Holotopia
Contents
- 1 HOLOTOPIA
- 1.1 An Actionable Strategy
- 1.2 Imagine...
- 1.3 Our proposal
- 1.4 A vision
- 1.5 Five insights
- 1.5.1 Power structure insight (analogy with Industrial Revolution)
- 1.5.2 Collective mind insight (analogy with Gutenberg Revolution)
- 1.5.3 Socialized reality insight (analogy with Enlightenment)
- 1.5.4 Narrow frame insight (analogy with Scientific Revolution)
- 1.5.5 Convenience paradox insight (analogy with Renaissance)
- 1.6 Large change is easy
- 1.6.1 The "course" is a paradigm
- 1.6.2 "A way to change course" is in academia's hands
- 1.6.3 "Human quality" is</em the key</h3> But what about culture? What about the "human quality", which, as we have seen, Aurelio Peccei considered to be the key to reversing our condition? On the morning of March 14, 1984, the day he passed away, Peccei dictated to his secretary from a hospital bed (as part of "Agenda for the End of the Century"): "Human development is the most important goal." We can put this "humanistic" perspective on our map by looking at it in the "evolutionary" way, as Erich Jantsch called it. Jantsch explained this way of looking through the metaphor of a boat (representing a system, which may be the natural world, or our civilization) on a river. The traditional science would position us above the boat, and have us look at it "objectively". The traditional systems science would position us on the boat, to seek ways to steer it effectively and safely. The "evolutionary" perspective invites us to see ourselves as—water. To acknowledge that we are the evolution! By determining how we are as 'water', the "human quality" determines our evolutionary course. The power structure insight showed that when we navigate the evolutionary stream by aiming to advance "our own" position—we unavoidably become part of the power structure; we create the systems that create problems. To put our two pivotal themes together, notice that changing the relationship we have with information should be dramatically easier for us than it was in Galilei's time—when it meant risking one's life or worse. The academia, not the Inquisition, is in change. But here's the rub: By being in charge, the academia is also part of the power structure! To see what this means practically and concretely, follow us through a thought experiment: Imagine that an academic administrator, let's call him Professor X, has just received a knowledge federation proposal. (We say "a" proposal, because proposals of this kind were advanced well before we were born.) What would be his reaction? When we did this thought experiment, Professor X moved on to his next chore without ado. We have an amusing collection of anecdotes to support that prognosis. And anyhow, why would Professor X invest time in comprehending a proposal of this kind, when he knows right away, when his body knows (see the socialized reality insight), that his colleagues won't like it. When there is obviously nothing to be gained from it. At the university too we make decisions by "instrumental thinking"; by taking recourse to embodied knowledge of "what works". We have seen (while developing the power structure insight) that this ethos breeds the power structure; that it binds us to power structure. This ethos is blatantly un-academic. If Galilei followed it, the Inquisition would still be in charge; if Socrates did that, there would be no academia. The academic tradition was conceived as a radical alternative to this way of making choices—where we develop and use ideas as guiding light. And so was knowledge federation. We coined several keywords to point to some of the ironic sides of academia's situation—as food for thought, and to set the stage for the academic dialog in front of the mirror. From Newton we adapted the keyword giant, and use it for visionary thinkers whose contributions must be taken into account to see the emerging paradigm (Newton reportedly "stood on the shoulders of giants" to "see further"). But as our anecdotes illustrate, the giants are now routinely ignored. The academic 'turf' has been minutely divided; a giant would take much too much space! From Johan Huizinga we adapted the keyword homo ludens, and use it (along the lines explained in socialized reality insight) to point out that we are not only the homo sapiens, as we tend to believe. The homo ludens (man the game player) does not seek information and knowledge to orient himself; he learns what works from experience, and does that. He doesn't look for comfort in understanding, but in career success. We addressed our proposal to academia, which we defined as "institutionalized academic tradition". It goes without saying that the academic tradition's all-important role is to help us become the best homo sapiens we can be, and must be. But as we have seen, the power structure ecology declines all institutions toward the homo ludens devious course. The question must be asked: Has the academic tradition been institutionalized in a way that avoids this problem? Or is even the academia now on the homo ludens evolutionary course? </div> </div> A strategy
- 1.7 A mission
- 1.8 Tactical assets
- 1.9 Art
- 1.10 Five insights
- 1.11 The mirror
- 1.12 The dialog
- 1.13 Keywords
- 1.14 Ten themes
- 1.15 Stories
- 1.16 The elephant
- 1.17 Books and publishing
- 1.18 Prototypes
HOLOTOPIA
An Actionable Strategy
Imagine...
You are about to board a bus for a long night ride, when you notice the flickering streaks of light emanating from two wax candles, placed 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.
The Modernity ideogram renders the essence of our contemporary situation by depicting our society as an accelerating bus without a steering wheel, and the way we look at the world, try to comprehend and handle it as guided by a pair of candle headlights.
Our proposal
Its essence
The core of our proposal is to change the relationship we have with information.
