Holotopia: Power structure

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

Power structure

At the turn of the 20th century, it appeared that the technology would liberate us from drudgery and toil, so that we may engage in finer pursuits such as human development. But we seem to be no less stressed and busy! What happened with all the time we've saved?

We look at the systems in which we live and work. Imagine them as gigantic machines, comprising people and technology, whose function is to take our daily work as input, and turn it into socially useful effects. If we are stressed and busy—should we not see if they might be wasting our time? And our best efforts result in problems rather than solutions—should we not see whether they might be causing those problems?

Stories

Power structure wastes resources

We have the resources needed to take care of world's problems. The roots of those problems are now in the power structure.

The Ferguson–McCandless–Fuller thread is intended to serve as a parable, pointing to the wastefulness of some of our core systems (finance, and governance tainted by "special interests"). See it outlined here and here.

Power structure causes devolution

An even deeper, or even more pivotal issues, is the manner in which the systems in which we live and work evolve. "The survival of the fittest", we seem to believe, will take care of that. But will it, really?

The insight we need from the studies of Darwinian evolution is that it favors (as Richard Dawkins pointed out) the best adapted gene; or meme—when we apply it to understanding social and cultural evolution.

The Chomsky–Harari–Graeber thread is also intended to serve as a parable, pointing to a sobering conclusion that this sort of study leads us to: The social-systemic "survival of the fittest" will tend to favor aggressive systems, that are damaging to culture, and to ourselves. Wee it outlined here. Make sure to process also our commentary of Joel Bakan's "The Corporation", which shows that while the results of this systemic devolution may look different in modernity, the pathological nature of its outcome has remain unchanged.

Systemic innovation is the key

Norbert Wiener's insight

In the present holotopia prototype Norbert Wiener is an iconic representative of cybernetics, and of the systems sciences in general. We let Wiener represent a large body of academic insights, leading to the conclusion we rendered as the Modernity ideogram, the bus with candle headlights: To be viable or "sustainable", a system must have suitable vision and steering (the name "cybernetics" suggests a scientific study of control and controllability). In the last chapter of his 1948 seminal Cybernetics, of which we provide a copy here, starting from the last paragraph on Page 158, Wiener presents a counterargument to what has to date grown to become the neoliberal dogma—that the best 'headlights and steering' (for which Wiener uses the technical keyword "homeostasis") are what "the invisible hand" of the market provides.

Cybernetics was envisioned as a transdisciplinary scientific field that would provide our society the insights it needed for its now most urgent task—of restructuring our core systems, so that they may become capable of fulfilling their functions in the larger wholes they compose together.

Wiener based part of his argument against "the invisible hand" on the theory of games. A related curiosity will serve to further illustrate our main point. Subsequent to the publication of Cybernetics, research in a subarea of game theory now called "prisoner's dilemma" virtually exploded, resulting in well over one thousand research articles. What we as society, however, needed from this large body of research (but failed to receive) is coded in the story used to define the Prisonner's dilemma (see it in the opening paragraphs of the [the simple message corresponding Wikipedia page]), which needs to be read as a parable. The story explains why what is still today considered as "rational choice" can result in an outcome that is inferior for all players—compared to the situation that would result if they cooperated.

But this is, once again, the insight that motivates the holotopia.

By providing all these prototypes and stories, we'd like to show just how much this inferior way of making choices has become common. And how incredibly inferior the situation that resulted is, compared to the one we can create together!

Erich Jantsch's insight

Jantsch also served as an active link between two insights and lines of interest—represented in the holotopia prototype by Norbert Wiener and cybernetics, and by Aurelio Peccei and The Club of Rome—namely that to be able to "change course", our society eeds "headlights and steering".

Having delivered the opening keynote at the inauguration meeting of The Club of Rome, in 1968 in Rome, Jantsch was well aware that a capability we as society are lacking—to update or re-create the systems in which we live and work—would be the key to solutions. Immediately, Jantsch undertook to do what was obviously needed (see it outlined here).

