Imagine...

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

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

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

Modernity ideogram

We need new 'headlights'

The way we see the world

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

We have 'candles' as 'headlights'

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

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

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

Massive academic publishing made things worse.

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

Neil Postman described the situation that resulted as follows:

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

Neil Postman

The KF proposal

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

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

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

Knowledge federation concretely

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

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

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

As a way to operationalize this proposal, we offer to

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

An application

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

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

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

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

Aurelio Peccei

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

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

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

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

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

A vision

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

The holotopia is an astonishingly positive future scenario.

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

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

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

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

This is exactly the direction the Modernity ideogram is pointing to.

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

A strategy

We focus on "changing course"

How can we, realistically, "change course"? What can make a large enough difference to really make a difference?

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

Of course, such a strategy can only be pursued through a radically changed awareness and values. And through collaboration, not conflict. But how can our values, our very way of being in the world, realistically be transformed?

We answer this question thoroughly under "Tactical assets" below.

We foster new thinking to enable solutions

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

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!

We begin with information

Just as building a house must begin with the foundations, changing the whole order of things too has a natural order in which it needs to proceed. As the Modernity ideogram suggested, to change course, we must begin by changing the illumination source—so that the new course can be seen; and pursued. Now that the "Age of Information" is turning into "Anthropocene", we need new information, which can help us navigate through our new challenges, and opportunities.

Five insights

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

We look at five pivotal themes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The sixth insight

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

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

A new understanding of justice

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

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

A more thorough understanding of our proposal

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

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

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

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

Ten themes

The five insights, and the ten direct relationships between them, provide us reference—in the context of which some of the age-old challenges are understood and handled in entirely new ways (for a complete list, which will be renamed and thoroughly re-edited see Ten conversations).

How to put an end to war?

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?

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.

Religion beyond belief

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.

When religion is, however, considered in the context provided by socialized reality and convenience paradox, a whole new possibility emerges—where religion is no longer an instrument of socialization—but of liberation; and as an essential way to cultivate our personal and communal wholeness.

A natural strategy for remedying religion-related dogmatic beliefs and inter-cultural conflicts emerges—to evolve religion further!

The ten themes are only examples

Of course any theme can be placed into the context of the five insights, and end up being seen and handled radically differently. To prime these eagerly sought-for conversations, we provided a selection of ten themes (related to the future of education, business, science, democracy, art, happiness...) that—together with the five insights—cover the space of holotopia in sufficient detail to make it palpable and real.

The dialog

An instrument of change

This point cannot be overemphasized: Our 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.

But here the medium in the truest sense is the message: By developing those 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" seeing what needs to be done, and directing and coordinating action.

This is why in the holotopia scheme of things everything is just prototypes. The are not an end, but means to an end—which is to bring together our "collective intelligence" to bear upon the themes that truly matter. To rebuild the public sphere. To recreate our collective mind

We build upon a rich tradition

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.

We built on this tradition and developed a collection of prototypes—which holotopia will use as construction material, and build further.

Reality shows

The dialogs have the nature of spectacles—not the kind of spectacles fabricated by the media, but real ones. Hence they present to them a real, transformative alternative.

The dialogs we expect to have will be 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. When successful, the result is most timely and informative. When these conversations fail—they reveal to us, in a spotlight, our resistances and our blind spots, our clinging to the obsolete forms of thought. Which is, of course, not any less exciting and relevant.

Occasionally we publish books about those themes, based on our dialogs, and to begin new ones.

Art and new media

Holotopia is an art project</p>

The Holotopia is an art project. We are reminded of Michelangelo painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, and in the heart of the old world order planting the seeds of the new one.

Duchamp's (attempted) exhibition of a urinal challenged what art may be, and contributed to the legacy that the modern art was built on. Now our conditions demand that we deconstruct the deconstruction—and begin to construct anew.

What will the art associated with the next Renaissance be like? We offer holotopia as a creative space where the new art can emerge.

<h3>Art as production of space

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

Henri Lefebvre summarized the most vital of Karl Marx's objections to capitalism, by observing that capital (machines, tools, materials...) or "investments" are products of past work, and hence represent "dead labour". That in this way past activity "crystalyzes, as it were, and becomes a precondition for new activity." And that under capitalism, "what is dead thakes hold of what is alive"

Lefebvre proposes to turn this relationship upon its head. "But how could what is alive lay hold of what is dead? The answer is: through the producion of space, whereby living labour can produce something that is no longer a thing, nor simply a set of tools, nor simply a commodity.

<p>As the above image may suggest, the holotopia artists still produce art objects; but they are used as pieces in a larger whole— which is a space where transformation happens. A space where the creativity of the artist can cross-fertilize with the insights of the scientist, to co-create a new reality that none of them can create on her own. Imagine it as a space, akin to a new continent or a "new world" that's just been discovered—which combines physical and virtual spaces, suitably interconnected.

The Holotopia project gives new life to new media technology

The Holotopia project combines contemporary art with contemporary media (tools for "augmenting our collective intellect", creative video recording and editing etc.), to change our collective mind.