What is our relationship with information presently like?
Here is how Neil Postman described it:
"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."
Its substance
What would our handling of information be like, if we treated it as we treat other human-made things—if we took advantage of our best knowledge and technology, and adapted it to the purposes that need to be served?
By what methods, what social processes, and by whom would information be created? What new information formats would emerge, and supplement or replace the traditional books and articles? How would information technology be adapted and applied? What would public informing be like? And academic communication, and education?
The substance of our proposal is a complete prototype of the handling of information we are proposing—by which initial answers to relevant questions are given, and in part implemented in practice.
We call the proposed approach to information knowledge federation when we want to point to the activity that distinguishes it from the common practices. We federate knowledge when we make what we "know" information-based; when we examine, select and combine all potentially relevant resources. When also the way in which we handle information is federated.
The purpose of knowledge federation is to restore agency to information, and power to knowledge.
Like architecture and design, knowledge federation is both an organized set of activities, and an academic field that develops them.
Our call to action is to institutionalize and develop knowledge federation as an academic field and real-life praxis (informed practice).
We refer to our proposal as holoscope when we want to emphasize the difference it can make.
The purpose of the holoscope is to help us see things whole.
We use the Holoscope ideogram to point to this purpose. The ideogram draws on the metaphor of inspecting a hand-held cup, in order to see whether it is broken or whole. We inspect a cup by choosing the way we look; and by looking at all sides.
Its method
While the characteristics of the holoscope—the design choices or design patterns, how they follow from published insights and why they are necessary for 'illuminating the way'—will become obvious in the course of this presentation, one of them must be made clear from the start.
In the holoscope, the legitimacy of multiple ways to look at a theme is axiomatic.
The ways of looking are called scopes. The scopes and the resulting views have similar role and meaning as projections do in technical drawing.
This modernization of our handling of information, distinguished by purposeful, free and informed choice or creation of the way we look at the world, has become necessary, suggests the Modernity ideogram. But it also presents a challenge to the reader—to bear in mind that the resulting views are not "reality pictures", contending for that status with one other and with the conventional ones.
To liberate our worldview from the inherited concepts and methods and allow for deliberate choice of scopes, we used the scientific method as venture point, and modified it by taking recourse to insights reached in 20th century science and philosophy.
Science gave us new ways to look at the world: The telescope and the microscope enabled us to see the things that are too distant or too small to be seen by the naked eye, and our vision expanded beyond bounds. But science had the tendency to keep us focused on things that were either too distant or too small to be relevant—compared to all those large things or issues nearby, which now demand our attention. The holoscope is conceived as a way to look at the world that helps us see any chosen thing or theme as a whole—from all sides; and in proportion.
A way of looking or scope—which reveals a structural problem, and helps us reach a correct assessment of an object of study or situation—is a new kind of result that is made possible by (the general-purpose science that is modeled by) the holoscope.
We will continue to use the conventional way of speaking and say that something is as stated, that X is Y—although it would be more accurate to say that X can or needs to be perceived (also) as Y. The views we offer are accompanied by an invitation to genuinely try to look at the theme at hand in a certain specific way (to use the offered scope); and to do that collectively and collaboratively, in a dialog.
All elements in our proposal are deliberately left unfinished, as a collection of prototypes. Think of them as composing a 'cardboard model of a city', and a 'construction site'. By sharing them we are not making a case for a specific 'city'—but for 'architecture' as academic field, and real-life praxis.
A vision
A difference to be made
Suppose we used the holoscope as 'headlights'; what difference would that make?
The Club of Rome's assessment of the situation we are in provided us a benchmark challenge for putting our proposal to a test.
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 call to action:
"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."
This conclusion, that we are in a state of crisis that has cultural roots and must be handled accordingly, Peccei shared with a number of twentieth century thinkers. Arne Næss, Norway's esteemed philosopher, reached it on different grounds, and called it "deep ecology".
In "Human Quality", Peccei explained his call to action:
"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".
A different way to see the future
Holotopia is a vision of a future that becomes accessible when proper 'light' has been 'turned on'.
Since Thomas More coined this term and described the first utopia, a number of visions of an ideal but non-existing social and cultural order of things have been proposed. In view of adverse and contrasting realities, the word "utopia" acquired the negative meaning of an unrealizable fancy.
As the optimism regarding our future waned, apocalyptic or "dystopian" visions became common. The "protopias" were offered as a compromise, where the focus is on smaller but practically realizable improvements.
The holotopia is different in spirit from them all. It ismore attractive than the futures the utopias projected—whose authors either lacked the information to see what was possible, or lived in the times when the resources we have did not exist. And yet the holotopia is readily attainable—because we already have the information and other resources that are needed for its fulfillment.
The holotopia vision is made concrete in terms of five insights.
