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.

Modernity ideogram

Our proposal

In a nutshell

The core of our knowledge federation 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."

The objective of our proposal is to restore agency to information, and power to knowledge.

Neil Postman

In detail

What would it take to repair the tie between information and action?

What would information and our handling of information be like, if we changed the relationship we have with information and treated it as we treat other human-made things—if we adapted it to the purposes that need to be served?

What would our world be like, if academic researchers retracted the premise that when an idea is published in a book or an article it is already "known"? If the other half of this picture were treated with similar thoroughness as academic technical work? If the question "What do people actually need to know?" led to a "social life of information" that allows each of us to benefit from what the others have seen and understood; and our society to perceive the world correctly, and navigate it safely?

What would the academic field that develops this approach to information be like? How would information be different? How would it be used? By what methods, what social processes, and by whom would it 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 knowledge federation, by which those and other related questions are answered.

The Knowledge Federation prototype is conceived as a portfolio of about forty smaller prototypes, which cover the range of questions that define an academic field—from epistemology and methods, to social organization and applications.

We use our main keyword, knowledge federation, in a similar way as the words "design" and "architecture" are used—to signify both a praxis (informed practice), and an academic field that develops it and curates it.

Our call to action is to institutionalize and develop knowledge federation as an academic field, and as real-life praxis.

Technically, we are proposing a paradigm. The proposed paradigm is not in a specific scientific field, where paradigm changes are relatively common, but in "creation, integration and application of knowledge" at large.

A challenge

A proof-of-concept application

The Club of Rome's assessment of the situation we are in, provided us with a benchmark challenge for putting the proposed ideas 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."

Aurelio Peccei

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's 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".

Can the proposed 'headlights' help us "find a way to change course"?

Why did Peccei's call to action remain unanswered? Why wasn't The Club of Rome's purpose—to illuminate the course our civilization has taken—served by our society's regular institutions, as part of their function? Isn't this already showing that we are 'driving with candle headlights'?

If we used knowledge federation to 'illuminate the way'—what difference would that make?

The Holotopia project is conceived as a knowledge federation-based response to Aurelio Peccei's call to action.

We coined the keyword holotopia to point to the cultural and social order of things that will result.

To begin the Holotopia project, we are developing an initial prototype, which includes both a vision and a project infrastructure. That prototype is described on these pages.

A vision

The holotopia is not a utopia

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. But in view of adverse and contrasting realities, the word "utopia" acquired the negative meaning of an unrealizable fancy.

As the optimism regarding our future faded, apocalyptic or "dystopian" visions became common. The "protopias" emerged as a compromise, where the focus is on smaller but practically realizable improvements.

The holotopia is different in spirit from them all. It is a more attractive vision of the future than what the common utopias offered—whose authors either lacked the information to see what was possible, or lived in the times when the resources we have did not yet exist. And yet the holotopia is readily realizable—because we already have the information and other resources that are needed for its fulfillment.

The holotopia vision is made concrete, and substantiated or justified, in terms of five insights, as explained below.

Making things whole

What do we need to do to change course toward the holotopia?

From a comprehensive volume of insights from which the holotopia emerges as a future realistically worth aiming for, we have distilled a simple principle or rule of thumb—making things whole.

This principle is suggested by the holotopia's very name. And also by the Modernity ideogram: Instead of reifying our institutions and professions, and merely acting in them competitively to improve "our own" situation or condition, we consider ourselves and what we do as functional elements in a larger system of systems; and we self-organize, and act, as it may best suit the wholeness of it all—including, of course, our own wholeness.

Imagine if academic and other knowledge-workers collaborated to serve and develop planetary wholeness – what magnitude of benefits would result!

A method

Seeing things whole

"The arguments posed in the preceding pages", Peccei summarized in One Hundred Pages for the Future, "point out several things, of which one of the most important is that our generations seem to have lost the sense of the whole."

But to make things whole—we must be able to see them whole!

To highlight that the knowledge federation methodology described in the mentioned prototype affords that very capability, to see things whole, in the context of the holotopia we refer to it by the pseudonym holoscope.

