ATTENTION ECONOMY 11: SYSTEMS OF ORGANIZATION…

Attention Economy 11: Systems of Organization

This is the latest in my #attentioneconomy series of essays, and it’s a monster. I’ll need all the help I can get =D

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“Humanity is under no delusions about the nature and scale of the problems we face; we have been aware of the difficulty our future presents for at least a generation. However, for each of these tremendous challenges, the available solutions seem to fall into two rough categories: market solutions and state solutions. Private solutions and public solutions. These were the two basic organizational strategies that came out of the Enlightenment, each of which has clear advantages for certain kinds of tasks and potentially tragic disadvantages for others. The history of human organization over the last few centuries has involved finding a precarious balance between these two strategies. On the traditional model, this balancing act centered around the importance of individual freedom, and played out in the discursive border disputes that continue to rage between the public and the private spheres. The digital age has violently disrupted these delicate attempts at balance, instigating all new turf wars; but all available solutions assume that these lines have to be drawn somewhere around the individual, even while there is less and less clear sense of what such a thing might even be. Since state based or market solutions (and increasingly, some combination of the two) are the only organizational strategies on the table, there is and remains no consensus for how to reconcile these anomalies. Even while it is clear that neither state or market solutions will adequately address the problems we face, we lack any clear sense of what an alternative organizational structure might look like. This is my assessment of our current organizational failure, as clear as I can make it.

“I claim that the attention economy provides a unified organizing model for reconciling these anomalies in a clear and consistent way, as seen in the charts above. Specifically, economies of attention are potentially both self-organized and decentralized, and thus unify the values of both apparently incommensurable organizational strategies we inherit from the Enlightenment.”

Attention Economy 11: Systems of organization

The #attentioneconomy is a unified model of social organization. In the previous post, I explained a simple thought experiment for thinking about your role as an attender in the network. In this post,…