Holotopia

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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.jpg Modernity ideogram

Our proposal

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."

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Neil Postman

What would information and our handling of information be like, if we treated them as we treat other human-made things—if we adapted them 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 knowledge federation, where initial answers to relevant questions are proposed, and in part implemented in practice.
Our call to action is to institutionalize and develop knowledge federation as an academic field, and a real-life praxis (informed practice).
Our purpose is to restore agency to information, and power to knowledge.

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."

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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 what follows we shall assume that this conclusion has been federated—and focus on the more interesting questions, such as how to "change course"; and in what ways may the new course be different.

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".

Could the change of 'headlights' we are proposing be "a way to change course"?


A vision

Holotopia is a vision of a possible future that emerges 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. 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 waned, 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 actionable—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, as explained below.


A principle

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

The five insights point to 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.

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

A method

"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."

To make things wholewe must be able to see them whole!

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

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.


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Holoscope ideogram

To see things whole, we must look at all sides.

The holoscope distinguishes itself by allowing for multiple ways of looking at a theme or issue, which are called scopes. The scopes and the resulting views have similar meaning and role as projections do in technical drawing. The views that show the whole from a certain angle are called aspects.

This modernization of our handling of information—distinguished by purposeful, free and informed creation of the ways in which we look at any theme or issue—has become necessary in our situation, suggests the bus with candle headlights. 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 our conventional ones.

In the holoscope, the legitimacy and the peaceful coexistence of multiple ways to look at a theme is axiomatic.

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 need to (also) be perceived 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 scopes); and to do that collaboratively, in a dialog.

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 discovery of a new way of looking—which reveals a structural problem, and helps us reach a correct general assessment of an object of study or a situation as a whole (see if 'the cup is broken or whole')—is a new kind of result that is made possible by (the general-purpose science that is modeled by) the holoscope

To see more, we take recourse to the vision of others. The holoscope combines scientific and other insights to enable us to see what we ignored, to 'see the other side'. This allows us to detect structural defects ('cracks') in core elements of everyday reality—which appear to us as just normal, when we look at them in our habitual way ('in the light of a candle').

All elements in our proposal are deliberately left unfinished, rendered 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 an academic field, and a real-life praxis.


Scope


What is wrong with our present "course"? In what ways does it need to be changed? What benefits will result?

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Five Insights ideogram

We use the holoscope to illuminate five pivotal themes, which determine the "course":

  • Innovation—the way we use our ability to create, and induce change
  • Communication—the social process, enabled by technology, by which information is handled
  • Epistemology—the fundamental assumptions we use to create truth and meaning; or "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", which in the modern society directly determines the course

In each case, we see a structural defect, which led to perceived problems. We demonstrate practical ways, partly implemented as prototypes, in which those structural defects can be remedied. We see that their removal naturally leads to improvements that are well beyond the removal of symptoms.

The holotopia vision results.

The key to comprehensive change turns out to be the same as it was in Galilei's time—a new approach to knowledge, which allows for creation of general principles and insights. The development of this new approach to knowledge is shown to follow from the state of the art of knowledge of knowledge—hence it is an academic job.

We are proposing a practical way to do that job.

In the spirit of the holoscope, we here only summarize the five insights—and provide evidence and details separately.


Scope

What might constitute "a way to change course"?

"Man has acquired such decisive power that his future depends essentially on how he will use it", observed Peccei. Imagine if some malevolent entity, perhaps an insane dictator, took control over that power.

The power structure insight allows us to see why no dictator is needed.

While the nature of the power structure will become clear as we go along, imagine it, to begin with, as our institutions; or more accurately, as the systems in which we live and work (which we simply call systems).

Notice that systems have an immense power—over us, because we have to adapt to them to be able to live and work; and over our environment, because by organizing us and using us in certain specific ways, they decide what the effects of our work will be.

The power structure determines whether the effects of our efforts will be problems, or solutions.

Diagnosis

How suitable are the systems in which we live and work for their all-important role?

Evidence shows that the power structure wastes a lion's share of our resources. And that it either causes problems, or make us incapable of solving them.

The root cause of this malady is in the way systems evolve.

Survival of the fittest favors the systems that are predatory, not those 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 most powerful institution on our planet evolved to be a perfect "externalizing machine" ("Externalizing" means maximizing profits by letting someone else bear the costs, notably the people and the environment), just as the shark evolved to be a perfect predator. This scene from Sidney Pollack's 1969 film "They Shoot Horses, Don't They?" will illustrate how the power structure affects our own condition.

The systems provide an ecology, which in the long run shapes our values and "human quality". They have the power to socialize us in ways that suit their needs. "The business of business is business"—and if our business is to succeed in competition, we must act in ways that lead to that effect. We either bend and comply—or get replaced. The effect on the system of both options will be the same.

Bauman-PS.jpeg

A consequence, Zygmunt Bauman diagnosed, is that bad intentions are no longer needed for bad things to happen. Through socialization, the power structure can co-opt our duty and commitment, and even heroism and honor.

Bauman's insight that even the holocaust was a consequence and a special case, however extreme, of the power structure, calls for careful contemplation: Even the concentration camp employees, Bauman argued, were only "doing their job"—in a system whose character and purpose was beyond their field of vision, and power to change.

While our ethical sense is tuned to the power structures of the past, we are committing (in all innocence, by acting only through power structures that bind us together) the greatest massive crime in history.

Our children may not have a livable planet to live on.

Not because someone broke the rules—but because we follow them.

Remedy

The fact that we will not solve our problems unless we develop the capability to update our systems has not remained unnoticed.

Jantsch-vision.jpeg

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

The work and the conclusions of this team were based on results in the systems sciences. In the year 2000, in "Guided Evolution of society", systems scientist Béla H. Bánáthy surveyed relevant research, and concluded in a true holotopian tone:

We are the first generation of our species that has the privilege, the opportunity and the burden of responsibility to engage in the process of our own evolution. We are indeed chosen people. We now have the knowledge available to us and we have the power of human and social potential that is required to initiate a new and historical social function: conscious evolution. But we can fulfill this function only if we develop evolutionary competence by evolutionary learning and acquire the will and determination to engage in conscious evolution. These two are core requirements, because what evolution did for us up to now we have to learn to do for ourselves by guiding our own evolution.

In 2010 Knowledge Federation began to self-organize to make further headway on this creative frontier. The procedure we developed is simple: We create a prototype of a system, and a transdisciplinary community and project around it to update it continuously. The insights in participating disciplines can in this way have real or systemic effects.

Our very first prototype, the Barcelona Innovation Ecosystem for Good Journalism in 2011, was of a public informing that identifies systemic causes and proposes corresponding solutions (by involving academic and other experts) of perceived problems (reported by people directly, through citizen journalism).

A year later we created The Game-Changing Game as a generic way to change systems—and hence as a "practical way to craft the future"; and based on it The Club of Zagreb, as an update to The Club of Rome.

Each of about forty prototypes in our portfolio illustrates systemic innovation in a specific domain. Each of them is composed in terms of design patterns—problem-solution pairs, ready to be adapted for other applications and domains.

The Collaborology prototype, in education, will highlight some of the advantages of this approach.

An education that prepares us only for traditional professions, once in a lifetime, is an obvious obstacle to systemic change. Collaborology implements an education that is in every sense flexible (self-guided, life-long...), and in an emerging area of interest (collaborative knowledge work, as enabled by new technology). By being collaboratively created itself (Collaborology is created and taught by a network of international experts, and offered to learners world-wide), the economies of scale result that dramatically reduce effort. This in addition provides a sustainable business model for developing and disseminating up-to-date knowledge in any domain of interest. By conceiving the course as a design project, where everyone collaborates on co-creating the learning resources, the students get a chance to exercise their "human quality". This in addition gives the students an essential role in the resulting 'knowledge-work ecosystem' (as 'bacteria', extracting 'nutrients') .


Scope

We have just seen that our evolutionary challenge and opportunity is to develop the capability to update our institutions or systems, to learn how to make them whole.

Where—with what system—shall we begin?

The handling of information, or metaphorically our society's 'headlights', suggests itself as the answer for several reasons.

One of them is obvious: If we should use information as guiding light and not competition, our information will need to be different.

In his 1948 seminal "Cybernetics", Norbert Wiener pointed to another reason: In social systems, communication is what turns a collection of independent individuals into a system. Wiener made that point by talking about ants and bees. It is the nature of the communication that determines a social system's properties, and behavior. Cybernetics has shown—as its main point, and title theme—that "the tie between information and action" has an all-important role, which determines (Wiener used the technical keyword "homeostasis", but let us here use this more contemporary one) the sustainability of a system. The full title of Wiener's book was "Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine". To be able to correct their behavior and maintain inner and outer balance, to be able to "change course" when the circumstances demand that, to be able to continue living and adapting and evolving—a system must have suitable communication and control.

Diagnosis

That is presently not the case with our core systems; and with our civilization as a whole.

The tie between information and action has been severed, Wiener too observed.

Our society's communication-and-control is broken; it needs to be restored.

Bush-Vision.jpg

To make that point, 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 communication their next highest priority—the World War Two having just been won.

These calls to action remained, however, without effect.

"As long as a paradox is treated as a problem, it can never be dissolved," observed David Bohm. Wiener too entrusted his insight to the communication whose tie with action had been severed.

We have assembled a formidable collection of academic results that shared the same fate—to illustrate a general phenomenon we are calling Wiener's paradox. The link between communication and action having been broken—the academic results will tend to be ignored whenever they challenge the present "course" and point to a new one!

To an academic researcher, it may feel disheartening to see that so many best ideas of our best minds remained ignored.

