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. If our work has become incomparably more efficient and yet we've remained busy—should we not see whether they might be wasting our time? And if our best efforts result in problems rather than solutions—should we not check whether they might be causing those problems?

Furthermore—as the above image may also illustrate—the systems in which we live and work determine our life quality most directly. How well are they serving us in that role?

Power structure wastes resources

A costly oversight

While the ingenuity of our innovation has been focused on small gadgets we can hold in our hand—those 'gigantic machines' constitute a proportionally more important, and yet overlooked creative frontier. How much is this oversight costing us?

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

As always, our stories are intended to vividly illustrate rather than rigorously prove the proposed views.

David McCandless: The Billion-Dollar-o-Gram 2009

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 familiar "global issues" ("to lift one billion people out of extreme poverty", "African debt", "save the amazon"...) seem insignificant in comparison.

Largest costs are systemically caused

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 that they were "inside jobs", as the title of Ferguson's second film suggested.

Fuller may have been right

In the late 1960s, Buckminster Fuller predicted that by the end of the century science and technology would have advanced enough to enable us, the people on the planet, to put an end to scarcity. And that our core challenge would be to reconfigure the use and distribution of those resources—which now sapped through scarcity-based competition.

What we have just seen suggests that Fuller may have been right.

In 1969 Fuller proposed to the American Senate a computer-based solution called the World Game. Its whose purpose was to enable the global policy makers to see the world as one, and collaborate on allocating and sharing its resources, instead of competing.

Power structure causes devolution

Competition vs. collaboration

But what is really the power structure? While our understanding will gradually deepen throughout this walk of our initial sketch of the holotopia, what's we've just seen might already suggest that power structures are the systems in which we live and work, or simply the "structures", that emerge when we are pursue egotism instead of wholeness, when we compete when we should collaborate, when we rely on "the invisible hand" and shun the awareness of purpose.

This popular myth, that competition (rather than informed co-creation) leads to the best possible world, seems to follow from Darwin's evolution theory. Isn't that the way in which the nature does her creation?

"Unfortunately, the evidence, such as it is, is against this simple-minded theory", warned Norbert Wiener.

What should we, really, learn from Darwin about cultural and social evolution? Richard Dawkins answered this question in his 1976 book "The Selfish Gene". His point, which subsequently led to a variety of applications and a new research field called "memetics", was that the survival of the fittest favors the fittest or best adapted gene (or the fittest "meme", when it is cultural or social evolution we are talking about); not any sort of utility or perfection.

What systems in which we live and work is this sort of evolution likely to produce? The Paradigm Strategy Poster (which was one of the forerunner prototypes to Holotopia) we used the homsky–Harari–Graeber thread to answer this question.

The "fittest" is not the best

We used the real-life history of "Alexander the Great" as a parable, as told by David Graeber, because it has all the elements we may want, to illustrate our points: The "fittest" system of its era (Alexander's army, with its corresponding "business model") was turning free people into slaves, destroying societies and cultures, homes, monasteries and palaces... and it even had "financial innovation" as one of its core elements!

The stories associated with the names of Noam Chomsky and Noah Yuval Harari allowed us to point to the dynamics that underlie the power structure devolution. We'll return to them when discussing the socialized reality insight.

Are you working for a psychopath?

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

As a law professor, Bakan explained how the modern corporation with time evolved to become the most powerful institution on the planet. And how—through a few centuries of legal maneuvering—it acquired the legal status of a person, but without the corresponding accountability. If the corporation is a person, then what sort of person is it? In his documentary, and the book that preceded it, Bakan showed that the corporation has all the characteristics that qualify a psychopath.

Power structure is us

"We have seen the enemy, and he is us!"

Pogo, Walt Kelly's exceedingly cute cartoon hero, said this long ago; and it stuck.

But could it be real?

What we must know about the Holocaust

In modernity, Zygmunt Bauman observed, cruelty and evil morphed. They became systemic; they became "an emergent property" of the systems in which we live and work. All that is needed for cruelty and evil to happen is that perfectly ordinary and well-intentioned people, folks like you and like us, "do their jobs".

Bauman is credited for observing that even the concentration camps were only extreme cases of this much more general tendency, which manifested itself in a variety of places and forms throughout the 20th century.

Bauman was alone to see that. Historian Omer Bartov wrote:

"There is a common tendency to view the Holocaust as a well-ordered plot, in which antisemitism led to Nazism, Nazism practiced genocide, and both were destroyed in a spectacular ‘happy end‘. This is a tale most people would like to believe, university students and filmgoers, book readers and television viewers."

