**3. From power to knowledge**

Since Arnold J. Toynbee, human history can be periodized in three different societal regimes: (1) nomadic hunter gatherers, (2) traditional societies, and (3) modernity. The most important sociological question is to understand how these societal regimes establish their cohesion. While nomadic societies are hold together through a strong symbiosis between actors, society, and environment, all integrated by ties of symbolic exchange, traditional societies mainly reproduce their synthesis by the media of power [4]. The particularity of this media is that it cannot be shared, you have the power or you have it not. If you lose it, somebody else would get it and reversely. In this sense, power is a resource for a zero-sum-game. Power must be legitimated. Since human agents are led by conscience and not by their instincts, situations of big risk of societal collapse excepted, this legitimation can only be reasonably asserted and universally admitted if a transcendent dimension guarantees power relations. In other words, God's will is the guarantee to legitimate social hierarchy. Due to the astronomic discoveries in the late 16th century, which drew scholastic thinking into deep contradictions between its Aristotelian frame and the newly discovered realities, the transcendent dimension backed away, especially in Europe [5]. The everlasting wars during all this century began to embody again the figure of a Deus absconditus, a hidden God who turns his back on humanity, away from the consequences of the misusages of human free will. This situation of a complete contingency is unique in human history. In the absence of God, humans had no other choice but to use their own reason (which is, after Augustinus, a gift of God) to master a kind of social order, to avoid collapse, and in other words, to share their reason and knowledge in order to figure and end to disorder and war. Instead of the transcendent divine will, a new world had to be created, imagined through the immanence of reason. But this new way to manage human affairs involved another resource than power, i.e., reason and knowledge. This is the turning point: reasonable knowledge is a resource for positive-sum-games, totally different from the zero-sum-power fuelled games. And there is more. If done properly —and this is an institu‐ tional issue of paramount importance—sharing knowledge between two or more sources gives place to a synergetic effect. This effect can only be reached if ideas and reasons have the freedom to circulate. So, the knowledge society has its roots in the early Enlightenment. It fueled the process of individualization and rationalization supported by the proofs that their synergetic answers were capable to create social order in God's vacancy.

and some epistemological creativity more interested in original questioning than in preserving

Proceedings of the International Conference on Interdisciplinary Studies (ICIS 2016) - Interdisciplinarity and Creativity

The form of a media dwells in its technological hardware. What McLuhan asserts with his legendary formula is more than the classical Aristotelian hylemorphism that postulates the nondissociation of form and content; it is actually its complete turnaround. McLuhan never said that the medium is a message as such, but only that the form of a given message could be completely different if the medium changed, e.g., if a roman law expressed in simple scriptur‐ ality is translated into mechanical scripturality at the Gutenberg Age. The first step to be taken, if we want to investigate this transformation in the meaning of the message, is to consider how this new kind of communication functions in technological terms. In other words, how the hardware determines the software. Traditionally, technicians and engineers were supposed to understand how things work and perform to their best. But if we read McLuhan correctly, it is much more than that. One could infer that their real job refers to (or at least should) the way their artifacts open a field to meaningfulness, whose options are, afterwards, constructed by socialforces.ItiswellknownnowthattheinventionofthewheelbyIncaengineersorhandymen never ended linearly in new forms of circulation and territorial policies [2,3], but was simply (but is this so simple?) used as a tool for new toys. The main difference between the Inca handymanandthe engineer of ourmedial age is thatthehandyman wasnever askedto imagine what kind of options and meanings his invention could acquire, whereas the contemporary engineer, on the contrary, has to assume this important effort. The point is that this effort is not necessary because of the universal accessibility of information, not even (!) because of the risks that technological innovations carry on; the point is, let aside that nobody else could perform

this effort, this is (or should be) part of his or her scientific responsibility.

