Imagine...

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

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

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

Modernity ideogram

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."

We are proposing to handle information as we handle other man-made things—by suiting it to the purposes that need to be served.

Or to rephrase this in the language of our metaphor, we are proposing to create the 'headlights'—instead of trying to make use of whatever happens to be there; instead of blindly adopting what we've inherited from the past.

Knowledge federation can now be understood as the principle of operation of the new 'headlights'.

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

Knowledge federation achieves this purpose by combining fragmented pieces of information together, to give them visibility and impact. Or as our logo might suggest—by 'connecting the dots'.

By 'connecting the dots', we can reach a new insight—and see an issue or a situation in a new way, show how it may need to be handled. Or we can create a prototype—and give this insight a way to impact reality.

What consequences will knowledge federation have? How will information be different? How will it be used? By what methods, what social processes, and by whom will it be created? What new information formats will emerge, and supplement or replace the traditional books and articles? How will information technology be adapted? What will public informing be like? And academic communication, and education?

The substance of our proposal is the Knowledge Federation prototype—a complete and academically coherent answer to those and other related questions. An answer that is not only described and explained, but also implemented—in a collection of real-life embedded prototypes.

An application

What difference will this make? The Holotopia prototype, which is under development, is 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 our ideas to 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 warning:

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

Aurelio Peccei

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

Can knowledge federation help us "change course"?

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

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

This conclusion Peccei shared with a number of twentieth century's frontier thinkers. Arne Næss for instance, Norway's most loved philosopher, reached it on different grounds and called it "deep ecology".

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

A vision

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

The holotopia is an astonishingly positive future scenario.

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

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

Unlike the utopias, the holotopia is readily realizable; we already have all that is needed for its fulfillment. To realize it, we need to "change course" in the direction that is suggested by its name.

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

This is the direction the Modernity ideogram is pointing to.

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

Five insights

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

They show why fundamental changes are ready to happen in five pivotal domains

• innovation
• communication
• epistemology
• the way we look at the world
• values

as soon as we begin to federate knowledge, or 'connect the dots'.

The five insights and the changes they point to are so interdependent, that a more general insight naturally follows:

Comprehensive change can be easy, even when smaller and obviously necessary changes may seem impossible.

Ten conversations

The relationships between the five insights provide us a context for perceiving and handling, in informed and completely new ways, some of the age-old challenges such as

• How to put an end to war
• How to overcome the dichotomy between science and religion
• How education may need to change, to help streamline the larger societal transformation

A prototype

A snapshot of Holotopia's pilot project in Kunsthall 3.14, Bergen.

The Holotopia prototype is not only a description; most importantly it is already "a way to change course".

A strategy

The Holotopia prototype implements the strategy proposed by The Club of Rome: Instead of focusing on problems, we undertake to change the systemic conditions from which they arise.

As an initiative to give our society a new capability, to 'connect the dots' and see things whole, knowledge federation brings to this strategy a collection of technical assets. Their potential to make a difference may be understood with the help of the elephant metaphor.

Imagine visionary thinkers as the 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.

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!

Elephant ideogram

The elephant symbolizes the paradigm that is now ready to emerge, as soon as we 'connect the dots'. Compared to the sensations we are accustomed to see on TV, the elephant is not only more spectacular; it is also incomparably more relevant.

And it gives agency to academic results.

A dialog

Initially, we are not aiming to get the proposed ideas accepted. The immediate goal of the Holotopia project is to organize dialogs around them.

The dialog, as a media-enabled and structured public conversation about a theme that matters, constitutes the very 'construction project' by which our society's 'headlights' are being rebuilt.