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 characteristic, however, must be made clear from the start.

Looking in new ways

Holoscope ideogram

The key novelty in the holoscope is the capability it affords to deliberately choose the way in which we look at an issue or situation, which we call scope. Just as the case is when inspecting a hand-held cup to see if it is whole or cracked, and in projective geometry, the art of using the holoscope will to a large degree consist in finding a suitable way of looking. This is, of course, also suggested with the bus with candle headlights metaphor.

Especially valuable will turn out to be the scopes, and the corresponding views, which correct the way in which we see the whole thing, our "big picture"; they will be made accurate finding and using scopes (or aspects or 'projection planes') that reflect what our habitual way of looking made us ignore.

To liberate our thinking from the narrow frame of 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 state of the art insights in 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.

This capability to create views by choosing scopes, on any desired level of detail, adds to our work with contemporary issues a whole new 'dimension' or "degree of freedom"—where we choose what we perceive as issues, so that the issues can be resolved, and wholeness can be restored.

Thinking outside the box

That we cannot solve our problems by thinking as we did when we created them is a commonplace. But this presents a challenge when academic rigor needs to be respected.

When our goal is to put a new piece into an existing "reality picture", then whatever challenges the reality of that picture will be considered "controversial".

When, however, our goal is to "find a way to change course"—then challenging the "conventional wisdom" is our very job.

The views we are about to share may make you leap from your chair. You will, however, be able to relax and enjoy our presentation if you bear in mind its meaning and purpose.

While we did our best to ensure that the presented views accurately represent what might result when we 'connect the dots' or federate published insights and other relevant cultural artifacts, we do not need to make such claims; and we are not making them. It is a paradigm we are proposing; it is the methodology by which our views are created that gives them rigor—as "rigor" is understood in the paradigm.

The methodology itself is, to the best of our knowledge, flawlessly rigorous and coherent. But we don't need to make that claim either.

Everything here is offered as a collection of prototypes. The point is to show what might result if we changed the relationship we have with information, and developed, both academically and on a society-wide scale, the approach to information and knowledge we are proposing.

Our goal when presenting them is to initiate the dialogs and other social processes that constitute that development.

Five insights

Five Insights ideogram

Before we begin

What themes, what evidence and conclusions, what "new discovery" might have the force commensurate with the momentum with which our civilization is rushing onward, and have a chance to make it "change course"?

We offer these five insights as a prototype answer.

We could have called them "five issues"—because each of them discloses a large systemic issue, which underlies the observed problems or conventional issues, and requires to be recognized as an issue. We chose to call them insights (in the general spirit of holotopia), because each of these issues can be resolved; and because their resolutions lead to benefit that vastly surpass the solution to problems.

The five insights result when we use the holoscope to illuminate five pivotal themes:

• Innovation (the way in which we use our rapidly growing ability to create, and induce change); and its relationship with justice and power; or to use our metaphor, we look at the way our 'bus' is following, and how the way is being chosen
• Communication, and the way the information technology is applied, and its relationship with governance or democracy; or in other words, we look at the construction of our 'headlights'
• Foundations for creating truth and meaning (the fundamental premises that govern our work with information); here the focus is on the relationship we have with information, and he assumptions that determine it, or metaphorically on the question whether we should indeed consider those 'candles' are 'headlights', and adapt them to their purpose
• Method for creating truth and meaning; or metaphorically at the principle of operation of the 'headlights', whether 'electricity' or 'fire' is more appropriate
• Values, and more specifically the way in which we "pursue happiness"; or metaphorically whether 'driving with candle headlights' is at all taking us where we want to be going; or whether a whole new direction emerges when proper light is used

For each of those five themes we shall see that our conventional way of looking made us ignore a principle or a rule of thumb, which readily emerges when we 'connect the dots', i.e. when we combine the published insights and "see things whole". And that by ignoring and violating those principles, we have created deep structural problems ('crack in the cup'), which are causing what we perceive as "problems" or specifically as "global issues".

We shall then be able to perceive our problems as consequences or mere symptoms of deeper structural issues. And we shall see, a bit later, that those structural issues can resolved. And that by resolving them, much larger benefits will result than mere "solutions to problems" or freedom of symptoms.