This sentiment is transformed into holotopian optimism when we look at 'the other side of the coin'—the creative frontier that is opening up. We are invited to, we are indeed obliged to reinvent the systems in which we live and work, by recreating the very communication that holds them together. Including, of course, our own, academic system, and the way in which it interoperates with other systems—or fails to interoperate.

Optimism will turn into enthusiasm, when we consider also this widely ignored fact:

The information technology we now use to communicate with the world was created to enable a paradigm change on that very frontier.

'Electricity', and the 'lightbulb', have already been created—for the purpose of giving our society the 'headlights' it needs.

Vannevar Bush pointed to the need for this new paradigm already in his title, "As We May Think". His point was that "thinking" really means making associations or "connecting the dots". And that—given the vast volumes of our information—our knowledge work must be organized in a way that enables us to benefit from each other's thinking. Bush's point was that technology and processes must be devised to enable us to in effect "connect the dots" or think together, as a single mind does. He described a prototype system called "memex", which was based on microfilm as technology.

Douglas Engelbart, however, took Bush's idea significantly further than Bush himself envisioned, and indeed in a whole new direction—by observing (in 1951!) that when each of us 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 as the cells in a human organism are connected by the nervous system.

All earlier innovations in this area—the clay tablets and the printing press—required that a physical object with a message be physically transported.

This new technology allows us to "create, integrate and apply knowledge" concurrently, as cells in a human nervous system do.

We can now develop insights and solutions together.

Engelbart conceived this new technology as a necessary step toward becoming able to tackle the "complexity times urgency" of our problems, which he saw as growing at an accelerated rate.

This three minute video clip, which we called "Doug Engelbart's Last Wish", will give us an opportunity for a pause and an illuminating reflection. Think about the prospects of improving the planetary collective mind. Imagine "the effects of getting 5% better", Engelbart commented with a smile. Then our old man put his fingers on his forehead, and raised his eyes up: "I've always imagined that the potential was... large..." The potential is not only large; it is staggering. The improvement that is both necessary and possible is qualitative—from a system that doesn't really work, to one that does.

To Engelbart's dismay, our new "collective nervous system" ended up being used to only make the old processes and systems more efficient. The ones that evolved through the centuries of use of the printing press. The ones that broadcast information.

Giddens-OS.jpeg

The above observation by Anthony Giddens points to the effects that our dazzled and confused collective mind had on our culture; and on "human quality".

Our sense of meaning having been drowned in an overload of data, in a reality whose complexity is well beyond our comprehension—we have no other recourse but "ontological security". We find meaning in learning a profession, and performing in it a competitively.

But that is exactly what binds us to power structure!


Remedy

What is to be done, to restore the severed link between communication and action?

How can we begin to change our collective mind—as our technology enables, and our situation demands?

Engelbart left us a simple and clear answer: bootstrapping.

His point was that only writing about what needs to be done would not have an effect (the tie between information and action having been broken). Bootstrapping means that we consider ourselves as parts in a collective mind; and that we self-organize, and act, as it may best serve its restoration to wholeness.

The key to solution is to either create new systems with the material of our own minds and bodies—or to help others do that.

The Knowledge Federation transdiscipline was conceived by an act of bootstrapping, to enable bootstrapping.

What we are calling knowledge federation is an umbrella term for a variety of activities and social processes that together comprise the functions of a collective mind. Obviously, the development of the collective mind paradigm will requires a system, a new kind of institution, which will assemble and mobilize the required knowledge and human and other resources toward that end. Presently, Knowledge Federation is a complete prototype of the transdiscipline for knowledge federation, ready for inspection, co-creative updates and deployment.

But may will have the requisit knowledge, and who may be given the power—to update our collective mind?

The praxis of knowledge federation itself must, of course, also be federated.

In 2008, when Knowledge Federation had its inaugural meeting, two closely related initiatives were formed: Program for the Future (a Silicon Valley-based initiative to continue and complete "Doug Engelbart's unfinished revolution") and Global Sensemaking (an international community of researchers and developers, working on technology and processes for collective sense making).

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Paddy Coulter, Mei Lin Fung and David Price speaking at the 2011 An Innovation Ecosystem for Good Journalism workshop in Barcelona

We use the above triplet of photos ideographically, to highlight that Knowledge Federation is a true federation—where state of the art knowledge is combined in state of the art systems. The featured participants of our 2011 workshop in Barcelona, where our public informing prototype was created, are Paddy Coulter (the Director of Oxford Global Media and Fellow of Green College Oxford, formerly the Director of Oxford University's Reuter Program in Journalism) Mei Lin Fung (the founder of Program for the Future) and David Price (who co-founded both the Global Sensemaking R & D community, and Debategraph—which is now the leading global platform for collective thinking).

Other prototypes contributed other design patterns for restoring the severed link between information and action. The Tesla and the Nature of Creativity TNC2015 prototype showed what may constitute the federation of a research result—which is written in an esoteric academic vernacular, and has large potential general interest and impact. The first phase of this prototype, completed through collaboration between the author and our communication design team, turned the academic article into a multimedia object, with intuitive, metaphorical diagrams, and explanatory interviews with the author. The second phase was a high-profile, televised and live streamed event, where the result was made public. The third phase, implemented on Debategraph, modeled proper online collective thinking about the result—including pros and cons, connections with other related results, applications etc.

The Lighthouse 2016 prototype is a conceived as a direct remedy for the Wiener's paradox, created for and with the International Society for the Systems Sciences. This prototype models a system by which an academic community can federate a single core message into the public sphere. The message in this case was also relevant—it was whether or not we can rely on "free competition" to guide the evolution and the functioning of our systems; or whether we must use its alternative—the knowledge developed in the systems sciences.

Scope

"Act like as if you loved your children above all else",
Greta Thunberg, representing her generation, told the political leaders at Davos. Of course political leaders love their children—don't we all? But what Greta was asking them to do was to 'hit the brakes'; and when the 'bus' they are believed to be 'driving' is inspected, it becomes clear that the 'brakes' too are missing. The job of a politician is to keep 'the bus on course' (the economy growing) for yet another four years. Changing the 'course' or the system is well beyond what they are able to do, or even imagine doing.

The COVID-19 pandemic may require systemic changes now.

Who—what institution or system—will take the leadership role, and guide us through our unprecedentedly immense creative and evolutionary challenges?

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

Why?

Isn't the prospect of restoring agency to information and power to knowledge deserving of academic attention?

It is tempting to conclude that the university institution followed the general trend, and evolved as a power structure. But to see solutions, we need to look at deeper causes.

Toulmin-Vision2.jpeg

We readily find them in the way in which the university institution originated.

The academic tradition did not originate as a way to practical knowledge, but to freely pursue knowledge for its own sake; in a manner disciplined only by knowledge of knowledge—which philosophers have been developing since antiquity. Wherever this free-yet-disciplined pursuit of knowledge took us, we followed.

And as we pointed out in the opening paragraphs of this website, by highlighting the iconic image of Galilei in house arrest,

it was this free pursuit of knowledge that led to the last "great cultural revival".

We asked:

Could a similar advent be in store for us today?

The key to the positive answer to this question—which is obviously central to holotopia—is in the historicity of "the relationship we have with knowledge"—which Stephen Toulmin explicated so clearly in his last book, "Reurn to Reason", from which the above quotation was taken. So that is what we here focus on.

As Toulmin pointed out, at the time when the contemporary academic ethos was taking shape, it was the Church and the tradition that had the prerogative of telling the people how to conduct their daily affairs and what to believe in. And as the image of Galilei in house arrest may suggest—they held onto that prerogative most firmly! But the censorship and the prison could not stop an idea whose time had come. They were unable to prevent a completely new way of exploring the world to transpire from astrophysics, where it originated, and transform first our pursuit of knowledge in general—and then our society and culture at large.

It is therefore natural that at the universities we consider the curation of this approach to knowledge to be our core role in our society. Being the heirs and the custodians of a tradition that has historically led to some of the most spectacular evolutionary leaps in human history, we remain faithful to that tradition. We do that by meticulously conforming to the methods and the themes of interests of mathematics, physics, philosophy, biology, sociology, philosophy and other traditional academic disciplines, which, we believe, embody the highest standards of that tradition. People can learn practical skills elsewhere. It is only at the university that they can acquire the highest standards of knowledge of knowledge—and the ability to pursue knowledge effectively in any domain.

We must ask:

Can the academic tradition evolve still further?

Can this tradition once again give us a completely new way to explore the world?

Can the free pursuit of knowledge, curated by the knowledge of knowledge, once again lead to "a great cultural revival" ?

Can "a great cultural revival" begin at the university?


Diagnosis


In the course of our modernization, we made a fundamental error.

From the traditional culture we adopted a myth far more disruptive of modernization than the creation myth—that "truth" means "correspondence with reality"; and that the purpose of information, and of our pursuit of knowledge, is to "know the reality" objectively, as it truly is. It may take a moment of reflection to see how much this myth permeates our popular culture, our society and institutions; how much it marks "the relationship we have with information"—in all its various manifestations.

This fundamental error has subsequently been detected and reported, but not corrected. (We again witness that the link between information and action has been severed.)

Einstein-Watch.jpeg

It is simply impossible to open up the 'mechanism of nature', and verify that our ideas and models correspond to the real thing!

The "reality", the 20th century's scientists and philosophers found out, is not something we discover; it is something we construct.

This "social construction of reality" is a result of complex interaction between our cognitive organs and our culture. From the cradle to the grave, through innumerably many 'carrots and sticks', we are socialized to organize and communicate our experience in a certain specific way.

The socialized reality construction has has served as the 'DNA', which enabled the traditional cultures to reproduce themselves and evolve.