"Bartov would prefer that we do not believe this," A. D. Moses commented in a book review, "because it 'fails to recognize that this extreme instance of industrial killing was generated by a society, economic system, and civilization of which our contemporary society is a direct continuation'. It leads to a 'false understanding of the present', and thereby 'legitimize(s) inaction and indifference, conformity and complacency'.”

A bold new meme is ready to emerge

Toward the end of his career, nearly ninety years old Zygmunt Bauman was invited to give a high-profile lecture at the University of Oslo. He interrupted a long applause by which the overfilled university's largest auditorium greeted him, to solemnly declare that he had nothing of value to tell us. When he was a young man, Bauman explained, he believed that the grave problems the humanity was facing could be solved. But now that he's grown old, he sees the problems getting worse; and no solution in sight.

We shall see now that things only take time. That Bauman's all-important insight is catching on. Not only in academia, as we have just seen, but also in the arts.

The way of the artist is different from the way of the philosopher. The artist does not analyze; she simply sees what goes on, what is "in the time" and struggles to find a voice, and acquire citizenship rights.

And the artist has a different way to reach out to the public. The philosopher speaks to a community of the elect; the artist speaks to everyone—by rendering ideas directly, in ways that make them palpable, visible, and real.

"The Reader" is a case in point

The movie "The Reader" is a case in point.

We meet Hanna, The Reader's main character (superbly brought to life by Kate Winslet's Academy Award winning role), when she helps Michael (the main male protagonist), who just contracted scarlet fever, to return home. A bit later we get to know that she's also a tram conductor, about to be promoted for her spotless performance. Who would in her character recognize a former concentration camp guard?

Hanna also performs admirably during the high-profile court trial where she is one of the defendants. She's the one who answers truthfully, without scheming to improve her image, and reduce her sentence. The passions of the daily news readers and the court audience were inflamed by the image of concentration camp prisoners burning to death in a burning church. "Why didn't you unlock the doors? Why didn't you let the people out?"

Hanna is the only one to answer; and she does that in the manner of pointing to the obvious: "We were guards; our job was to guard the prisoners. We couldn't just let them escape. We were responsible for them. (...) If we'd opened the doors, there would have been chaos. How could we restore order?

"If people like you don't learn from what happened to people like me—then what the hell is the point of anything?" This was told to Michael by his law professor, who had obviously been a grownup in the war; and who obviously shared Bauman's insight, and undertook to share it with a mere handful of students, who signed up for his seminar. But the same could have been told by Zygmunt Bauman; and by Sidney Pollack, who co-produced "The Reader". We did not learn, The Reader warns us. This warning is issued by the closing scenes of the film, when the only survivor of the church event, who was then a girl, rejects Hanna's humble plea for forgiveness or reconciliation. The woman proclaims that "nothing" was to be learned from the concentration camps. As a Holocaust surviver she deserves all compassion. And respect. And yet the setting she's in—a New York mention loaded with antiques—suggests that she might be part of some contemporary power structure. No, there is is no room for suspicions of antisemitism; Pollack, just as Bauman's, is ethnically Eastern-European Jewish. Something far more profound, and more important, is at play.

If you are in doubt whether the unfortunate condition that the power structure condemned us to was Pollack's real interest, see this trailer of his first directorial success, "They Shoot Horses, Don't They". In The Reader—which was hislast Academy Award nominated project—Pollack naturally aimed at a deeper understanding of causes.

Pollack's movie, just as Bernhard Schlink's novel on which it was based, was criticized on the grounds of presenting the culprits in an unjustifiably positive light. Bauman's—and the movie's—point was entirely missed.

So yes, Bauman's meme is ready to emerge. But it did not emerge yet. It is an issue without a name; a cause without citizenship rights.

This meme can make a difference

Tangled up in yesterday's worldviews, issues, and rights and wrongs, we are about to commit a completely new, and history's largest, kind of cruelty. Not a genocide—but of a biocide; and a geocide!

Can we help Bauman's insight be seen in the light of day? And make a difference?

Systemic innovation is the key

Erich Jantsch saw what needed to be done

In our collection of parabolic stories, Erich Jantsch represents a 20th century thinker who, having become familiar with The Club of Rome's timely mission in 1968, clearly saw what needed to be done.

