Imagine...

You are about to board a bus for a long night ride, when you notice two flickering streaks of light emanating from two wax candles, placed in the circular holes where the headlights of the bus are expected to be. Candles? As headlights?

Of course, the idea of candles as headlights is absurd. So why propose it? Because on a much larger scale this absurdity has become reality.

By depicting our society as a bus without a steering wheel, and the way we look at the world and try to comprehend it and handle it as a pair of candle headlights, the Modernity ideogram renders the essence of our contemporary situation.

Modernity ideogram

We need new 'headlights'

The way we see the world

The COVID-19 crisis and its fallout reminded us once again of the connectedness and the vulnerability of the human world. And of the importance of 'headlights'. This crisis is relatively minor—compared to the irreversible changes that are expected to result from, for instance, the climate change. Shall we, in absence of true understanding, resort to age-old scapegoating and blame "lazy people on welfare", immigrant workers, the 1%, the whites or the blacks? Or shall we see our situation in a way that will empower us to comprehend it truly, and resolve it by finding a new course?

We have 'candles' as 'headlights'

How exactly we ended up with a dysfunctional and obsolete way of comprehending the world is illuminating, and we must return to it, however briefly.

Around the middle of the 19th century, our societies began to change by a landslide: Our countries became democracies, our worldviews became scientific and secular, and our lifestyles became mechanized and modern. The way we looked at the world also changed—and then for about a century remained frozen!

During that century, our academic understanding of things of course continued to evolve. But it remained confined to disciplines, which grew and got fragmented into subspecialties, until they lost contact not only with the world at large, but also with one another. Entire academic fields failed to communicate to the world even their most basic insights.

Massive academic publishing made things worse.

And so did the new media, which got appropriated by commercial and superficial actors—who used them to appropriate the public's attention.

Neil Postman described the situation that resulted as follows:

"The tie between information and action has been severed. Information is now a commodity that can be bought and sold, or used as a form of entertainment, or worn like a garment to enhance one's status. It comes indiscriminately, directed at no one in particular, disconnected from usefulness; we are glutted with information, drowning in information, have no control over it, don't know what to do with it."

Neil Postman

The KF proposal

The goal of knowledge federation is to restore agency to information, and power to knowledge.

Imagine us as a collection of academic 'cells' who mutated in a new way. Having perceived our society as a bus with candle headlights, we perceived ourselves as (part of) those headlights. Naturally, we began to self-organize differently—to become 'lightbulbs', not 'candles'!

We understood, in other words, that we must use our creativity in a new way; not by merely observing and reporting—but by acting differently.

Knowledge federation concretely

We are proposing to establish knowledge federation as a new academic field, and a real-life praxis.

As "applied research", knowledge federation is intended to be the 'headlights'—and turn academic and other relevant insights into shared vision.

As "basic research", its function is to create the 'headlights'—and continue to recreate them continuously, to keep them in sync with relevant knowledge, technology, and our society's needs.

As a way to operationalize this proposal, we offer to

• establish knowledge federation as a transdiscipline—for which the prototype detailed on these pages is offered as a detailed explanation, and a template ready for implementation
• develop the holotopia prototype as a real-life initiative to change the way we as society see and handle our larger situation at hand, and information and knowledge in particuar—as described here

An application

The Club of Rome's assessment of the situation we are in, provided us with a benchmark challenge for developing the Holotopia prototype. Four decades ago—based on a decade of this global think tank's research into the future prospects of mankind, in a book titled "One Hundred Pages for the Future"—Aurelio Peccei issued the following warning:

"It is absolutely essential to find a way to change course."

Peccei also specified what needed to be done to "change course":

"The future will either be an inspired product of a great cultural revival, or there will be no future."

Aurelio Peccei

This conclusion, that our present crisis has cultural roots and must be handled accordingly, Peccei shared with a number of twentieth century's thinkers. Arne Næss for instance, Norway's esteemed philosopher, reached it on different grounds, and called it "deep ecology".

In "Human Quality", Peccei assessed our contemporary situation as follows:

"Let me recapitulate what seems to me the crucial question at this point of the human venture. Man has acquired such decisive power that his future depends essentially on how he will use it. However, the business of human life has become so complicated that he is culturally unprepared even to understand his new position clearly. As a consequence, his current predicament is not only worsening but, with the accelerated tempo of events, may become decidedly catastrophic in a not too distant future. The downward trend of human fortunes can be countered and reversed only by the advent of a new humanism essentially based on and aiming at man’s cultural development, that is, a substantial improvement in human quality throughout the world."

The Club of Rome insisted that lasting solutions would not be found by focusing on specific problems, but by transforming the condition from which they all stem, which they called "problematique".

We conceive the Holotopia prototype as a way to federate The Club of Rome's vision and mission.

A vision

What new 'course' shall we see, when we use knowledge federation to 'illuminate the way'?

The holotopia is an astonishingly positive future scenario.

This future vision is more positive than what the familiar utopias offered—whose authors lacked the information to see what was possible; or lived in the times when the resources we have did not yet exist.

When the evidence offered on these pages has been considered, it will be clear why holotopia is not only "the new black"—but also the new red; and the new green!

Unlike the utopias, the holotopia is readily realizable; we already have all that is needed for its fulfillment.