Information, in other words, has traditionally served as 'headlights'; the purpose of the traditional myths was not to tell the people how the world really originated—but to serve as foundation for principles and norms, which oriented their behavior; and the development of "human quality".

Information, however, and socialization, have always served also a different purpose—as instruments of power, by which the power relationships were maintained. They have been not only core elements of culture—but also of the power structure.

In "Social Construction of Reality", Berger and Luckmann left us an analysis of the social process by which the reality is constructed—and pointed to the role that "universal theories" (which determine the relationship we have with information) play in maintaining a given social and political status quo. An example, but not the only one, is the Biblical worldview of Galilei's persecutors.

To organize and sum up what we above all need to know about the nature of socialization, and about the relationship between power and culture, we created the Odin–Bourdieu–Damasio thread, consisting of three short real-life stories or vignettes. (The thread is an adaptation of Vannevar Bush's technical idea for organizing collective mind work, which he called "trail".)

The first, Odin the Horse vignette, points to the nature of turf struggle, by portraying the turf behavior of horses.

The second vignette, featuring Pierre Bourdieu as leading sociologist, shows that we humans exhibit a similar behavior—and that our culture may be perceived as a complex 'turf'.

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Bourdieu used interchangeably two keywords—"field" and "game"—to refer to this 'turf'. By calling it a field, he portrayed it as something akin to a magnetic field, which orients our seemingly random or "free" behavior, without us noticing. By calling it a game, he portrayed it as something that structures or "gamifies" our social existence, by giving each of us certain "action capabilities" (which Bourdieu called "habitus"), pertaining to a role, which tends to be transmitted from body to body directly. Everyone bows to the king, and we do that too. With time, we become socialized to accept those roles and behaviors as the "reality". Bourdieu called this experience (that our social reality is as immutable and real as the physical reality) doxa.

The third story, featuring Antonio Damasio in the role of a leading cognitive neuroscientist, completes this thread by explaining that we, humans, are not the rational decision makers, as the founding fathers of the Enlightenment made us believe. Each of us has an embodied cognitive filter, which determines what options we are able to rationally consider. This cognitive filter is programmed through socialization. Damasio's insight allows us to understand why we civilized humans don't rationally consider taking off our clothes and walking into the street naked; and that for cognitively similar reasons we don't consider changing the systems in which we live and work.

Socialized reality constitutes a pseudo-epistemology.

We can "know" something because we've been socialized to "know" it; and because the people around us "know" it too.

The socialized reality insight adds substantial explanatory power to the power structure insight. We can now understand why we can be socialized to accept any societal order of things as just "reality".


The socialized reality insight, which we have so far only touched upon, delineates and opens up a truly wonderful creative frontier—where three realms that are usually considered as independent are inextricably intertwined: culture, power and epistemology ("the relationship we have with information"). It is here that we can truly understand why "a great cultural revival" is possible—and see all the wonderful things that can be done to help it emerge.

As an understandable consequence of historical circumstances, as Toulmin showed, our hitherto modernization has ignored these subtleties—and we've assumed that (1) the purpose of information is to mirror reality and (2) the traditions got it all wrong. The consequences are far reaching and central to holotopia.

  • Severed link between information and action. The (perceived) purpose of information being to complete the 'reality puzzle'—every new piece appears to be as relevant as others, and necessary for completing the 'puzzle'. In the sciences and in the media, enormous quantities of information are produced "disconnected from usefulness"—as Neil Postman diagnosed.
  • Stringent limits to creativity. A vast global army of selected, trained and publicly sponsored creative people are obliged to confine their repertoire of creative action to producing research articles in traditional academic fields.
  • Loss of cultural heritage. A trivial observation will suffice to make a point: With the threat of eternal fire on the one side, and the promise of heavenly pleasures on the other, a 'field' was created that oriented people's ethical sense and behavior. To see that the ancient myths were, however, only a tip of an iceberg (a small part of a complex ecosystem whose purpose was to develop "human quality") this one-minute thought experiment—an imaginary visit to a cathedral—might be helpful: There is awe-inspiring architecture; Michelangelo's Pietà meets the eye, and his frescos are near by. Allegri's Miserere reaches us from above. And there's of course also the ritual. All this comprises an ecosystem—in which the emotions of awe and respect make one open to practicing and learning. By its complex dynamics, it resembles our biophysical environment—but there is a notable difference: There we have nothing equivalent to the temperature and CO2 measurements, to be able to diagnose problems and propose remedies.
  • "Human quality" abandoned to power structure. Advertising is everywhere. And explicit advertising too is only a tip of an iceberg, the bulk of which consists of a variety of ways in which "symbolic power" is used to socialize us in ways that suit the power structure interests. Scientific techniques are used; the story of Edward Bernays, Freud's American nephew who became "the pioneer of modern public relations and propaganda", is iconic.
  • Reification of institutions. Even when they cause us problems, and make us incapable of solving them.

This conclusion suggests itself.

The Enlightenment did not liberate us from power-related reality construction, as it is believed.
Our socialization only changed hands—from the kings and the clergy, to the corporations and the media.

Ironically, our carefully cultivated academic self-identity—as "objective observers of reality"—keeps us on the 'back seat'; we diagnose problems—but we cannot federate solutions.

Remedy

We have already seen the remedy.

The remedy is to change the relationship we have with information.

To consider information as the core element of our systems; and to adapt it to the functions that need to be served.

In the spirit of the holoscope, we condensed the fundamental part of this argument by a metaphorical image, the Mirror ideogram. This ideogram renders the essence of the academic situation we are in.

The Mirror ideogram invites us to interrupt what we are doing and self-reflect—as Socrates used to invite his contemporaries, at the Academia's point of inception.


This self-reflection leads us to two insights.

We are compelled to abolish reification.

When we look at a mirror, we see ourselves in the world. We are not above the world, observing it "objectively". The disciplinary interests, methods and institutions are not something that objectively existed, which our predecessors only discovered. They created them—in certain historical circumstances. Hence it is academically legitimate to create new ones.

We are compelled to embrace accountability.

The world we see ourselves in, when we look at the mirror, is a world in dire need—for new ideas, new ways of thinking and being. We see that, by virtue of the role we have in that world, we hold the very key to its transformation.

Mirror2.jpg
Mirror ideogram

We are then also compelled to ask:

How can we be accountable in our new social role, without sacrificing the academic rigor—which has been the distinguishing trait of our tradition?

The answer offers itself as an unexpected result of our metaphorical self-reflection:

We can walk right through the mirror!

This takes only two steps.

The first is to use what philosopher Villard Van Orman Quine called "truth by convention"—which we adapted as one of our keywords.

Quine–TbC.jpeg

Quine opened "Truth by Convention" by observing:

"The less a science has advanced, the more its terminology tends to rest on an uncritical assumption of mutual understanding. With increase of rigor this basis is replaced piecemeal by the introduction of definitions. The interrelationships recruited for these definitions gain the status of analytic principles; what was once regarded as a theory about the world becomes reconstrued as a convention of language. Thus it is that some flow from the theoretical to the conventional is an adjunct of progress in the logical foundations of any science."

But if truth by convention has been the way in which the sciences improve their logical foundations—why not use it to update the logical foundations of knowledge work at large?

Having explored this direction, we can offer the following conclusion:

Truth by convention is the new Archimedean point, by which we can once again empower knowledge to make a difference.

As we are using this keyword, the truth by convention is the kind of truth that is common in mathematics: "Let X be Y. Then..." and the argument follows. Insisting that X "really is" Y is obviously meaningless. A convention is valid only within a given context—which may be an article, or a theory, or a methodology.

The second step is to use truth by convention to define an epistemology.

We defined design epistemology by rendering the core of our proposal (to change the relationship we have with information—by considering it a human-made thing, and adapting information and the way we handle it to the functions that need to be served) as a convention.

Notice that nothing has been changed in the traditional-academic scheme of things. The academia has only been extended; a new way of thinking and working has been added to it, for those who might want to engage in that new way. On the 'other side of the mirror', we see ourselves and what we do as (part of) the 'headlights' and the 'light'; and we self-organize, and act, and use our creativity freely-yet-responsibly, and create a variety of new methods and results—just as the founding father of science did, at the point of its inception.

In the "Design Epistemology" research article (published in the special issue of the Information Journal titled "Information: Its Different Modes and Its Relation to Meaning", edited by Robert K. Logan) where we articulated this proposal, we made it clear that the design epistemology is only one of the many ways to manifest this approach. We drafted a parallel between the modernization of science that can result in this way and the emergence of modern art: By defining an epistemology and a methodology by convention, we can do in the sciences as the artists did—when they liberated themselves from the demand to mirror reality, by using the techniques of Old Masters.

As the artists did—we can become creative in the very way in which we practice our profession.

To complete this proposal and make it concrete, we developed two prototypes: the holoscope models the academic reality on the other side of the mirror; the holotopia models the corresponding social reality.

Let us illustrate these abstract ideas by brief and self-contained module, comprising an academically stated challenge, and two examples of its resolution—by using the techniques just described. Each of the examples includes both a concept definition by convention, and a prototype (of disciplinary or institutional re-definition) that was embedded and tested in academic practice, with encouraging results.


The definition of design allowed us to capture the essence of our post-traditional cultural condition, and suggest how to adapt to it.

We defined design as "alternative to tradition", where design and tradition are (by convention) two alternative ways to wholeness. Tradition relies on spontaneous, gradual, Darwinian-style evolution. Change is resisted, small changes are tried—and tested and assimilated through generations of use. We practice design when we consider ourselves accountable for wholeness.

When tradition cannot be relied on, design must be used.