Another point should be mentioned too. We could argue that this mission is assumed by prospective studies that could be part of the education and the professional training of the engineers.Butthatisonlytheobvious, shallowpartoftheproblem.Themostimportantfunction is, in fact, to outline all the possible options opened by hardware techniques; we refer to what we could call the aesthetic part of technical investigation. When the perspective was discov‐ ered during the Quattrocento in Italy, nobody could imagine what kind of consequences this new representation technique could have in mathematics, physics, and, especially, in practi‐ cal arts like architecture. It was necessary to wait for Erwin Panofsky [4] to understand the link betweenallthesedisciplinesandarts.Ittookfivecenturiesfortherelationbetweenthisinvention and its consequences to be seriously understood. No need to say that such delays are nowa‐

Since Arnold J. Toynbee, human history can be periodized in three different societal regimes: (1) nomadic hunter gatherers, (2) traditional societies, and (3) modernity. The most important

certainties.

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in the Knowledge Society

days impossible to accept.

**3. From power to knowledge**

**2. The medium is (also) the message**

Modernity is not a creation of scientists, technicians, lawyers or philosophers; it is the creature of the positive-sum-game. Under given conditions, this game is the chance to interconnect different kinds of knowledge in order to achieve new solutions and innovations. The mislead‐ ing idea was that the man is a homo faber. He is that indeed. But he was a homo faber during all his history and did not wait the late 16th century to develop his abilities and it is, therefore, important to acknowledge that these competences began to be cumulative and synergetic only as parts of a positive-sum-game. This means that by essence knowledge sharing opposes to power games. Knowledge is the only win-win game possible. Alas, the dark side of the process is that, if human transactions are considered under this light, there is no limit in human material needs. The Greek called this illimitation pleonexia, which is the mother of all Hybris, the loss of measure. It is insofar a perversion of "human nature" since the material universe, in any traditional society, must be conceived as a strictly limited and ordered cosmos. The conception of unlimited goods is impossible in the mind frame of such a cosmos. Thus, whereas the synergetic effects achieve Enlightenment and all the modern achievements in the ideational world, this process has its shadowy or even cursed side in the illimitation of the material world.

Parallel to the elaboration of knowledge society during the 17th century, this new paradigm of human transactions gives place to what we call "risk society" since Ulrich Beck in late modernity.

Another consequence of the positive-sum-society is individualization. Even if freedom of will and action is certainly the most important normative achievement of modernity, this constit‐ utive part of the individualization process has its dark side too. In a traditional zero-sumsociety, social ties are strong and give human beings a kind of ontological security they cannot afford anymore. Social ties are strong in the traditional world because everything in the "great chain of being" (Arthur O. Lovejoy), which forms its cosmos, is linked by relations of indebt‐ edness, especially among humans. And, the social logic of zero-sum-games is the imbalance of cost and benefits in every form of transaction. If (A) makes a profit (a+) on the costs of (B), (a+) and (b−) are equivalents under the condition that in a further transaction (A) has to carry the costs and (B) will profit on histurn—either as a reduced (A/B) or enlarged form of exchange (A/B/C….A). Under the condition of positive-sum-game, (a) and (b) are not in a relation of indebtedness, but of mutual profit, either in a reduced dual (a+) ⇒ (b+) or in collective form (a +) ⇒ (b+) ⇒ (c+), etc., like in Mandeville's fable of the bees (1704), where private vices contribute to public virtue. In such a situation, social (debt) bonds are replaced by the individual pursuit of profit, happiness or vice. This pursuit is moral insofar, as the individual advantage (a+) can be considered as the condition for (b+) or (c+). This is the exact definition of individuality. In other words, the price of freedom is not just loneliness, but also the ontological insecurity. In place of God, modern individualistic societies placed the ongoing process of Mandeville's fable.

The two pillars of modernity, illimitation of goods and individualization, share obviously the same root; and insofar, the two dark sides of these pillars, the ecological collapse due to unlimited growth and social loneliness, are coming from the same origin. Unfortunately, this origin has hardly been unveiled.
