or the systems sciences, and the need to make our civilization "sustainable". In this present holotopia prototype, those interests are symbolized respectively by Norbert Wiener and Aurelio Peccei.

Power Structure ideogram

The Power Structure ideogram depicts the power structure as an entity of a completely new kind.

The dollar sign in the ideogram represents the instruments of power as we are accustomed to perceive them: money, weapons, censorship, dictatorship...

The stethoscope represents health or wholeness, to begin with our own—which, in holotopia, you've already learned to perceive as indistinguishable from the wholeness of our institutions and other systems in which we live and work, and from the wholeness of our bio-physical life-support systems.

The book represents our culture in a most general sense, which includes our ideas about the world, ethical principles, laws and ways of handling information.

The point made by the Power Structure ideogram is that those three entities are so closely related, that they need to be perceived as a single entity. But that their relationships are not discernible by the naked eye; and that therefore suitable information, or the holoscope, needs to be used to make them visible.

A bit simpler and still correct interpretation would be to consider the dollar sign as representing just power; and to consider the stethoscope and the book as representing the 'hardware' and the 'software' of our society-and-culture. The message of the ideogram will then be that—in subtle ways, which need to be carefully understood or 'illuminated'—the power interests are capable to corrupt, and in effect co-opt the systems in which we live and work, and even the values and ideas that directly govern our own behavior.

Power structure

Seeing the "enemy"

Every genuine revolution—and the holotopia is not an exception—includes a change of the way in which the issues of power, freedom and justice are perceived. Even nuances can make a difference. Just recall, for instance, the difference that was made by changing the meaning of the word "men", in its motto "All men are created equal" of the world's oldest living democracy, to include also black men, and women.

The power structure, however, is not a small change. We are talking about changing the very idea of "power holder"; of our potential political "enemy"—toward whom our precaution, and political action, need to be directed.

To create a whole new entity, which is not a visible object but a construction—and make it the central theme of the age-old human quest for freedom and justice—may at first seem implausible; even preposterous. It will take more than a moment of thought, in the light of the evidence shared with all five insights and even a bit more, to fully comprehend why this is perfectly legitimate; and the sweeping consequences it is leading us to.

A signature theme in knowledge federation is to combine the most basic insights reaching us from distinct fields of interest, to create an even more basic insight. The power structure construction involved a combination of the most basic insights from artificial intelligence, artificial life and stochastic optimization, to show why spontaneously emerging structures can evolve to have characteristics of living beings, endowed with intelligence and purpose—even without anyone's intention, or even awareness of its existence. A more complete explanation is given in the book manuscript Information Must Be Designed (the password for opening the chapters is Dubrovnik)—where the first three chapters explain the construction of new 'headlights', or of what we here call the holoscope; and where the fourth chapter shows why this new approach to knowledge is a necessary part of our society's 'immune system'—because without it, we cannot even see our enemy!

Here, however, we will illustrate the basic idea and the dynamics of the power structure by two metaphorical images. And we already see some of the explanatory and predictive power of this new way of looking.

Power structure as 'magnet'

Imagine us people as small magnets. Think of the magnetic field of the Earth as providing us a "natural" orientation—symbolizing the way we need to be aligned, to support the wholeness of our planetary and other systems.

Imagine that some of the magnets detached themselves from this field, and having perceiving "their own interests" differently, created a different field, by alining themselves together. As more and more people align themselves to this new field, the field becomes stronger—so that ultimately than the original orientation cannot even be felt.

This simplistic image illustrates several properties of the power structure, For instance that the power relationships are not visible but subtle. The 'field' just subtly orients the seemingly random or free movement of the magnets. And yet after many such subtle redirections—the result is that everyone is aligned, without even noticing that.

Another point made is that the greater power that we get by aligning ourselves to the power structure is an illusionary power—we only get to partake in the power of the power structure, by surrendering our own power to it. We enjoy the illusion of power only as long as our behavior is compliant to the interests of the power structure. <p>This simple model also helps us understand how Erich Jantsch and (as we shall see again and again in this presentation) so many of the 20th century's leading edge thinkers got ignored: They did not align themselves with the power structure. They were not only aligned with another 'magnetic field'—but they were also doing their best to realign others accordingly. But alas—they just didn't have enough power to do that.

Power structure as 'cancer'

It needs to be carefully understood that the power structure is not a recognizable entity, but a pattern. This can easily be understood if we imagine it as social-systemic cancer—which is also not a distinct entity, but a deformation of an organism's healthy tissues and organs. A cancer can grow beyond bounds and sap the organism's vitality, because the organism's immune system is failing to recognize it as a threat, and treats it as it does the organism's healthy tissues and organs.

Our challenge and opportunity will then be to find remedies to this pervasive systemic illness.

The enemy is us

The power structure model turns the conventional idea of power and politics on its head. We see that we are "the enemy". Our social order of things, our culture, values, ideas...

However angry we may feel, there is nobody to blame. On the contrary—we are all in this together.

According to the conventional idea, in every political or power game there are winners and there are losers. There's our side, and there is "them". In this emerging scenario, all of us are losers! Those who see themselves as winners—do so because the power structure created their ideas of what winning and losing are about. It is indeed difficult to imagine a rational argument where anyone's "winning" is compatible with the kind of futures that the power structures are now leading us toward.

Systemic innovation

The systemic innovation is, simply, the antidote to power structure. It means re-aligning ourselves to the systemic purpose; it means "making things whole".