Social consequences of power structure

Zygmunt Bauman's insight

Zygmunt Bauman's observations about how the nature of evil and cruelty changed in modernity is of our central interest. Even the Holocaust, Bauman observed, may be seen as a metaphor for (what we are calling) power structure—where even the worst nightmare can be the result of no more than everyone doing "his job".

Bauman's centrally important keyword "adiaphorisation" may be translated into a more modern parlance as "rational choice" or "objective criteria": We are only "doing our job"; "reducing costs"; increasing "scientific productivity"...

Power structure dynamics in popular culture

The movie "The Reader" presents a concretization and illustration of Bauman's ideas. The curious fact that this most significant aspect of this film remained virtually unnoticed by critics is also worth highlighting. Kate Winslet, in her Academy Award winning role, portrays a person who became part of something horrid because it was "her job"; which she performed conscientiously, because otherwise "there would be chaos". As The Reader movie vividly puts forth, when the power structure changes, and the uncanny sides of the old order of things are seen in the light of day—we wake up as if from a dream, and begin to look for a scapegoat.

In this way we fail to receive an all-important message about our social psychology and its relationship with power—which we'll elaborate on, by federating suitable insights from the humanities, in Socialized reality.

Power structure and knowledge federation

Knowledge federation's history

By knowledge federation we here man of course not only our initiative, but the whole history—which in our own telling begins with Vannevar Bush, and features prominently Doug Engelbart, Erich Jantsch and others. And ending with the contemporary history of our initiative.

When the dots are connected and we see the whole—this story is a fascinating example pointing to the following possibilities, which we here name as positive statements, following our usual procedure:

• The academic discipline is (must be seen as) a power structure—protecting its members, and eliminating the outstanders; even when they have something incredibly important to contribute
• At the same time, the academic discipline is not nice to its own people either; people can be hugely overworked, stressed, competing with one another—for what effect?

Ideogram

System ideogram

The System ideogram suggests that our institutions or more generally (socio-technical) systems, or the power structures, need to be perceived as gigantic mechanisms; and also handled accordingly (adapted to their purpose).

The ideogram also suggests that the power structures form an environment by which our life quality is determined, and in which our human quality grows or decays.

Keywords

Power structure

Every genuine revolution—and our proposed revolution in knowledge and awareness is not an exception—is also a revolution of the way in which power relationships, or "justice", are perceived and handled. We coined this keyword to point out where the next such revolution may be coming from.

George Bernard-Shaw's dictum is familiar:

“All professions are conspiracies against the laity.”

"The conspiracies refer to the methods used by professions to acquire prestige, power and wealth", explains Wikipedia.

The power structure keyword allows us to extend his insight, by observing that the professions can, and surprisingly often also are, conspiracies against the professionals themselves, as well! And indeed in two ways:

• By making the professionals compete with one another for no better reason than their position within the profession
• By leaving the work undone—and hence creating an overall system that is not whole, from which we all (and hence the professionals too) suffer

To fully understand the power structure concept, all five insights and some reflection will be necessary. But to begin with, consider the power structure as modeling the intuitive notions "power holder" and "political enemy" in a new way. While our ethical, legal and political sensibilities are tuned to power structures of the times gone by, completely new ones are now obstructing our freedom, threatening our future, and demanding attention.

Technically, the power structure is not a thing but a pattern. Anything can be looked at as power structure, and see to what degree it may have devolved as power structure. Hence the power structure concept can and needs to be applied to obviously useful systems. The point is not that they "are" a power structure, but to check to see if they may have developed power structure aberrations.

To develop this view of power, we wove together a number of insights emanating from both the humanities and the technical sciences. Most basic insights reached in artificial life, artificial intelligence and combinatorial optimization allowed us to explain why the power structure may evolve structure and behavior that make it resemble a purpose-oriented living organism—even without anyone's intention or even awareness of the power structure's existence.

The power structure may be understood as social-systemic cancer—a 'malignant' growth of otherwise normal and necessary societal 'tissues', which saps the 'organism's' vitality and majorly disrupts its wholeness.