The situation we are in, which we rendered by the bus with candle headlights metaphor, can now be understood as a result of a transition: We are no longer traditional (our technology evolves by design); but we are not yet designing ("the relationship we have with information" is still traditional). Our call to action can be understood as a practical way to complete modernization.

Reification can now be understood as the foundation for truth and meaning that suits the tradition; truth by convention is what empowers us to design.

We proposed this definition to the academic design community, as part of an answer to its quest for logical foundations. The fact that Danish Designers chose our presentation to be repeated as opening keynote at their tenth anniversary conference suggests that this praxis—of assigning a purpose to a discipline and a community by using ruth by convention—may have immediate interest and applications.

The definition of implicit information and of visual literacy as "literacy associated with implicit information for the International Visual Literacy Association was in spirit similar—but its point was different.

Whowins.jpg

We showed the above ideogram as depicting a situation where two kinds of information—the explicit information with explicit, factual and verbal warning in a black-and-white rectangle, and the visual and "cool" rest—meet each other in a direct duel. The image shows that the implicit information wins "hands down" (or else this would not be a cigarette advertising). Our larger point was that while our legislation, ethical sensibilities and "official" culture at large are focused on explicit information, our culture is largely created through subtle implicit information. Hence we need a literacy to be able to decode those messages—and reverse the negative consequences of reification.

Lida Cochran, the only surviving IVLA founder, found that this definition expressed and served the founders' original intention.



Scope

We have just seen that the academic tradition—instituted as the modern university—finds itself in a much larger and more central social role than it was originally conceived for. We look up to the academia, and not to the Church and the tradition, for an answer to the pivotal question:

How should we look at the world, to be able to comprehend and handle it?

That role, and that question, carry an immense power!

It was by providing a completely new answer to that question, that the last "great cultural revival" came about.


Diagnosis

So how should we look at the world, to be able to comprehend and handle it?
Nobody knows!

Of course, countess books and articles have been written about this theme since antiquity. But in spite of that—or should we say because of that—no consensus has emerged.

The way we the people look at the world, try to comprehend and handle it, shaped itself spontaneously—from scraps of science that were most visible around the middle of the 19th century, when Darwin and Newton as cultural heroes replaced Adam and Moses. What is today popularly considered as the "scientific worldview" took shape then—and remained largely unchanged.

As members of the homo sapiens species, this worldview would make us believe, we have the evolutionary privilege to be able to comprehend the world in causal terms, and to make rational choices accordingly. Give us a correct model of the world, and we'll know exactly how to satisfy our needs (which we can experience directly). But the traditional cultures got it all wrong: Not knowing how the nature works, they put a "ghost in the machine", and made us pray to him to give us what we needed. Science corrected this error—and now we can satisfy our needs by manipulating the mechanisms of nature directly, with the help of technology.

It is this causal or "scientific" understanding of the world that made us modern. Isn't that how we understood that women cannot fly on broomsticks?

From our collection of reasons why this way of looking at the world is neither scientific nor functional, we here mention only two.

Heisenberg–frame.jpeg

The first reason is that the nature is not a mechanism.

The mechanistic way of looking at the world that Newton and his contemporaries developed in physics, which around the 19th century shaped the worldview of the masses, was later disproved and disowned by modern science. Research in physics showed that even the physical phenomena exhibit the kinds of interdependence that cannot be understood in "classical" or causal terms.

In "Physics and Philosophy", Werner Heisenberg, one of the progenitors of this research, described how "the narrow and rigid" way of looking at the world that our ancestors adapted from the 19th century science was damaging to culture—and in particular to its parts on on which the "human quality" depended, such as ethics and religion. And how as a result the "instrumental" thinking and values, which Bauman called "adiaphorized", became prominent. Heisenberg believed that the dissolution of that "rigid and narrow frame" would be the most valuable gift of his field to humanity.

In 2005, Hans-Peter Dürr (considered as Heisenberg's scientific "heir") co-wrote the Potsdam Manifesto, whose title and message is "We need to learn to think in a new way". The proposed new thinking is similar to the one that leads to holotopia: "The materialistic-mechanistic worldview of classical physics, with its rigid ideas and reductive way of thinking, became the supposedly scientifically legitimated ideology for vast areas of scientific and political-strategic thinking. (...) We need to reach a fundamentally new way of thinking and a more comprehensive under­standing of our Wirklichkeit, in which we, too, see ourselves as a thread in the fabric of life, without sacrificing anything of our special human qualities. This makes it possible to recognize hu­manity in fundamental commonality with the rest of nature (...)"

The second reason is that even complex mechanisms ("classical" nonlinear dynamic systems) cannot be understood in causal terms.

MC-Bateson-vision.jpeg

It has been said that the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. Research in the systems sciences, one of which is cybernetics, explained this scientifically: The "hell" (which you may imagine as global issues, or the 'destination' toward which our 'bus' is diagnosed to be headed) tends to be a "side effect" of our best efforts and "solutions", reaching us through "nonlinearities" and "feedback loops" in the natural and social systems we are trying to manipulate.

Hear Mary Catherine Bateson (cultural anthropologist and cybernetician, daughter of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson who pioneered both fields) say:

"The problem with Cybernetics is that it is not an academic discipline that belongs in a department. It is an attempt to correct an erroneous way of looking at the world, and at knowledge in general. (...) Universities do not have departments of epistemological therapy!"

Remedy

Truth by convention allows us to explicitly define and academically develop new ways to look at the world.

We called the result a methodology, and our prototype the Polyscopic Modeling methodology or polyscopy.

A methodology is in essence a toolkit; anything that does the job would do. We, however, defined polyscopy by turning state of the art epistemological insights into conventions.

By creating a methodology, the severed link between fundamental scientific insights and the popular worldview can be restored.

The polyscopy definition comprises eight aphorismic postulates; by using truth by convention, each of them is given an interpretation.

The first postulate defines information as "recorded experience". It is thereby made explicit that the substance communicated by information is not "reality", but human experience. Since human experience can be recorded in a variety of ways (a chair is a record of experience related to sitting and chair making), the notion of information is extended well beyond written documents. The first postulate enables knowledge federation across cultural traditions and fields of interests; the barriers of language and method are bridged by reducing all that is of relevance to human experience, as 'common denominator'.

The second postulate is that the scope (the way we look) determines the view (what is seen). In polyscopy the experience (or "reality" or whatever is "behind" experience) is not assumed to have an a priori structure. We attribute to it a structure with the help of the concepts and other elements of our scope. This postulate enables us to create new ways of looking, and to make the basic approach of science generally applicable—as prototyped by the holoscope.

Polyscopy did not talk about knowledge. We may now improvise this new axiom:

Knowledge must be federated.

This only states the intuitive or common-sense idea of "knowledge": If we should be able to say that we "know" something, we must federate not only supporting evidence, but also potential counter-evidence—and hence information in general. Academic peer reviews implement that principle in science; but this federation tends to be restricted to a discipline. An analogy with constitutional democracy also comes to mind—where even a hated criminal has the right for a fair trial. Like a dutiful attorney, knowledge federation does its best to gather suitable evidence, and back each federated insight with a convincing case.

A methodology allows us to state explicitly what information needs to be like; and what being "informed" means. We modeled this intuitive notion with the keyword gestalt. To be "informed", one needs to have a gestalt that is appropriate to one's situation. "Our house is on fire" is a canonical example. The knowledge of gestalt is profoundly different from only knowing the data (such as the room temperatures and the CO2 levels.). To have an appropriate gestalt means to be moved to do the action that a situation is calling for.

Can we be uninformed—in spite of all the information we have?

"One cannot not communicate", reads one of Paul Watzlawick's axioms of communication. Even when everything in a news report is factually correct, the gestalt it conveys implicitly can be profoundly deceptive—because we are told what Donald Trump has said, and not Aurelio Peccei.

Polyscopy offers a collection of techniques for communicating and 'proving' or justifying general or high-level insights and claims. Knowledge federation is conceived as the social process by which such insights can be created and maintained. To create the methodology, we federated methodological insights from a variety of fields:

  • Patterns have a closely similar function as mathematics does in traditional sciences—and at the same time completely generalize the implementation of this function
  • Ideograms allow us to include the expressive power and the insights and techniques from art, advertising and communication design
  • Vignettes implement the basic technique from media informing, where an insight or issue is made accessible by telling illustrative and engaging or "sticky" real-life people and situation stories
  • Threads implement Vannevar Bush's technical idea of "trails" as a way to combine specific ideas into higher-level units of meaning


We conclude by telling a vignette—which will illustrate some of the further nuances of this methodological approach to information and knowledge.

A situation with overtones of a crisis, closely similar to the one we now have in our handling of information at large, arose in the early days of computer programming. The buddying industry undertook ambitious software projects—which resulted in thousands of lines of "spaghetti code", which nobody was able to 'detangle' (understand and correct). The solution was conceived as "computer programming methodology"; the longer story is interesting, but we only highlight a couple of lessons learned from the "object oriented methodology", developed in the 1960s by Ole-Johan Dahl and Krysten Nygaard.


The designers of a computer programming language made themselves accountable for the "usability" of the results, and developed a methodology.

Any sufficiently complete programming language, even the "machine language" of the computer, will allow the programmers to create any application program. The creators of the object oriented methodology, however, took it upon themselves to provide the programmers the kind of programming tools that would enable them, or even compel them, to write comprehensible, reusable and well-structured code.

Dahl-Vision.-R.jpeg

To understand a complex system, abstraction must be used. We must be able to create views of the complex whole on distinct levels of generality.

The object oriented methodology provided a structuring template called "object"—which "hides implementation and exports function". What this means is that an object can be "plugged into" more general objects based on the functions it produces—without the burden of the details of its code.