We use those tools to create a new collective mind

The elephant

The elephant

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.

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!

A spectacle

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.

A side effect is that the academic results once again become interesting and relevant. In this context newly created, they acquire a whole new meaning; and agency!

Post-post-structuralism

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.

We can here see how 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 also 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 have a way to 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

A parable

While the view of the elephant is composed of a large number of stories, one of them—the story 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'.

This story also inspired us to use this metaphor: Engelbart saw 'the elephant' already in 1951—and spent a six decades-long career to show him to us. And yet he passed away with only a meagre (computer) mouse in his hand (to his credit)!

The mirror

The mirror is a complex symbol, in which a number of streams of thought and lines of development that constitute the holotopia are woven together.

End of "objectivity"

Or the "discovery of ourselves"—will have a range of consequences.

One of them is to understand just how much our perception of things is subject to "human development"...

The end of "objectivity" is the beginning of accountability—where instead of seeing ourselves as "objective observers" of the world, we recognize that we are its responsible creators. "We have seen the enemy, and he is us."

This is also an epistemology change—with profound consequences on how we valuate information, and what we do.

A theme for academic revival

A key point here is that the evolution of academia—that is, of knowledge of knowledge—has brought us here, in front of this mirror. The next step in academia's development is to (instead of being so busy with business as usual) stop and self-reflect. When we do that, a whole new self-identity will emerge—where we are no longer the "objective observers of reality", but its creators. But that is the epistemology that begets the holotopia.

The academia must guide our society 'through the mirror'

The holotopia and the holoscope (alias knowledge federation) are respectively the social and the academic reality on the other side. By presenting the suitable prototypes, we facilitate the all-important step, through the mirror.

Stories

We bring together stories (elsewhere called vignettes)—which in attractive and accessible ways share the core insights of leading contemporary thinkers. We tell their stories.

They become 'dots' to connect in our conversations.

They also show what obstructed our evolution (the emergence of holotopia). The point here is, of course, not to blame ourselves—but to understand our situation, and continue our evolution.

Ideograms

The ideograms condense lots of insights into a simple image, ready to be grasped.

The existing ideograms are only a place holder—for what may be developed through suitable combinations of art and new media.

The ideograms employ the vast arsenal of artistic and suggestive tools, to affect us directly

As the above image may suggest, the pentagram—as the basic icon or 'logo' opf holotopia—lends itself to a myriad re-creations. We offer the above model for a larger sculpture to suggest how a myriad of ideas can be condensed to a simple image—and how this image can then expand into a broad variety of artistic creations.

Keywords

The Renaissance too, and also science, brought along a whole new way of speaking—and hence a new way to look at the world. All along, and with the five insights in particular, we introduce the keywords which are newly defined. It is in terms of those keywords that we come to understand the core issues and our time in completely new ways.

Prototypes

Information has agency only when it has a way to impact our actual physical reality. A goal of the Holotopia project is to co-create prototypes—new elements of our new reality. All along we share the prototypes we've already developed, to put the ball in play.

Completing the KF prototype

The academic cause is presently obstructed ('Galilei is held in house arrest') by a most interesting challenge, which we have called the Wiener's paradox: Our collective mind is structured in a way that leaves the academia disconnected, from the public opinion and from the policy. As we have seen, the core mission of our knowledge federation initiative is to remedy that split.

This paradox, however, means that whatever we may say in an academic publication—is likely to remain without effect! But what else can we do? The Holotopia project is our prototype answer. Its purpose within the Knowledge Federation prototype is to complete the prototype by federating knowledge federation!

Imagine us as a collection of 'cells' in our 'collective mind', which mutated in a new way. Having perceived our society as a bus with candle headlights, we perceived ourselves as (part of) those headlights. And we began to self-organize differently. So that we may become 'lightbulbs', not 'candles'!

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

And so we made a small snowball, and began to roll it downhill. Will it gather snow? Will it grow? Will it have the effect it needs to have?

Margaret Mead wrote in Continuities in Cultural Evolution, already in 1964:

"(W)e are living in a period of extraordinary danger, as we are faced with the possibility that our shole species will be eliminated from the evolutionary scene."

Well before The Club of Rome said their word, Mead 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."

Mead's best known motto is encouraging:

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

We leave her more sober words, regarding what constitutes "a small group of... citizens" that are capable of making such a large difference, as her challenge to the Holotopia initiative:

Margaret Mead

"Although lengthy discussions about different kinds of leadership in different situations serve, indirectly, to explain why science has not solved the problem of identifying leaders, they serve no further constructive purpose.

Instead, we 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, so related to their period and to one another that they can consciously set about solving the problems they propose for themselves."

A dugnad

Our call to action is an invitation to make an inner all-important step: To consider holotopia as your project, not ours. By seeing yourself as part of the larger whole—and contributing accordingly—you will already be in holotopia

In Norwegian language there is a word, "dugnad" (pronounced as "dügnad"), for the kind of collective event that may be organized by the people in the neighborhood, to collect fallen branches and trash and do small repairs in the commons—and then share a meal and get to know each other.

It is the spirit of dugnad we are inviting you to emulate.