Within the context of our holoscope prototype, the power structure definition has often served as a way to argue that the proposed approach to knowledge is a necessary element of our 'societal immune system', because without it we cannot even see 'the enemy'. See the blog post Holoscope for the Buckminster Fuller Challenge, where the history of the power structure definition with links is provided at the end. Have a look at the video teaser at the very beginning. The entire blog post we wrote when it turned out that, in spite of personal contacts with some of the BFC leaders, which led to our application, even this progressive group was unable to envision that innovation was needed not only in "green" technology, but also and indeed above all in socio–technology; which is of course what our proposal was about.

Systemic innovation

To restore agency to information, and power to knowledge, we must develop ways to extend them into systemic change. That is what systemic innovation is about.

We adopted this keyword, systemic innovation, from Erich Jantsch. He used it to point to the capability we are lacking, to become able to handle any of the large contemporary issues. Systemic innovation can be interpreted in two ways: As "making things whole", and as innovation on the scale of basic socio-technical systems. Both are needed to counteract the power structure devolution. See it outlined in our contribution "Enabling Social-Systemic Transformations" to "Transformation in a Changing Climate" academic conference.

Prototypes

Knowledge Federation transdiscipline

The Knowledge Federation transdiscipline is an early prototype of what Erich Jantsch was calling for—an academic institution that is capable of federating information into systems. The method we use is simple: We create a systemic prototype, and organize a transdiscipline around it to update it continuously, by weaving together relevant expertise. The Knowledge Federation initiates or bootstraps this approach by creating itself as a prototype.

This self-organization was initiated at Knowledge Federation's second biennial workshop in Dubrovnik in 2010, and announced publicly at our first international workshop, within the Triple Helix IX International Conference at Stanford University, in 2011. See the blog report with link to article here.

Healthcare as a Power Structure

Maintenance—as a rule of thumb and orientation—is so much more effective and so less costly than repair; why isn't our healthcare conceived accordingly?

Could even healthcare develop 'cancer'?

The "Healthcare as a Power Structure" model, which was part of our collaboration with Prof. Gunnar Tellnes who was then the President of the European Public Health Association, was an example, both of an application of the power structure theory, and our intervention in a real-life academic system. We proposed our methodology (polyscopy) to the European Association for the History of Health and Medicine as a way to extend their traditionally historiographic work by developing "laws of change" results. See the abstract.

As prototypes tend to, this prototype provides a template for other studies. It would, for instance, be of interest to our initiative to look at the academic discipline as a power structure.

The Game-Changing Game

Here is what we, as a human generation, need to make our first priority: To empower the coming generation to see and disarm the power structure. And in that way become capable of crafting their future. To update the systems in which we live and work. The Game-Changing Game was a system in which elders in power positions, called "Z-players", empower the younger (in life and career phase) "A-players" to "play their life and career games" by changing systems, instead of conforming to the existing ones. Hence The Game-Changing Game is a generic system for changing systems. See our brief outline, with links, here.

The Game-Changing Game was one of the experiments that led to holotopia.

The Club of Zagreb

The Club of Rome needs an update: Instead of trying to inform and convince people in power positions (whose very power comes from the power structure), The Club's members need to use their influence to empower the young ones to change the power structure. In 2012 we created The Club of Zagreb as prototype of such an update. See it described here.

Authentic Travel

All our prototypes can be seen as examples of systemic innovation in specific domains of application. We make systems or things whole by (1) identifying the changes that need to be made, (2) developing ways to do that, and (3) weaving the resulting design patterns together into a coherent prototype.

Since the beginning of civilization, people traveled to become acquainted with other cultures, and by so doing also with their own. But mass tourism, being more cost-effective, constituted a power structure devolution. Can this trend be reversed?

The Authentic Travel is a series of prototypes we developed for travel or tourism, which show how a redesign of the conventional corporate model may empower small economies and cultures, stimulate cultural exchange and post-war revitalization, and promote cultural and human authenticity. A summary is provided here.

Collaborology

Education, as our society's "reproduction system", is of course a natural way to intervene into social-systemic evolution. Can education cease being a preparation to join the power structure, and become an instrument of human development? See our educational prototype here.