We have seen, in socialized reality, that the academia too needs to consider itself accountable for the tools and processes by which information and knowledge are handled—both for the ones used by academic researchers, and for the ones used by people at large. To see what those two lessons learned may mean practically, Imagine a highly talented young person, let's call him Pierre Bourdieu to be concrete, about to become a researcher. The academia will give Bourdieu a certain way to render his results, which he'll be using throughout his career. The "usability", comprehensibility and in a word—the usefulness of Bourdieu's life work will largely depend on the format in which he'll render his results. This format, however, will not be in his power to change, and it is unlikely that even Bourdieu would even think about doing that.

Bourdieu is, of course, only a drop in the ocean.


The solution for structuring information we devised in polyscopy is called information holon. An information holon is closely similar to the "object" in object oriented methodology. Information, represented in the Information ideogram as an "i", is depicted as a circle on top of a square. The circle represents the point of it all ('the cup has a crack'); the square represents the details, the side views.

When the circle is a general insight or a gestalt, it allows that insight to be integrated or "exported" as a "fact" into higher-level insights (while the contributing insights and data remain "hidden" in the square). When the circle is a prototype, the multiplicity of insights that comprise the square are given direct systemic impact, and hence agency.

Information.jpg
Information ideogram

The Holotopia prototype may now be understood as the circle by which our knowledge federation proposal is being federated. The holotopia vision is hereby not only described—but also turned into a collaborative strategy game, whose goal is to "change course".

A prototype polyscopic book manuscript titled "Information Must Be Designed" is structured as an information holon. Here the claim made in the title (which is the same we made in the opening of this presentation by talking about the bus with candle headlights) is justified in four chapters of the book—each of which presents a specific angle of looking at it. The book's four chapters present four aspects of our handling of information; they identify anomalies and propose remedies—which are the design patterns of the proposed methodology.

It is customary in programming language design to showcase the language by creating its first compiler in the language itself. In this book we described the paradigm that is modeled by polyscopy, and then used polyscopy to make a case for that paradigm.

The book's introduction is available online. What we (at the time this manuscript was written) branded information design, has subsequently been completed and rebranded as knowledge federation.


Scope

We turn to culture and to "human quality", and ask:

Why is "a great cultural revival" realistically possible?

What insight, and what strategy, may divert our "pursuit of happiness" from material consumption and opportunism to human cultivation?

We approach this theme also from another angle: Suppose we developed the praxis of federating information—and used it to combine all relevant heritage and insights, from sciences, world traditions, therapy schools...

Suppose we used real information to guide our choices, not advertising. What changes would develop? What difference would they make?

The Renaissance replaced the original sin and the eternal reward as preoccupations, by happiness and beauty here and now.

What values might the next "great cultural revival" bring to the fore?

Diagnosis

In the course of modernization we made a cardinal error—by elevating convenience (what feels attractive or pleasant) to the status of our cardinal value.

This error can easily be understood if we consider that we've been looking at the world through the narrow frame—which elevated (direct) causality to the status of our chosen ("scientific") way to create truth and meaning. Convenience indeed appears to make us happy—and we take it for granted that it indeed does.

The value of convenience is endlessly reinforced by advertising.

We let convenience orient even our choice of—information!

The consequences are sweeping.

When convenience is the criterion by which we measure life quality, the systems in which we live and work easily appear as the best possible ones. We lose interest in "cultural revival", and "human quality". We believe that we can simply feel what we want—and that the rest is a practical matter of getting it.

When we recognize that convenience is a deceptive value—we are compelled to acknowledge that we have no reliable basis for deciding what our goals should be.

A cultural frontier opens up—where real information is created and used for making choices.

Remedy

We point to the remedy by the Convenience Paradox ideogram. Like all of us, the person in the picture wants his life to be convenient. But he made a wise choice: Instead of simply following the direction downwards, which feels easier, he paused to reflect whether this direction leads to a more convenient condition.

It doesn't.

The convenience paradox is a pattern, where a more convenient direction leads to a less convenient situation. The iconic image of a "couch potato" in front of a TV is an obvious instance. The less obvious instances are, however, abundant, and often surprising.

The convenience paradox is a result of us simplifying "pursuit of happiness" by ignoring its two most interesting dimensions—time; and our own condition, which makes us inclined or able to feel in some specific way.

By depicting the way to wholeness as "yang" in the traditional yin-yang ideogram, it is suggested that its nature is paradoxical and obscure—and that the way needs to be illuminated by suitable information. This way is what the Buddhists call "Dhamma" and the Taoists "Tao".


However paradoxical, the way follows a certain pattern that can be understood; not in a mechanistic-causal way, not by studying what various cultures believe in—but by focusing on and federating the phenomenology repeated in the world traditions.

Convenience Paradox.jpg Convenience Paradox ideogram

We showed that the convenience paradox is a pattern repeated or subtly reflected in all major aspects of our civilized human condition.

To do that, we created an information holon—where the square comprises the main aspects of human wholeness.

Here, however, we only motivate this work. We do that by sharing three specific insights—and supporting them by a few anecdotes and examples.

1. Human wholeness feels better than most of us can imagine.

We called this insight "the best kept secret of human culture" , and made it a theme of one of our chosen ten conversations.

It was a glimpse or an experience or side of human wholeness that attracted our ancestors to the Buddha, the Christ, Mohammed and other adepts and teachers of the way, or "sages" or "prophets". C.F. Andrews described this in "Sermon on the Mount":

"Through their practice, the early disciples of Jesus found out) that the Way of Life, which Jesus had marked out for them in His teaching, was revolutionary in its moral principles. It turned the world upside down (Acts 17. 6). (...) They found in this new 'Way of Life' such a superabundance of joy, even in the midst of suffering, that they could hardly contain it. Their radiance was unmistakable. When the Jewish rulers saw their boldness, they 'marvelled and took knowledge of them that they had been with Jesus' (Acts 4. 13). (...) It was this exuberance of joy and love which was so novel and arresting. It was a 'Way of Life' about which men had no previous experience. Indeed, at first those who saw it could not in the least understand it; and some mocking said, 'These men are full of new wine' (Acts 2. 13)."

The existence and character of this experience can, however, readily be verified by simply observing or asking the people who have followed the way, and tasted some of its fruits.

2. The way to wholeness is counter-intuitive.

LaoTzu-vision.jpeg

To get a glimpse of it, compare the above utterances by Lao Tzu (acclaimed as progenitor of Taoism; "tao" literally means "way"), with what Christ taught in his Sermon on the Mount. Why was Teacher Lao claiming that "the weak can defeat the strong"? Why did the Christ advise his disciples to "turn the other cheek"?

Aldous Huxley's book "Perennial Philosophy" is alone sufficient to give an answer. Coming from a family that gave some of Britain's leading scientists, Huxley undertook to not only federate some of the core insights about the way (by demonstrating the consistency of both the relevant practices and their results across historical periods and cultures), but to also make a case for the method he used, as an extension of science needed to support cultural evolution.

3. To overcome the paradox, we must reverse the modernity's characteristic values.

Convenience must be replaced by "human development".

Egotism must be subjugated by service to larger purposes.

Lao Tzu (the Holotopia prototype's iconic pointer to the way) is often portrayed as reading a bull—which signifies that he achieved that.

While this insight can easily be federated in the manner just described, we here point to it by a curiosity.

Huxley-vision.jpeg

In "The Art of Seeing", Huxley observed that overcoming egotism is a necessary element of even physical wholeness!

We may now perceive significant parts of our cultural history as a struggle between cultivation of wholeness guided by insights into the nature of the way—and the power structure–related socialization, aided by the attraction of convenience and egotism. It is on the outcome of this struggle, Peccei warned us, that our future will depend.

What hope do we have of reversing its outcome?

The answer is, of course, that we now have a whole new dimension to work with.

We can design communication.

We can create media content that will communicate the convenience paradox in clear and convincing ways; we can guide people to an informed use of information; and we can create various elements of culture to socialize us or cultivate us accordingly. Including, of course, the systems in which we live and work.


A vast creative frontier opens up.

We illustrate it here by a handful of examples.


The NaCuHeal-Information Design was our project developed in collaboration with the European Public Health Association, through Prof. Gunnar Tellnes who was then its president. In Norway Tellnes developed an authentic approach to health, which was based on nature and culture-related activities. This collaboration resulted in several prototypes, of which we mention two.

We contributed "Healthcare as a Power Structure" to the European Association for the History of Medicine and Health. Historiographically, we based this research on the results of Weston Price and Werner Kollath—two pioneers of the scientific "hygiene", understood as a scientific study of the ways in which civilized lifestyle influences people's health. But we also added a methodological contribution—a way to 'connect the dots' and supplement historiographic research by a general "law of change" result. By seeing that also our approach to health and medicine can develop pathological tendencies, we can explain the fact that the results of those pioneers are still virtually unknown even to medical professionals; and why, in spite of them, our "caring for health" so consistently ignores the lifestyle factors, and relies on far more costly interventions.

Kommunewiki—a dialog-based communication project for Norwegian municipalities (as basic units of Norwegian democracy)—was conceived to empower their members to counter power structure lifestyle tendencies, and develop salutogenic new ones.

We developed the "Movement and Qi" educational prototype as a way to add to the conventional academic portfolio a collection of ways to use human body as medium—and work with "human quality" directly. And as a way to include the insights and techniques of the "human quality" traditions such as yoga and qigong into the academic repertoire.

"Liberation", subtitled "Religion beyond Belief", is a book manuscript and a communication design project. The book federates the message of Ven. Ajahn Buddhadasa, a 20th century's Buddhism reformer in Thailand, who—having through experimentation and practice understood and 'repeated the Buddha's experiment', found in it also a natural antidote to rampant materialism. The first four chapters present four aspects of human wholeness, including physical effortlessness, creativity, emotions and vitality. Buddhadasa's insights are shown to be a necessary piece in this large puzzle. The closing four chapters explain how societal wholeness may result.