In that way the holotopia vision will be made concrete and actionable.

We shall see, by connecting the five insights as dots, that the "new discovery" we need to make to radically change our situation is stupefyingly simple—it's the discovery of ourselves!

Since the key to it all will turn out to be to change the relationship we have with information, and be able to "see things whole", a case for our proposal will also be made.

In the spirit of the holoscope, we here only summarize each of the five insights as a big picture—and provide the supporting evidence and details separately.

Power structure issue

"Man has acquired such decisive power that his future depends essentially on how he will use it", observed Peccei. We look at the way in which man uses his newly acquired and rapidly growing power to innovate (create, and induce change). That is the way our civilization is following in its evolution, or metaphorically 'the itinerary' of our 'bus'—and we use the holoscope to illuminate it.

An easy observation will give us a head start: We use competition or "survival of the fittest" to orient innovation, not systemic insights and information. The popular belief that "the free competition" or "the free market" is our best guide makes our "democracies" elect the "leaders" who represent it. But is that belief warranted?

Genuine revolutions tend to include new ways to perceive the perennial issues of freedom and power, and the holotopia is not an exception. We offer this keyword, power structure, as a means to that end. Think of the power structure as a new way to conceive of the intuitive notion "power holder", who might obstruct our freedom, or be our political "enemy".

While the exact meaning and character of the power structure will become clear as we go along, imagine, to begin with, that power structures are institutions; or a bit more accurately, that they are the systems in which we live and work, which we'll here simply call systems. Notice that the systems have an immense power—first of all the power over us, because we have to adapt to them to be able to live and work; and then also the power over our environment, because by organizing us and using us in certain specific ways, they determine what the effects of our work will be. Whether the effects will be problems, or solutions.

How suitable are our systems for this all-important role?

Evidence, circumstantial and theoretical, shows that the systems waste a lion's share of our resources. That they cause our problems, and make us incapable of solving them.

The reason is that the evolution by "the survival of the fittest" tends to favor the systems that are by nature predatory, not the ones that are useful. This excerpt from Joel Bakan's documentary "The Corporation" (which Bakan as a law professor created to federate an insight he considered essential) explains how the corporation, the most powerful institution on our planet, evolved to be a perfect "externalizing machine", just as the shark evolved as a perfect "killing machine". ("Externalizing", as explained in more detail in the excerpt, means maximizing profits by letting someone else, notably the people and the environment, bear the costs.) This excerpt from Sidney Pollack's 1969 film "They Shoot Horses, Don't They?" will illustrate how the competitive environment our systems create for us to live and work in impacts our own condition.

So why do we put up with such systems? Why don't we treat them as we treat other human-made things—by adapting them to the purposes that need to be served?

The reasons are most interesting, and they'll be a recurring theme in holotopia.

One of them we have already seen: We don't have the habit or the means to see things whole. When we look in our conventional ways, we don't see the structure of our systems—just as we don't see the mountain on which we might be walking. Because of this natural limitation of our perception, even such uncanny errors as 'using candles as headlights' might develop on this large scale without us noticing.

A subtler reason why we tend to ignore the possibility of adapting the systems in which we live and work to their roles in larger systems, is that they perform for us an entirely different role—they give structure to our power battles and turf strifes. Within our system, they provide us "objective" and "fair" criteria to compete for positions; and in the world outside, they give our system a "competitive edge".

Our media agencies, to illustrate this by an example, cannot combine their resources to give us the awareness we need, because the media corporations compete with one another for our attention—and must be as "cost-effective" in that struggle as they can.

But the deepest and the most interesting reason is that our systems or power structures have the power to socialize us in ways that suit their interests. Through socialization, they can adapt to their interests both our culture and our "human quality".

A result is that bad intentions are no longer needed for cruelty and evil to result. The power structures can co-opt our sense of duty and commitment, and even our heroism and honor.

Zygmunt Bauman's key insight, that the concentration camp was only a special case, however extreme, of (what we are calling) the power structure, needs to be carefully digested and internalized: While our ethical sensibilities are focused on the power structures of the past, we are committing the greatest massive crime in human history (in all innocence, by acting through the systems we belong to).

