Reductionism or consolidation
Civilization has created a wealth of information over past centuries, and as a matter new insights and knowledge — complexity grew and continuous to grow.
But modularization for complexity management, as presently handled, is at its limit. Following the “Ausdifferenzierung” (differentiation) of science — as a matter of information growth – all disciplines have diverged in language and Weltanschauung to a point were praxis and semantics are too loosely coupled as that progress could go ahead full steam.
Fundamental terms of society are ambiguous or subject to negotiation:
Norbert Wiener as well as Claude Shannon introduced a new and purely formal concept of information, which sidestepped the context and meaning of information to ensure computability. — Suchman and Weber
A first cluster of information concepts/theories — wherever you want to begin with — might be those that look upon information as a given. Sometimes this is called “potential” information or “structural” information. […] A second cluster focuses on the transmission aspect. Seen from that angle, information is not lying in the structure but that which is transmitted from a sender to a receiver via a channel that is disturbed by noise. […] A third and last cluster is that of the view of the receiver. Information is finally not that which is transmitted — pursuant to this perspective — but that which is processed by the receiver. It is the receiver who, by processes of decoding, is considered to attach a meaning to the message and to thereby produce “actual” information. — Hofkirchner
Put differently, human progress is subject not to consensus but compromise and opportunism (cf. Ioannidis) based on a few dominating insights. Insights are starting to haunt us: herding has been quite important in human history, yet today, it leads to system failure.
Even worse at present reductionists lead and leaders of society have decided that information hiding might be a good way to handle complexity. What we need is a phase of consolidation where fundamental insights are re-articulated or redefined (ie. hierarchy, heterarchy, and panarchy).