The core Buddhadasa's message, which is also the message of this book, is to portray religion as "liberation"—not only from rigidly held beliefs that form our self-identity, but from rigidly held anything, as well as from self-identity as such.

We chose this book as part of our strategy for launching the holotopia. Many people have strong opinions about religion—be they "religious" and pro, or "scientific" and against. This book is likely to surprise both sides and challenge both positions—while at the same time reconciling their differences.

Isn't the prospect of evolving religion further a promising strategy for remedying religion-inspired violence?

And of course, a way to evolve further culturally and ethically—as Peccei requested; and holotopia promised to deliver.


Summary and conclusions

Human quality and cultural revival

We assumed that Peccei's call to action (that we must "find a way to change course") was federated, and undertook to find out in what way the specific "change of course" he diagnosed was necessary, "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" could realistically be achieved.

The first of the five insights, the power structure, showed that when we use "free competition" or "the survival of the fittest" to direct our efforts and our evolutionary course, then we end up being 'the enemy' creating the "problematique". We have seen that the key to "changing course" is a change of values—from convenience and egotism to wholeness. We have seen (the convenience paradox insight) that this change of values follows when we substitute federated information for various forms of power-motivated socialization, such as advertising.

The values are an easy target, if we consider that convenience and egotism are so obviously lame that they hardly merit to be called "values". In the Socialized reality detailed article, we however showed that those values inhibit also our personal "pursuit of happiness", profoundly and directly. And that as soon as an informed "pursuit of happiness" is in place, not only the direction is changed, but also a vast culture-creative frontier opens up, where the levels of human wholeness and fulfillment come within reach that are well beyond what the now common ways of "pursuing happiness" can achieve.

Furthermore, in narrow frame, we have seen how a general-purpose methodology can be developed for doing that, on state-of-the-art academic premises.

We can now offer the following conclusion.

The five insights show that "a way to change course" is by changing the relationship we have with information.

From using convenience to choose information—to using information as 'guiding light' to make choices in general—and the choice of values in particular.

The relationship we have with information

A case for what we called the "core of our proposal"—to change the relationship we have with information—follows from the five insights directly. They are, after all, insights; each of them shows, in its own specific domain, that a radical change of perception, and of direction, follows as soon as we develop the praxis of federating insights, and using basic insights as "guiding light" to orient our action.

The core of our proposal is to extend the academic or "scientific" approach to knowledge to include all those basic issues of human life and culture that have so far remained untouched by it—or even touched in a wrong way. A simple argument follows from the historicity of our handling of information: Science was conceived as a way to explore the natural phenomena; it ended up in its much larger role, of "the Grand Revelator of modern Western Culture" as Benjamin Lee Whorf called it, "without intending to".

Knowledge federation as academic field and real-life praxis

Academically, the prototype we've proposed is a paradigm proposal (we have adapted from Thomas Kuhn's familiar keyword).

Each of the five insights can now be seen as a large anomaly; a costly error, which has already been amply reported—and yet those reports remained ignored.

The handling of each of the anomalies, we have shown, requires the specific choices or design patterns that our prototype, which forms the substance of our proposal, embodies.

We can now offer the following conclusion.


Our call to action, to institutionalize and develop knowledge federation as an academic field and a real-life praxis, is a practical way to implement the changes that have become necessary. As an academic field, knowledge federation is conceived as the academia's and the society's evolutionary organ; as a real-life praxis, it is the collective thinking we now need to develop.

Jantsch-university.jpeg

When making this call to action, we are not saying anything new; we are only echoing the call to action that many have made before us.

We, however, also federate that call to action, by organizing together a broad variety of insights that motivate it; and we operationalize the action, by evolving prototypes.


The holotopia vision


The five insights together compose a vision of "a great cultural revival". They complete the analogy between our time and the situation at the twilight of the Middle Ages and the dawn of the Renaissance, which we've been pointing to by using the iconic image of Galilei in house arrest:

  • A revolution in innovation. By bringing a radical improvement of the efficiency and effectiveness of human work, through innovation, the Industrial Revolution promised to liberate our ancestors from hardship and toil, so that they may focus on developing culture and "human quality". The power structure, however, thwarted our aspirations. This issue can be resolved, and progress can be resumed, by learning to "make things whole" on the level of the systems in which we live and work.
  • A revolution in communication. The printing press enabled the Enlightenment by enabling a revolution in literacy and communication. The collective mind insight shows that the new information technology can power a similar revolution—whose effect will be a revolution of meaning. The kind of revolution that can make the differences that needs to make, in a post-industrial society.
  • A revolution in epistemology. By reviving the academic tradition, the Enlightenment empowered our ancestors to use their reason to comprehend the world, and evolve faster. The socialized reality insight shows that the evolution of the academic tradition brought us to a new turning point—which will liberate us from reifying our inherited systems and worldviews; and enable us to evolve culturally, at a similar rate as we've evolved technologically.
  • A revolution in method. Galilei in house arrest was science in house arrest. Once liberated, this new way to understand the the world liberated our ancestors from superstition, and empowered them to change their condition by developing technology. The narrow frame insight shows that the "project science" can and needs to be extended into all walks of life—to illuminate the core issues that traditional science left in the dark.
  • A revolution in culture. The Renaissance was a "great cultural revival"—a liberation and celebration of life, love, and beauty, through lifestyle change and the arts. The convenience paradox insight shows that our culture is again a victim of power structure; and that a final liberation is possible.



We will not solve our problems

The Holotopia prototype is conceived as a co-creative space, where we make tactical moves toward "changing course".

We respond to Margaret Mead's call to action (published in "Continuities in Cultural Evolution", in 1964—four years before The Club of Rome was founded):

"(W)e are living in a period of extraordinary danger, as we are faced with the possibility that our whole species will be eliminated from the evolutionary scene. One necessary condition of successfully continuing our existence is the creation of an atmosphere of hope that the huge problems now confronting us can, in fact, be solved—and can be solved in time."

We do not claim, or even assume, that "the huge problems now confronting us" can be solved.

Mead.jpg
Margaret Mead

Hear Dennis Meadows (who coordinated the team that produced The Club of Rome's seminal 1972 report Limits to Growth) diagnose, based on 44 years of experience on this frontier, that our pursuit of "sustainability" falls short of avoiding the "predicament" they were warning us about back then:

"Will the current ideas about "green industry", and "qualitative growth", avoid collapse? No possibility. Absolutely no possibility of that. (...) Globally, we are something like sixty or seventy percent above sustainable levels."

We wasted precious four decades pursuing a dream (hear Ronald Reagan set the tone for it, in the role of "the leader of the free world").

A sense of sobering up, and of catharsis, now needs to reach us from the depth of our problems.

Small things don't matter. Business as usual is a waste of time.

Our evolution, or "progress", must acquire a new—cultural—focus and direction.

Hear Dennis Meadows say, in the interview cited above:

"Will it be possible, here in Germany, to continue this level of energy consumption, and this degree of material welfare? Absolutely not. Not in the United States, not in other countries either. Could you change your cultural and your social norms, in a way that gave attractive future? Yes, you could."

It is this change—of our very idea of "progress"—that the holotopia is focusing on.

Ironically, our problems can only be solved when we no longer see them as problems—but as symptoms of much deeper, structural or systemic defects, which can and must be corrected to continue our evolution; to resume "progress". But this we need to do irrespective of problems!

The five insights show that the structural problems now confronting us can be solved.

Hence the holotopia fulfills "one necessary condition of successfully continuing our existence" in a much larger degree than Mead asked for. It fosters more than "an atmosphere of hope". It is indeed a clear vision of a future that is far more worth living in than our present-day condition, and of what we must do to get there, that the holotopia 'brand' stands for.

And we don't even need to wait for our problems to be solved; we can be part of "a great cultural revival" instantly—by joining holotopia in action, or even only in spirit.

We, however, neither deny that the problems we are facing must be attended to, nor belittle the heroic efforts of our frontier colleagues who are working on their solution.

The holotopia only complements the problem-based approaches—by adding what is still lacking to make solutions possible.

Holotopia is not our project

Holotopia is a project of our generation, and more—it is indeed trans-generational.

We are inspired by Gaudi's Sagrada Familia. It is to begin the creation of holotopia that is our generation's task. It will make all the difference, on our record, whether we leave our children only a mess—or a way to a new world.


Margaret Mead left us an encouraging insight, as her best known motto:

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."

And she also pointed to the critical task at hand: "Although tremendous advances in the human sciences have been made in the last hundred years, almost no advance has been made in their use, especially in ways of creating reliable new forms in which cultural evolution can be directed to desired goals."

That is where the Holotopia prototype finds its niche! We set it up as a research lab, for resolutely working toward that goal. We create a transformative 'snowball', with the material of our own bodies; and we let it roll.

SagradaFamilia.png
We are inspired by Gaudi's Sagrada Familia as trans-generational project. (In this rough draft we are borrowing this photo found on the Web.)


We federate a strategy

Peccei wrote in One Hundred Pages for the Future (the boldface emphasis is ours):

For some time now, the perception of (our responsibilities relative to "problematique") has motivated a number of organizations and small voluntary groups of concerned citizens which have mushroomed all over to respond to the demands of new situations or to change whatever is not going right in society. These groups are now legion. They arose sporadically on the most variend fronts and with different aims. They comprise peace movements, supporters of national liberation, and advocates of women's rights and population control; defenders of minorities, human rights and civil liberties; apostles of "technology with a human face" and the humanization of work; social workers and activists for social change; ecologists, friends of the Earth or of animals; defenders of consumer rights; non-violent protesters; conscientious objectors, and many others. These groups are usually small but, should the occasion arise, they can mobilize a host of men and women, young and old, inspired by a profound sense of te common good and by moral obligations which, in their eyes, are more important than all others.