All we need to do to realize this vision, all that remains for us to do to "change course", is to follow a principle or a rule of thumb, which is suggested by the holotopia's very name.

We must see ourselves as parts in a larger whole; and act in ways that make this larger whole more whole.

But this is exactly the direction the Modernity ideogram is pointing to!

It is also a radical departure from our current course—which emerges as a result of everyone pursuing "his our own interests"; and trusting that "the invisible hand" of "free competition" will turn our self-serving acts into the greatest common good.

A strategy

We focus on "changing course"

What can make a large enough difference to really make a difference?

The holotopia strategy is suggested by its name—it is to focus on changing the entire order of things from which our problems emanate. As The Club of Rome recommended.

Such a strategy can and needs to be pursued through radically changed awareness and values. And through collaboration, not conflict.

We foster new thinking to enable solutions

Our value proposition is not to replace the most worthwhile initiatives that are focused on specific problems, but to complement them. And by doing that—to vastly augment their chances to succeed.

We begin with information

Just as building a house must begin with the foundations, changing the whole order of things has its own natural order in which it needs to proceed. As the Modernity ideogram suggested, to change course, we must begin by changing the illumination source, so that the new course may become visible. Since the "Age of Information" is now turning into "Anthropocene", it is high time to create the kind of information that can illuminate our way.

This strategy empowers us to leave for the moment the Wall Street bankers be, and focus our attention and action on the natural leverage point—the academia. Where the power is in the hands of knowledgeable, well-intentioned and publicly sponsored knowledge-work professionals.

We show that an academic revival is called for—for both intrinsic (or fundamental) and extrinsic (or pragmatic) reasons.

Five insights

The holotopia vision is made concrete in terms of five insights.

We look at five pivotal themes

When Peccei talked about "a great cultural revival", he was obviously referring to the the Renaissance—as the historical moment when the last comprehensive change of the human systems began. We refer to it by using the symbolic image of Galilei in house arrest—and carefully develop an analogy between that pregnant historical moment and our present times and conditions. The five insights explain why a similar change is ready to take place once again in our own time, by elaborating on the analogy between our times and conditions with each of the five specific changes of which the historical comprehensive change was composed:

• the Industrial Revolution
• the revolution in communication made possible by the printing press
• the empowerment of human reason to explore and comprehend the world
• the vast improvement in our ability to explore and comprehend the world, through science
• the liberation from the preoccupation with the afterlife, and empowerment to "pursue happiness" here and now

By radically improving the efficiency and the effectiveness of human work, the Industrial Revolution liberated our ancestors from toil, and enabled them to engage in a cultural revival. The power structure insight shows that in this process a peculiar oversight was made; and that a new wave of change with similar consequences is possible.

By radically improving communication, the printing press enabled a rapid dissemination of information, and growth of knowledge. The collective mind insight shows that the new media enable a similar revolution—where the improvement will not be only in the production of the volume of data, but also and most importantly in the organization of information; and in the quality of knowledge.

What Galilei before all stands for is a change of the foundations on which information and knowledge are created and handled—from an unreserved faith in the Scriptures, to an empowerment of reason to explore and understand the world. The socialized reality insight shows that an error has been made, and also academically discovered. The situation that resulted obliges us to once again liberate and empower the human reason—to make the kind of difference that now must be made.

Galilei also stands for the onset of science—as the method by which the human reason was empowered. The narrow frame insight shows that the scientific revolution remained confined to the natural world; and why the evolution of science can continue, and enable a revolution in the human world.

The Renaissance is, of course, most vividly remembered as an emancipation of the arts, and of the joy of living and human quality. The convenience paradox insight shows that once again our "pursuit of happiness" got stalled by a myth. And why a new Renaissance is ready to begin.

The sixth insight

The anomalies the five insights point to, and the corresponding solutions, are so closely inter-related that taking care of one necessitates resolving the others. In this way the sixth insight is reached:

Comprehensive change can be easy—even when smaller and obviously necessary changes may have proven impossible.

A new understanding of justice

Every genuine revolution is also a revolution in justice; not only in the way in which justice is handled, but also in the way in which it is conceived of. Galilei was in house arrest not only because his ideas were "heretical", but also and perhaps primarily because he was questioning the foundations on which the existing power relations depended.

Each of the five insights contributes a new piece also to that puzzle. When those pieces are put together, a completely new idea of justice and freedom, and what tends to obstruct them, results. We see who, or what, 'holds Galilei in house arrest' once again in our own time—even though the form and the means of oppression are entirely different than they were then.

Knowledge federation in a context

The five insights allow us to see and understand our knowledge federation proposal in a context.

The insights, and especially the points of evidence we bring up to make them clear and convincing, serve as "anomalies" (in Thomas Kuhn's usage of this word), which call for a "new paradigm" in knowledge work at large. In this context we present the main design decisions that led to knowledge federation, as well as some of the implementation details, as solutions, or as steps necessary for resolving the paradigm.

In this way, a case for academic revival is made—by showing that the new paradigm we are proposing has become necessary for both fundamental and pragmatic reasons.

At the same time, we provide sufficiently many technical details of our solution, to make the Holotopia prototype self-contained.