The wars that will shape the future
Beyond Battles: The New Wars Shaping Our Future
The fight (between humans) that got us here
The human-centered conflicts for socio-political reasons have been one of the most significant sources of innovation and technological progress. We believe that the most fundamental paradigm shift in history is bringing about a new type of war that will shape the future of technology.
The technology of today, especially the information technology at the bottom of our current cognitive technologies and computers, is a direct consequence of the wars and conflicts of humanity during the last few centuries. The socio-political wars of the past and present have driven investment, talent dedication, a real-life laboratory for prototyping and experimentation, an excuse to break disciplinary silos, and a sense of ultimate urgency.
This is not just relevant to the most recent and advanced wars but something that goes to the beginning of humans fighting each other. Ancient warfare spurred the development of various technologies driven by the need for more effective offense and defense. Early innovations included stronger bronze and later iron weapons and armor, offering greater durability and protection. The chariot emerged as a crucial technology for mobility and tactical advantage on the battlefield. Siege warfare saw the creation of formidable machines like catapults and trebuchets for launching projectiles, battering rams to breach fortifications, and siege towers to scale walls. Naval warfare also advanced with the development of more sophisticated ships designed for ramming and boarding, such as the Greek trireme, showcasing the ingenuity applied to military needs in ancient times.
World War II is notable for its relevance in today’s world as many of the advancements developed during it are today part of our present everyday objects. Some examples are:
Microwaves: Radar technology, particularly the cavity magnetron, led to the development of microwave ovens for home use.
Radar: Initially for military detection, radar became crucial for meteorology and weather forecasting.
Computers: ENIAC, one of the first general-purpose computers, was developed for military calculations and later made public, revolutionizing computing technology. Alan Turing participated in creating “The Bombe” which was a machine to decipher German encrypted messages.
Medicine: Advances in blood transfusions, skin grafts, trauma treatment, and the mass production of penicillin significantly improved medical practices.
Atomic Bomb: The development of atomic weapons drastically altered global politics and led to the nuclear arms race.
Space Technology: The Space Race, fueled by Cold War tensions, spurred the creation of NASA and led to significant advancements in space exploration.
Supply chains and Management: The advancement of troops over ever expanding territories has pushed fields like Operations Research and Management towards efficiency, reliability, safety.
Many of today’s most important institutions and funding for technology research and development centers in the world, like the Lincoln Laboratory at MIT, the U.S. Army Research Laboratory (ARL), the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO), in India, the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), in the UK, or companies like the RAND Corporation or DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) pour immense amounts of money and attention to the questions of war, security and conflict.
We at Holon Labs think that the questions and history of War and Defense are fundamental to our work with composition, collective cognition and our special attention to gardens. We think that the history of gardens is closely related to the history of humans fighting with each other, as the shift to agrarian societies fundamentally altered human conceptions of property, moving from communal or nomadic use of land to established, cultivated territories. As groups transitioned to farming, the land they tilled and invested labor into became valuable, leading to the development of private property. This sense of ownership in turn generated a critical need for security and protection. Individuals and communities sought to defend their cultivated land from others who might desire it, spurring the formation of social structures, defensive technologies like walls and weapons, and early forms of governance to maintain order and safeguard ownership claims. The enclosure, also related to "garden", metaphorically and physically represents this desire for security and protection. The transition to agrarian life not only reshaped economies but also created enduring concepts of property rights and the necessity of their defense.
The word "garden" traces its origins to the concept of "enclosure", which is central to the historical understanding of gardens. Further etymological connections reveal the word "paradise" derives from an Old Iranian form, "*parādaijah-," meaning "walled enclosure," which then evolved to denote the expansive walled gardens of the First Persian Empire. These "paradises" were later referenced in Greek as "parádeisos," signifying a "park for animals," and also appeared in Aramaic and Hebrew, eventually contributing to the concept of the Garden of Eden. Thus, the very word "garden" inherently carries the notion of a bounded, contained space, reflecting its historical function as an enclosed area, and linking it conceptually and linguistically to the idealized enclosure of "paradise." The connections between gardens and paradise is fundamental to our understanding of an aspirational desire for enclosing a piece of Nature that we own and control, and therefore that we have to defend from others.
War and the traditional european interpretation of gardens are related in the fundamental value system that they share, this is that land can be owned, controlled and protected, and then as the trajectory of these ideas progressed, we saw as a civilization a detachment of the material meaning of the relationship between land and property, which pushed us to protect bigger and bigger spaces of territory and even systems of information and abstraction that don’t have a material link to the physical world, like money or data.