They form a kind of popular army, actual or potential, with a function comparable to that of the antibodies generated to restore normal conditions in a biological organism that is diseased or attacked by pathogenic agents. The existence of so many spontaneous organizations and groups testifies to the vitality of our societies, even in the midst of the crisis they are undergoing. Means will have to be found one day to consolidate their scattered efforts in order to direct them towards strategic objectives.

Especially in times of change, diversity is good and useful, and it needs to be preserved and nourished. The systems scientists have a keyword, "requisite variety", which points to a necessary spectrum of capabilities or memes that make a social system capable of responding to environmental change, by changing itself—and hence viable or "sustainable".

The risk is, however, that the actions of "small voluntary groups of concerned citizens" may be reactive, not proactive.

To point to this risk, from political scientist Murray Edelman we adapted the keyword symbolic action. We engage in symbolic action when we act out our concerns and responsibilities within the limits of what's allowed—i.e. within the limits set by the systems in which we live and work. We organize a demonstration; or an academic conference. As a rule, symbolic action will have only symbolic effects; it will make us feel that we've done our duty. But it won't affect the systemic causes from which our problems result.

There is a lot to be said in favor of informing the work on change—by allowing the "strategic objectives" to emerge by federating insights, and by learning from one another. "Design for evolution" was Erich Jantsch's fruitful slogan, and we let it be our guiding light.

The advantages of adding an "evolutionary learning" module to the frontier where change is under way become especially striking when we consider the following insight, which follows as an obvious consequence of the five insights, and from all the rest we've shared above:

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

Comprehensive change, however, has its own way in which it may need to proceed; it has its own systemic leverage points.

The Holotopia prototype is envisioned as a 'research lab', organized to help the best strategies and strategic directions emerge.

Here we are presenting an initial variant, to get us started.

Our core goal is to foster a meme

Margaret Mead also left us an admonition—what exactly distinguishes "a small group of citizens" that is capable of making a large difference—which we do not take lightly.


"(W)e take the position that the unit of cultural evolution is neither the single gifted individual nor the society as a whole, but the small group of interacting individuals who, together with the most gifted among them, can take the next step; then we can set about the task of creating the conditions in which the appropriately gifted can actually make a contribution. That is, rather than isolating potential "leaders," we can purposefully produce the conditions we find in history, in which clusters are formed of a small number of extraordinary and ordinary men and women, so related to their period and to one another that they can consciously set about solving the problems they propose for themselves."


We have demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that we are not living in conditions "in which the appropriately gifted can actually make a contribution". Our stories, deliberately chosen to be a half-century old, show that the "appropriately gifted" have offered their gifts—but that we did not receive them.

It is essential to understand what we are up against. Watching this excerpt from the animated film The Incredibles might help: "A company is like an enormous clock. It only works if all the little cogs mesh together." We hear with Bob Incredible, a fictional superhero, his boss repeat the same words again and again, until we get it:

We too have been socialized, through infinitely many such moments, to turn a deaf ear to the hero in us, and be "little cogs that mesh together".

To act in ways we know don't work, because our embodied experience tells us that, is an epitome of stupidity. Unless, of course, our goal is to shift the paradigm—in which case acting in ways we know don't work is exactly what we have to be able to do!

Can the Holotopia prototype mobilize enough "human quality", within us who take in it an active part, and on the interface where it meets the world, to manifest its vision?

In the Holotopia prototype, we turn the challenge of transforming the cultural ecology that would make us "little cogs that mesh together" into a co-creative strategy game.

Our core goal is, in other words, to federate a value, and a way of being in the world—where we make both things and ourselves whole—by being responsible, responsive and self-organizing parts in a whole.


The Holotopia prototype is conceived as a collaborative strategy game—where we make tactical moves toward the holotopia vision. By prime it by this collection of tactical assets.

Art

The Holotopia prototype extends science as we know it—and at the same time thoroughly transforms it. The science we practice is not limited to academic professionals and laboratories, on the contrary—it extends the traditional academia into a vibrant space of transformative action.

KunsthallDialog01.jpg


An example of a transformative space, created by our "Earth Sharing" pilot project, in Kunsthall 3.14 art gallery in Bergen, Norway.

Just as the case was during the Renaissance, only the art can give transformative insights a transformative form.

We are reminded of Michelangelo painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, and in the midst of the old order of things planting seeds of a new one. Art is what first comes to mind when we think of the Renaissance. What sort of art will be the vehicle for this new one?

When Marcel Duchamp exhibited the urinal, he challenged not only the meaning of "art", but also the limits of what we can conceive of as creative action. The deconstruction of the tradition, has, however, now been completed.

Our situation calls for artistic construction of a completely new kind.


Here is a very brief sketch of holotopia ("white") being "(...) also the new red"; through a brief sketch of (possible) holotopia's interpretation of "young Marx". The point is: Young Marx arrived at a theoretical / philosophical standpoint for understanding the society and its ills. But having seen the miserable condition of the workers, he (in the eyes of the revolutionary left "matured" and) eschewed the intellectual idealism of his era, and embraced revolutionary engagement instead. The paradox of Marx is that this latter having become controversial and in many ways inappropriate for our conditions, the former got forgotten and ignored...

In "Production of Space", Henri Lefebvre summarized Marx's essential and increasingly vital point, his objection to capitalism (or what we would call power structure evolution) as causing "alienation" (by which humans are forced to abandon their quest for wholeness), by observing that capital (machines, tools, materials...) or "investments" are products of past work, and hence represent "dead labour". Our past activity "crystalyzed, as it were, and became a precondition for new activity." Under capitalism, "what is dead takes hold of what is alive". Lefebvre proposed to turn this relationship upon its head. "But how could what is alive lay hold of what is dead? The answer is: through the production of space, whereby living labour can produce something that is no longer a thing, nor simply a set of tools, nor simply a commodity.

As an initiative in the arts, Holotopia produces a space where what is alive in us can overcome what is making us dead.

In "The Society of the Spectacle", Guy Debord added a core element of this foundation, by elucidating the role the new media play in this process of alienation. The bottom line is that yes indeed, a revolution is what is called for—but of a completely different kind than what Marx saw as necessary in his time!


Keywords


A challenge is reaching us from sociology.

Beck-frame.jpeg

Beck continued the above observation:

"Max Weber's 'iron cage' – in which he thought humanity was condemned to live for the foreseeable future – is for me the prison of categories and basic assumptions of classical social, cultural and political sciences."

The 'candle headlights' (the practice of inheriting the way we look at the world, try to comprehend it and handle it) are keeping us in 'iron cage'!


Wholeness

Simple goal, to direct our efforts ('destination to bus').

Culture

In a fractal-like manner, our definition of culture reflects the entire situation around holoscope and holotopia. So let us summarize it here in that way, however briefly. We motivated this definition by discussing Zygmunt Bauman's book "Culture as Praxis"—where Bauman surveyed a large number of historical definitions of culture, and reached the conclusion that they are so diverse that they cannot be reconciled with one another. How can we develop culture as praxis—if we don't even know what "culture" means? We defined culture as "cultivation of wholeness", where the keyword cultivation is defined by analogy with planting and watering a seed (which suits also the etymology of "culture") . Thereby (and in accordance with the general holotopia approach we discussed above), we pointed to a specific aspect of culture. No amount of dissecting and studying a seed would suggest that it needs to be planted and watered. Hence when we reduced "reality" to what we can explain in that way, the culture as cultivation is all gone! When, however, we consider and treat information as human experience, and look for what may help us redeem and further develop culture—then a remedial trend, modeled by holotopia, is already under way.


Religion

In traditional cultures, religion was widely regarded as an integral part of our wholeness. Can this concept, and the heritage of the traditions it is pointing to, still have a function and a value in our own era?

We adapted the definition that Martin Lings contributed, and defined religion as "reconnection with the archetype" (which harmonizes with the etymological meaning of this word). The archetypes include "justice", "motherhood", "freedom", "beauty", "truth", "love" and anything else that may inspire a person to overcome egotism and convenience, and serve a "higher" end.

Addiction

The evolution gave us senses and emotions to guide us to wholeness—in the natural condition. Civilization made it amply possible to deceive our senses—by creating pleasurable things that do not further wholeness. We point to them by the keyword addiction.

We defined addiction as a pattern; and motivated this definition by observing that evolution equipped us, humans with emotions of comfort and discomfort to guide our choices toward wholeness. The civilized humans, however, found ways to deceive nature—by creating pleasurable things called "addictions", which lead us away from wholeness. Since selling addictions is lucrative business, the traditions identified certain activities and things as addictions—such as the opiates and the gambling; and they developed suitable legislation and ethical norms. In modernity, however, with the help of new technology, businesses can develop hundreds of new addictions—without us having a way to even recognize them as that. By defining addiction as a pattern, we can perceive addiction as an aspect of otherwise good and useful things. From a large number of obvious or subtle addictions, we here mention only pseudoconsciousness defined as "addiction to information". Consciousness of one's situation and surroundings is, of course, a necessary condition for wholeness. In civilization we can, however, drown this need in facts and data, which give us the sensation of knowing—without telling us what we need to know in order to be or become whole.


Symbolic action


The [five insights|five insights] are also five keywords.