Our civilization is not "on the collision course with nature" because someone violated the rules—but because we follow them.

The fact that we will not "solve our problems" unless we learned to collaborate and adapt our systems to their contemporary roles and our contemporary challenges has not remained unnoticed. Alredy in 1948, in his seminal Cybernetics, Norbert Wiener explained why competition cannot be relied on the role of 'headlights and steering'. Cybernetics was envisioned as a transdisciplinary academic effort to help us understand systems, and give them the kind of structure that will enable them to function—and us to have a future.

The very first step the founders of The Club of Rome's did after its inception in 1968 was to gather a team of experts, in Bellagio, Italy, and develop a suitable methodology. They gave "making things whole" on the scale of socio-technical systems the name "systemic innovation"—and we adopted that as one of our keywords.

Collective mind issue

If our key evolutionary task is to develop the ability to make things whole on the level of basic institutions or socio-technical systems—then where, with what system, should we begin?

Handling of information, or metaphorically our society's 'headlights', suggests itself as the answer for several reasons. One of them is that if we'll use information and not competition to guide our society's evolution, then our information will have to be entirely different.

Norbert Wiener contributed another reason, by observing that in all systems composed of self-governed individuals, communication is what turns those individuals into a system. The nature of communication determines what such a system will be like—and Wiener talked about the communication in the colonies of ants, bees and other animals to make that point.

We may now understand our bus with candle headlights, and without steering, in scientific or cybernetic terms. The complete title of Wiener's book was "Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine". The most basic insight we need to acquire from cybernetics is that to have "control" over its impact on its environment, by correcting its behavior, a system must have suitable communication (or technically "feedback"). In "Cybrnetics", Wiener used the technical keyword "homeostasis", which we may interpret as "sustainability". But the tie between information and action has been severed, Wiener too observed; and it needs to be restored, for "sustainability" to even be possible

To make that point, that the tie between information and action has been severed, Wiener cited an earlier work, Vannevar Bush's 1945 article "As We May Think", where Bush urged the scientists to make the task of revising their own system their next highest priority (the World War Two having just been won).

So why hasn't this been done?

"As long as a paradox is treated as a problem, it can never be dissolved," observed David Bohm. The reason for our inaction is, of course, that the tie between information and action has been severed. Wiener too entrusted his own results to this broken communication! We used this anecdote to point to a more general and pervasive anomaly in academic communication, which we are calling Wiener's paradox.

It may feel disheartening, especially to an academic researcher, to see the best ideas of our best minds unable to benefit our society; to see again and again—our portfolio has a wealth of examples—that when a researcher's insight challenges the "course", it as a rule remains ignored. But this quickly changes to optimism, when we look at the vast creative frontier this insight is pointing to—where we shall reinvent the very system by which we do our work; as the founding fathers of science did.

And optimism turns into enthusiasm, when we realize that core parts of contemporary information technology were created to enable such a development!

It is not completely true that Vannevar Bush's call to action was ignored. Douglas Engelbart heard it, and with his SRI team responded to it and developed a solution well beyond what Bush envisioned—and demonstrated them in their famous 1968 demo.

The point here is this: When we, humans, are connected to a personal digital device through an interactive interface, and when those devices are connected together into a network—then the overall result is that we are connected together in a similar ways as the cells in a human organism are connected by the nervous system.

Notice that all earlier innovations in this area—from clay tablets to the printing press—required that a physical medium that bears a message be reproduced and physically transported from one person to another. The new technology allows us to "create, integrate and apply knowledge" concurrently, as cells in a human nervous system do. We can now think and create—together!

This three minute video clip, which we called "Doug Engelbart's Last Wish", is an opportunity for a brief pause and reflection. Imagine the effects of improving the system by which information is produced and put to use; even "the effect of getting 5% better", Engelbart commented with a smile. Then he put his fingers on his forehead: "I've always imagined that the potential was... large..." The improvement that is possible is indeed not only large—it is qualitative; from a system that doesn't work, to a system that does. This possibility is mind-blowing, and well worth reflecting on.