A current example of this detachment of war for land is the socio-political cyberwarfare, characterized by state-sponsored hacking, disinformation campaigns, and attacks on critical infrastructure, which is simultaneously informing and directly fueling the corporate focus and investment in cybersecurity. As governments and nation-states engage in digital conflicts, they expose vulnerabilities and highlight the potential for devastating cyberattacks. This creates a clear and present danger for corporations, driving the need to protect sensitive data, intellectual property, and operational systems from similar threats. Consequently, companies are pouring resources into cybersecurity, demanding innovative solutions, advanced threat detection systems, and robust data encryption. This surge in corporate demand has in turn propelled the growth of the cybersecurity industry, fostering the development of new products, technologies, and strategies to combat increasingly sophisticated cyber threats, which not surprisingly are being developed by entrepreneurs that mostly come from the defense industry and from regions of the world in which this type of conflict is high.
As the origin of the concept of gardening pushes us to segregation and enclosement, we at Holon Labs are working to integrate them and compose them with our lives, societies, economies and ecologies. The integration or composition across time and dimensions of reality and possibility when we think about private gardens is not just a design challenge for a landscape designer, as integration and composition is the biggest philosophical, scientific and technological challenge of our generation.
My dad told me about Sun Tzu and his wisdom for War. He advised me to learn about his teachings and even got me a copy of “The Art of War” as he thought it would be useful to navigate my professional life and the world of business. A world focused on winning (or wining?), dominance and control. I mean if you want to keep your “garden” yours you better hire some Sun Tzu followers. My dad was not alone in being influenced by military strategy and its association to business and everything else. The generation after World War II grew up seeing a direct relationship between War strategy, success and economic development. It also prepared me for the barrage of bosses and business executives that I had to encounter across my corporate career that based their book and historical intellectual diet mostly on reading military strategy books, which gave me plenty of opportunities to quote back ideas from Tank General Patton, Winston Churchill and so on.
But humans are not the only ones “at war”. Nature is constantly fighting for dominance and balance. Our bodies are a constant battle between organisms, conditions and context fighting for the preservation and reproduction of life (please excuse my Darwinian reduction here). The technologies of the present have been mostly centered in helping humans beat and protect each other. I think the new technologies of the future will come from helping Nature preserve and reproduce life.
The new (and very old) type of war
What I am about to do is a gross simplification and reduction of the types of structures and behaviors of Nature. I am aware that Nature is not “at war” with itself and that all these analogies are at the end imperfect. I still think that in a world in which powerful leaders hold the resources that can unlock new futures we have to speak their language. As Sun Tzu would say:
“He who knows when he can fight and when he cannot, will be victorious.”
Sun Tzu
I do know that fighting to get Business Executives and powerful politicians to read about ecological systems science and modern cognitive technology is a losing proposition, believe me I have tried. Instead, I am proposing to surreptitiously add to the section in the airport bookstore a book titled: The Wars Happening Right Now That Will Bring You Success and Fame.
There are three types of “wars” happening right now that, if prioritized, will change our technological landscape:
The war between bees and butterflies.
Of course that butterflies are not “in war” with bees. The point is to focus on the relationship between non-human beings as a way to force ourselves to address the challenge of coordination and collectives without relying on Information Theory or human-based languages.
Every time we do a garden at Holon I hear a form of “we should put a sign for that…” which is an attempt to regulate the behavior of something happening in the garden using information. “don’t walk here”, or “water not safe for drinking” or “keep your dog away from these plants” are all desired behaviors that we attempt to manage with information, but butterflies and bees don’t speak “human”, or at least they pretend they don’t ;), which means that we are forced to relate to them in a phenomenological, physico-chemical way that transcends information.
Drawing a parallel to Alex Kendall's approach at Wayve, pioneering AV2.0 in London, highlights how deliberately choosing a challenging environment can spur innovation. By opting to develop their autonomous driving technology amidst London's chaotic traffic, unpredictable pedestrian behavior, and complex road layouts, Kendall and Wayve forced themselves to move beyond simplistic, idealized models. This "baptism by fire" approach necessitated the creation of highly adaptable, resilient AI algorithms capable of handling real-world uncertainty. Faced with no alternative but to navigate the intricate complexities of London's streets, Wayve was compelled to innovate at a faster pace, pushing the boundaries of their technology and developing a more robust, generalizable autonomous driving system than if they had chosen a controlled, predictable testing ground. The same happens when we at Holon focused on the dynamics of non-human entities within a garden as a way to force us to move beyond information-theory, and digital solutions.
Decentralizing the garden from a human perspective is a radical shift in a world in which design methods like “human-centered” design, or QR codes, invade most approaches for landscaping and engineering. It is also a radical idea in a moment in time when information-based technologies like computers are taking over our collective popular imagination as limitless machines that can do anything. We believe that there must be a form of gadget I can buy for my garden that regulates the behavior in a similar way that our smart-watches tell us to stand up and to breathe.
A garden that is not human-centered but compositional across all forms of living and non-living entities (like rocks and water), is Holon’s focus for technological innovation. Information was once a revolutionary tool for humans to advance. We believe that it is reaching its limits in the face of technology and that a new form of phenomenological device needs to emerge: a collective computer.