The five insights resulted when we applied the holoscope to illuminate five pivotal themes; "pivotal" because they determine the "course":
- Innovation—the way we use our growing ability to create, and induce change
- Communication—the social process, enabled by technology, by which information is handled
- Foundation—the fundamental assumptions based on which truth and meaning are socially constructed; which serve as foundation to the edifice of culture; which determine the relationship we have with information
- Method—the way in which truth and meaning are constructed in everyday life; or the way we look at the world, try to comprehend and handle it
- Values—the way we "pursue happiness"; or choose "course"
In each case, when we 'connected the dots' (combined the available insights to reach a general one), we were able to identify a large structural defect. We demonstrated practical ways, partly implemented as prototypes, in which those structural defects can be remedied. We showed that such structural interventions lead to benefits that are well beyond curing problems.
The five insights establish an analogy between the comprehensive change that was germinating in Galilei's time, and what is in store for us now.
Power structure insight (analogy with Industrial Revolution)
We looked at the systems in which we live and work as gigantic socio-technical 'mechanisms'—which determine how we live and work; and what the effects of our efforts will be.
When "free competition" or the market controls our growing capability to create and induce change, the systems in which we live and work evolve as power structures—and we lose the ability to steer a viable course. A dramatic improvement in efficiency and effectiveness of human work, and of the human condition at large, can result from systemic innovation, where we innovate by making things whole on the large scale, where socio-technical systems or institutions are made whole.
Collective mind insight (analogy with Gutenberg Revolution)
We looked at the social process by which information is handled.
Hear Neil Postman observe:
“We’ve entered an age of information glut. And this is something no culture has really faced before. The typical situation is information scarcity. (…) Lack of information can be very dangerous. (…) But at the same time too much information can be dangerous, because it can lead to a situation of meaninglessness, of people not having any basis for knowing what is relevant, what is irrelevant, what is useful, what is not useful, where they live in a culture that is simply committed, through all of its media, to generate tons of information every hour, without categorizing it in any way for you.”
We saw that the new media technology is still being used to make the social process that the printing press made possible (publishing or broadcasting) more efficient; which breeds glut! In spite of the fact that core elements of the new technology have been created to enable a different social process—whose results are function and meaning; where technology enables us to think and create together, as cells in a single mind do.
Socialized reality insight (analogy with Enlightenment)
We looked at the foundation on which truth and meaning are socially constructed, which we also call epistemology. It was the epistemology change—from the rigidly held Biblical worldview of Galilei's prosecutors—that made the Enlightenment possible; that triggered comprehensive change.
We saw that a similar fundamental change, with similar consequences, is now mandated on both fundamental and pragmatic grounds.
Narrow frame insight (analogy with Scientific Revolution)
We looked at the method by which truth and meaning are socially constructed.
Science eradicated prejudice and expanded our knowledge—where the methods and interests of its disciplines could be applied. We showed how to extend the scientific approach to knowledge, to questions we need to answer.
Convenience paradox insight (analogy with Renaissance)
We looked at the values that determine the way we "pursue happiness"; and our society's "course".
We showed that when proper 'light' illuminates the 'way'—our choices and pursuits will be entirely different.
Large change is easy
The "course" is a paradigm
The changes the five insights are pointing to are inextricably co-dependent.
We cannot, for instance, replace 'candles' with 'lightbulbs' (as the collective mind insight demands), unless systemic innovation (demanded by the power structure insight) is in place. And without having a general-purpose method for creating insights (which dissolves the narrow frame). We will remain unknowing victims of the convenience paradox, as long as we use 'candles' to illuminate the way.
We cannot make any of the required changes without making them all.
We may use Wiener's keyword "homeostasis" negatively—to point to the undesirable property of systems to maintain a course, even when the course is destructive. The system springs back, it nullifies attempted change.
It is because of this property of our global system that comprehensive change can be easy—even when smaller and obviously necessary changes may be impossible.
"A way to change course" is in academia's hands
Paradigm changes, however, have an inherent logic and way they need to proceed.
A "disease" is a living system's stable pathological condition. A "remedy" is what has the power to change it. In systems terms, the remedy is a "systemic leverage point". And when to heal a social system is our goal, we seek to change "the mindset or paradigm out of which the goals, rules, feedback structure arise"; and before all to restore "the power to transcend paradigms", as the most powerful way to intervene.
By changing the relationship we have with information we change the paradigm.
First of all because (as the five insights showed) it is a simple change from which all other requisite changes follow. We abolish reification—of worldviews and institutions in general, and of journalism, science and other inherited ways of looking at the world in particular—and we instantly see the imperative of changing them by adapting them to the purposes that must be served.
And then also because (as the socialized reality insight showed) this change is mandated on both fundamental and pragmatic grounds. Because it follows as a logical consequence of what we already "know".
This "way to change course" should be especially easy, because it is a fundamental change, which is in control of publicly sponsored intellectuals—the academia.
We don't need to occupy Wall Street.
The university, not the Wall Street, is the systemic leverage point par excellence.
For us who are in academic positions already, who are called upon to make this timely change—there is nothing we need to occupy. What we must do to "change course" is already part of our occupation.