Engelbart envisioned that this would allow us to comprehend our problems and to respond to them far more quickly than we do; or—as he phrased it. He foresaw that the collective intelligence that would result would enable us to tackle the "complexity times urgency of our problems", which he saw as growing "exponentially".

But to Engelbart's dismay, our new "collective nervous system" ended up being used to only broadcast data—to only implement the old processes and systems, which evolved through the centuries of use of the printing press, and make them more efficient.

The 'socio-technical lightbulb' was invented—and yet the 'electricity' ended up being used to do no more than create fancy 'candles'!

The above observation by Anthony Giddens points to the impact this has had on us as culture; and on "human quality". Dazzled by an overflow of data, in a reality whose complexity is well beyond our comprehsnsion—we have no other recourse but "ontological security". We find meaning in learning a profession, and performing in it a competitively.

But this is, of course, what binds us to power structure.

Instead of liberating us—the new information technology bound us to power structure even stronger!

Socialized reality issue

"Act like as if you loved your children above all else"

So our next question is who, that is what institution, will inform and initiate the next and most urgent task on our evolutionary agenda—where we shall learn how to update the systems in which we live and work, bu adapting them to their new roles, and our new challenges?

Both Erich Jantsch and Doug Engelbart believed that the answer would have to be "the university"; and they made their appeals accordingly. But they were ignored—and so were Vannevar Bush and Norbert Wiener before them, and Neil Postman and others that followed.

Why? Isn't restoring agency to information and power to knowledge a task worthy of academic attention?

It is tempting to conclude that the academia too followed the general trend; that the academic disciplines too evolved as power structures. But to see solutions, we need to look at deeper causes.

We did that in the very opening paragraph of this website, where our knowledge federation proposal is made and our prototype described. We did that to point to a novelty in our proposal (relative to those historical ones) that is easily missed: We not only presented an academically complete prototype of knowledge federation as an academic field or concretely transdiscipline—but we also presented an academically careful case for its academic institutionalization. What we are here calling the socialized reality insight is the main point in this argument, which we'll here very briefly summarize as follows.

A fundamental error was made in our modernization, whose consequences cannot be overrated. This error was subsequently detected and reported, but not corrected (the tie between information and action having been severed).

The error is that the purpose of information is to provide us an "objectively true picture of reality".

A consequence of this error is the popular myth that the traditions got it all wrong; and that by developing science, we were able to correct their errors, and resume evolution or "progress".

The twentieth century's science and philosophy reversed this naive picture. It turned out that we got it wrong (or more to the point—that we need to recognize this error, by seeing and honoring a different role that information needs to fulfill).

It is simply beyond our power, the scientists found out, to assert that our ideas and models correspond to reality. There is no way to open the supposed "mechanism of nature", and verify that our models correspond to the real thing.

Information is (or needs to be perceived as) the central element in another 'mechanism'—in the system of our society. Information is what organizes us together in a society; it is what enables the culture to be .

"Objective reality", the researchers found out, needs to be understood as partly an illusion created by our sensory and cognitive organs; and in part as a contrivance of the traditional culture, or power structure, invented to socialize us in a certain way. Our "reality pictures", Berger and Luckmann observed in Social Construction of Reality, tend to serve as "universal theories", to legitimize a given social order.

Research in sociology explained the relationship between the belief that our socialized reality picture is "the reality" (which they called doxa), and the all-important symbolic power—by which the power structure can divert our evolution. Research in cognitive science showed how socialization can radically affect our values, worldview and choices—which were earlier considered to be purely rational.

The overall result was that we ignored the symbolic means by which the power structure can control our cultural evolution; or metaphorically, how 'Galilei can be kept in house arrest'—without recourse to censorship or prison or any other physical means of compulsion.

Our socialization merely changed hands—from one power structure (the kings and the clergy) to the next (the corporations and the media).

The "official culture", notably the academic researchers, remained in an observer role; the production of culture, with the help of the new media, was "outsourced" to advertising and media agencies, superficial interests, and the proverbial "two hackers in a garage".