The war between Mitochondria and the Cell
I recently talked to one entrepreneur building a technology based on artificial intelligence who told me that the ultimate proof that everything is Information is that life can be encoded in an information system called DNA. I am not a biologist but I do remember from middle school biology that we don’t have one DNA but at least two: the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) which differs from nuclear DNA (nDNA) in several key ways. Based on this Life is not just an information code but the result of a living “war” between at least two systems of information, ignoring that the human body is full of millions of other organisms like bacteria, fungi, viruses that also are not described by the nuclear DNA that this tech bro thinks defines his life.
It is an attractive idea to think that life can be encoded in information because that would literally mean that our life can be eternal as long as we figure out what that information code is, but that is me just questioning the motivation of this idea and not the merits of it. We can leave that discussion for another time.
The fact that most known complex life, formed by eukaryotic cells, is derived by this structure of a mitochondria relating to a cell seems to be not just important for our understand of identity, cognition, composition and balance, but also for our understanding of energy management of complex systems, as in the human body this dynamic between these two systems delivers most of the energy that the human body needs.
Energy is today a critical aspect of the transition towards a new world. Our current world exists under a paradigm in which we have things that consume energy and things that produce them. The natural world, right inside each of us, is showing us that there is another way. A symbiotic relationship between cognition, life and energy.
The war between infrastructure and its ecological context
While technology plays a significant role in the mission and process of modern landscapes we eventually face the material question of building something using technology, the larger project is one that involves purpose, accountability, and intentionality. We believe that a framework that enables a harmonious approach to thinking about design is to change the perspective, from one of traditional project management in which we are in the present trying to define what each particular garden and system that we build will be in the future, to one in which we are standing in a far future in which the garden is the ruins of what us, future ancestors of new generations, left behind.
Latin America is a place familiar with ruins. Aguada Fénix, for example, is a 3,000 years old large Preclassic Mayan ruin located in Mexico. Most of the buildings and systems that we see around us won’t exist in just a few decades, much less in hundreds or thousands of years. The most basic reason for this is that these systems are not integrated in a compositional and harmonious way with their context but in a physical, chemical and biological war between their components and the environment in which they are erected. The potential for a system to become the ruins of the future depends directly on how much that system is in peace with its natural context.
When a Holon Garden is at peace with its present it secures its place in the future.
Humans are not very good at building infrastructure that becomes ruins. The Theopetra Rock includes a man-made stone wall that is still standing today, which was built in approximately 21,000 BCE. It is the oldest known example of a man-made structure. The wall is thought to have been built to protect its residents from cold winds at the height of the last ice age. The oldest man-made infrastructure is just 20,000 years old.
“Sometimes you are born in a world that is ending”. Stop worrying about the current rules and start building good ruins that are left behind”
Federico Campagna, Italian philosopher.
We -at Holon Labs- believe that the problem of integration and composition between a building and its environment (the war between infrastructure and the environment), that ultimately allows it to survive for milenia, is based on the same philosophical, scientific and technological principles to what allows the integration of basic ideas, components and systems. This is a critical challenge for engineering and technology today, as we see brand new airplanes drop doors from the sky because they are not integrated to their fuselage, or democracies that are collapsing as debate and ideas become less compositional, or depression and anxiety as our own personal lives become fragmented, or autonomous cars that don’t integrate to the cities in which they drive producing tragedy and chaos, or systems of mining and extraction of natural resources that don’t integrate with nature.
The contemporary narrative around technology is that the digital world is here to save us. That, even if we are not integrated in the material existence, we can theoretically achieve digital integration through information, language and computers. We at Holon Labs, believe that the limitations of digital/language are so inescapable that we completely need to abandon them to embrace a material relational technology with life and others.
Wrapping up
The history of conflict, from ancient battles to modern cyber warfare, has undeniably shaped the trajectory of technological advancement. Yet, as we move forward, it is crucial to recognize that the "wars" of the future must shift in focus. Rather than battles for dominance and control, we must engage in the more nuanced struggles for balance and harmony. The "wars" between species, cellular systems, and human infrastructure with its environment offer a powerful new lens through which to view innovation. These are not battles to be won, but intricate dances of co-existence that hold the keys to a sustainable and thriving future.
At Holon Labs, our vision extends beyond simply leveraging past technological developments. We seek to fundamentally redefine what progress means. By understanding the deep connections between gardens, security, and societal conflict, we strive to build technologies that foster integration and composition rather than separation and control. It is a challenge that requires a shift away from information-centric models and toward a material, relational understanding of the world.
Only then can we hope to create technologies that not only serve humanity but also honor the complex and interconnected web of life that sustains us all, ultimately leaving behind "good ruins" that stand as a testament to a more harmonious age.