The socialized reality insight allows allow us to see and comprehend something about ourselves, which we tend to ignore—that we indeed have two sets of values: the ones we hold consciously, and the embodied ones, which are the result of socialization. Nothing is in principle wrong with wanting to be successful; indeed repeating strategies that demonstrably don't work is considered the hallmark of stupidity. Gradually, without us noticing, we learn to accommodate other people's "interests", so they may accommodate ours. Those "interests" become our embodied values. We become part of a power structure.

Our rationally held values become distant from our embodied ones—which subtly yet decisively limit our thought and action, and in that way govern our behavior.

From political scientist Murray Edelman we adopted a most useful keyword, to answer that all-important question—symbolic action. We engage in symbolic action when we do something that makes us feel we've done our share, which is within the existing systemic or power structure constraints: We join a protest meeting; we write a research article, or organize a conference.

Text


Mirror

Mirror-Lab.jpeg
Details from Vibeke Jensen's Berlin studio.

In holotopia the mirror is a symbolic object with a variety of connotations. As an art object, is carries a spectrum of possibilities. And as a tactical object—the mirror lets us employ the symbolic language of the arts, to code culturally transformative messages.

As a society, and as the academic tradition in particular—which has been guiding our society along the homo sapiens evolutionary path—we are now standing in front of the mirror. We are invited to self-reflect. And to find a way through.

Abolition of reification

The mirror brings an end to reifications of all kinds—of the power-laden way in which we see the world (or socialized reality created by power structure), our "scientific worldview" (or narrow frame), our ways of handling knowledge (our functionally impaired collective mind), our likes and dislikes (convenience paradox). <p>

Academic self-reflection

<p>It is the academia that needs to liberate us from reification. </p>

<p>We defined academia as "institutionalized academic tradition".

<p>It is with the legitimacy of the academic tradition—and with the suggestive power of the arts—that we are about to make our next step.</p>

Co-creating awesomeness

<p>The holotopia is on the other side.</p>


</div> </div>


The dialog

Dialog as an art form

We make the ten themes alive by creating dialogs.

<p>We turn conversations into artistic and media-enabled events (see the Earth Sharing prototype below).</p>

The dialog as an attitude

<p>The dialog is an integral part of the holoscope. Its role will be understood if we consider the human inclination to hold onto a certain way of seeing things, and call it "reality". And how much this inclination has been misused by various social groups to bind us to themselves, and more recently by various modern power structures. (Think, for instance, about the animosity between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland, or between Sunni and Shia Muslims in the Middle East.)</p> <p>The attitude of the dialog may be understood as an antidote.</p>

Dialog as a tradition

<p>The dialogues of Socrates marked the very inception of the academic tradition. More recently, David Bohm gave the evolution of the dialogue a new and transformative direction. Bohm's dialogues are a form of collective therapy. Instead of arguing their points, the participants practice "proprioception" (mindfully observe their reactions), so that they may ultimately listen without judging, and co-create a space where new and transformative ideas can emerge.</p> <p>We built on this tradition and developed a collection of prototypes—which holotopia will use as construction material, and build further.</p>

The dialog as a spectacle

<p>The holotopia dialogs will have the nature of spectacles—not the kind of spectacles fabricated by the media, but real ones. To the media spectacles, they present a real and transformative alternative.</p> <p>The dialogs we initiate are a re-creation of the conventional "reality shows"—which show the contemporary reality in ways that need to be shown. The relevance is on an entirely different scale. And the excitement and actuality are of course larger! We engage the "opinion leaders" to contribute their insights to the cause.</p> <p>When successful, the result is most timely and informative: We are witnessing the changing of our understanding and handling of a core issue.</p> <p>When unsuccessful, the result is most timely and informative in a different way: We are witnessing our resistances and our blind spots, our clinging to the obsolete forms of thought.</p> <p>Occasionally we publish books about those themes, based on our dialogs, and to begin new ones.</p>

The dialog as an instrument of change

<p>This point cannot be overemphasized: Our primary goal is not to warn, inform, propose a new way to look at the world—but to change our collective mind. Physically. The dialog is the medium for that change. </p>

We organize public dialogs about the five insights, and other themes related to change, in order to make change.

<p>Here the medium in the truest sense is the message: By developing dialogs, we re-create our collective mind—from something that only receives, which is dazzled by the media... to something that is capable of weaving together academic and other insights, and by engaging the best of our "collective intelligence" in seeing what needs to be done. And in inciting, planning and coordinating action.</p> <p>In the holotopia scheme of things everything is a prototype. The prototypes are not final results of our efforts, they are a means to an end—which is to rebuild the public sphere; to reconfigure our collective mind. The role of the prototypes is to prime this process.</p>

We employ contemporary media

<p>The use of contemporary media opens up a whole new chapter, or dimension, in the story of the dialog. </p> <p>Through suitable use of the camera, the dialog can be turned into a mirror—mirroring our dysfunctional communication habits; our turf strifes.</p> <p>By using Debategraph and other "dialog mapping" online tools, the dialog can be turned into a global process of co-creation of meaning.</p>

  • * *

<p> It complements the mirror. Brings completely different attitude to communication. Follows from fundamental premises.</p>

<p>Tell the story of Bohm, Einstein and Bohr?</p>

<p>Feedback mechanism: It is easy to see whether we are genuinely listening and supporting—or playing a power game. The difference is huge!</p>

<p>When we, however, do succeed—we have already reached our goal. The medium here truly is the message!</p>


The five insights, and the ten direct relationships between them, provide us a frame of reference—in the context of which some of the age-old challenges can be understood and handled in entirely new ways.

Academia quo vadis?

<p>Txt</p>

How to put an end to war?

<p>Consider, for instance, this age-old question: "How to put an end to war?" So far our progress on this all-important frontier has largely been confined to palliative measures; and ignored those far more interesting curative ones. What would it take to really put an end to war, once and for all?</p> <p>When this question is considered in the context of two direction-changing insights, power structure and socialized reality, we become ready to see the whole compendium of questions related to justice, power and freedom in a completely new way. We then realize in what way exactly, throughout history, we have been coerced, largely through cultural means, to serve renegade power, in the truest sense our enemy, by engaging our sense of duty, heroism, honor and other values and traits that constitute "human quality". We then become ready to redeem the best sides of ourselves from the power structure, and apply them toward true betterment of our condition.</p>

Religion beyond belief

<p>Book One</p> <p>Or think about religion—which has in traditional societies served to bind each person with "human quality", and the people together into a culture or a society. But which is in modern times all too often associated with dogmatic beliefs, and inter-cultural conflicts.</p> <p>When religion is, however, considered in the context provided by socialized reality and convenience paradox, a whole new possibility emerges—where religion no longer is an instrument of socialization—but of liberation; and as an essential way to cultivate our personal and communal wholeness.</p> <p>A natural strategy for remedying religion-related dogmatic beliefs and inter-cultural conflicts emerges—to evolve religion further!</p>

The largest contribution to knowledge

<p>Text</p>

Stories

<p>Introduction</p>

The incredible history of Doug Engelbart

<p>He was making the largest contribution to knowledge...</p>


The elephant

<p> Elephant.jpg
Elephant ideogram </p>

The role of this metaphorical image, the elephant, is to point to a "quantum leap" in relevance and interest, which specific insights and actions can achieve when presented as essential elements of a spectacularly large event—a "cultural revival".

The elephant

<p>Imagine the 20th century's visionary thinkers as those proverbial blind-folded men touching an elephant. We hear them talk about things like "a fan", "a water hose" and "a tree trunk". But they don't make sense, and we ignore them.</p> <p>Everything changes when we realize that they are really talking about the ear, the trunk and the leg of an imposingly large exotic animal, which nobody has yet had a chance to see—a whole new order of things, or cultural and social paradigm! </p>

A spectacle

<p>The effect of the five insights is to orchestrate this act of 'connecting the dots'—so that the spectacular event we are part of, this exotic 'animal', the new 'destination' toward which we will now "change course" becomes clearly visible.</p> <p>A side effect is that the academic results once again become interesting and relevant. In this newly created context, they acquire a whole new meaning; and agency!</p>

Post-post-structuralism

<p>The structuralists undertook to bring rigor to the study of cultural artifacts. The post-structuralists "deconstructed" their efforts, by observing that there is no such thing as "real meaning"; and that the meaning of cultural artifacts is open to interpretation.</p> <p>This evolution may be taken a step further. What interests us is not what, for instance, Bourdieu "really saw" and wanted to communicate. We acknowledge (with the post-structuralists), that even Bourdieu would not be able to tell us that, if he were still around. We acknowledge, however, that Bourdieu saw something that invited a different interpretation and way of thinking than what was common; and did what he could to explain it within the old paradigm. Hence we give the study of cultural artifacts not only a sense of rigor, but also a new degree of relevance—by considering them as signs on the road, pointing to an emerging paradigm</p>

Engelbart saw the elephant

<p>While the view of the elephant is composed of a large number of stories, one of them—the incredible history of Doug (Engelbart)—is epigrammatic. It is not only a spectacular story—how the Silicon Valley failed to understand or even hear its "giant in residence", even after having recognized him as that; it is also a parable pointing to many of the elements we want to highlight by telling these stories—not least the social psychology and dynamics that 'hold Galilei in house arrest'.</p> <p>This story also inspired us to use this metaphor: Engelbart saw 'the elephant' already in 1951—and spent a six decades-long career painstakingly trying to show him to us.</p>

He did not succeed!

<p>Engelbart passed away with only a meager (computer) mouse in his hand (to his credit)!</p>


Prototypes

<p>

Workshop. Use prototypes to create prototypes.</p>




Events

<p>Making things happen.</p>

<p>We'll bring all this down to earth by describing the pilot project we've developed in art gallery Kunsthall 3.14 in Bergen. </p>

<p>Lots of photos...</p>