Alex King, who with Peccei co-founded The Club of Rome, and who was then the scientific leader of the OECD in Paris, had good reasons to invite exactly Jantsch to deliver the opening keynote at The Club of Rome's opening. One of them was that, for the OECD, Jantsch had just completed an extensive study of how different countries go about directing technological innovation. And directing technological innovation was, needless to say, was what giving a direction to our metaphorical 'bus' was really all about.

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Our society needs a new capability—to update the systems in which we live and work. To recreate them, continuously, by combining the available knowledge, and technology. Jantsch called this new capability, this 'power structure, "systemic innovation", and we adopted that as one of our keywords.

Following The Club of Rome's inaugural meeting, Jantsch conducted a sequence of practical, strategic steps which had to be done if the "problematique" was to be resolved; see also these comments. But for interesting reasons beyond this brief summary, already in The Club of Rome's first large work meeting, in 1970 in Bern, this initiative took a different turn from what Jantsch and his immediate collaborators intended. Shall we conclude that "the rest is history"?

Design for evolution

The holotopia must also credit Erich Jantsch for another theme, which was the focus of his last decade of life and work. Jantsch understood, namely, that the best or perhaps the only practical way to intervene into large socio-technical systems was to intervene in their evolution. Or as he suggested in the title of one of his books, to "design for evolution".

In addition to understanding evolution, intervening into socio-systemic evolution required an entirely new way of being creative. Jantsch explained it by using the metaphor of a boat (representing a human system or the human system) in a river (representing the evolution). The traditional sciences would tend to position themselves above the boat and the river, and aim to observe their behavior in an "objective" way. The traditional cybernetics or systems science would position itself on the boat, and find better ways to steer it. In the evolutionary approach, however, we see ourselves as the river. We are evolution—and our task is to present ourselves to it so that it may proceed in the best way it can.

As we shall see in a moment, design for evolution, and participating in evolution, is what the Holotopia project is about.

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

Our invisible 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. We are proposing to change the very nature of political action.

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 not only possible and legitimate, but also necessary.

A signature theme in knowledge federation is to combine the most basic insights emanating from distinct academic fields and other traditions, to create even more basic insights. The power structure construction involved a combination of the basic insights from artificial intelligence, artificial life and stochastic optimization, to show why spontaneously emerging structures can evolve to have characteristics which we normally ascribe only to living beings, endowed with intelligence and purpose (see Chapter Four of the book manuscript Information Must Be Designed; the password for opening the chapters is Dubrovnik). <p>Here, however, it will be sufficient to illustrate the basic idea and the dynamics of the power structure by two metaphorical images.

Power structure as 'magnet'

Imagine us people as small magnets. Think of the magnetic field of the Earth as providing us a "natural" orientation—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 perceived "their own interests" differently, created a different field of their own, by alining themselves together. As now more and more people align themselves to this new field, the field becomes stronger—and ultimately becomes so strong that the original field of the Eart can no longer even be felt.

This metaphor suggests, and we shall see later why this is the case, that the power relationships that bind the power structure together tend to be invisible, or subtle. And that the power structure can subtly orient our seemingly random or "free" behavior—and reorient us completely without us noticing.

A still subtler point is that the power we are awarded by surrendering our own power to the power structure is an illusionary one; we can enjoy it only as long as we remain aligned.</em> <p>This metaphor may also helps us understand why Erich Jantsch and so many of the 20th century's leading edge thinkers were ignored: Not only were they aligned with another 'magnetic field'—but they also struggled to realign others accordingly.

Power structure as 'cancer'

The power structure needs not be a recognizable entity; it is deformity of a recognizable entity, or technically a pattern. It is also a way of looking at the issues of power and justice, which allows us to see more than we saw before; to "see the enemy". Imagine it as a social-systemic cancer—a deformity in a social organism's healthy tissues and organs. This deformity can grow beyond bounds and sap the organism's vitality, because the organism's immune system fails to recognize it as a threat, and considers it as the organism's healthy tissues and organs.

Politics beyond "us and them"

The power structure view of turns the conventional idea of power and politics on its head. When we see ourselves as "the enemy"—who is there to blame? Who is there to fight against?

According to the conventional idea, in every political power struggle there is "our side", and there's "the other side". At the end of the game, some of us will be winners, others will be losers. But in the power structure view of politics, it's all of us against the power structure. Collaboration, and self-organization, are our way to victory. And if we lose—all of us will be losers!

Systemic innovation

The systemic innovation is the remedy to power structure. It means using our creative capabilities to make things whole. It means 'driving' in the new direction, which the holotopia's rule of thumb is pointing to.