People-Powered Systems: How Open Societies Work
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One of the most effective "hacks" of democratic nation-states, as open societies, lies in the role people played within them. From poor, uneducated populations ruled by God and kings, open societies began tapping into human potential—as soldiers, labourers, scientists, bureaucrats, creators, and citizens. The opportunity to convert time and skills into rights, money, and decision-making power was revolutionary. In some places, it enabled lifestyles that 16th-century monarchs could only dream of, in most places it led to a rise in life-expectancy. Citizens were encouraged by States and Markets to become skilful agents, able to adapt to the changing needs of their societies. States and Markets, in turn, provided the infrastructure for the development of skills and opportunities to deploy them, acting as strange attractors upon which economies and financial markets thrived.
Today, the same systems that once depended on people for their vitality have developed replacements in the form of computation, automation and robotics. Citizens are no longer needed in the same ways. This trend is irreversible and affects people's ability to sustain their livelihoods, shape national and global agendas, and protect hard-earned moral standards, rights, and benefits. This is a frightening situation—especially for those who have enjoyed the fruits of liberty and democracy over the past few decades.
Yet it also highlights what sets open societies apart. Unlike oligarchies and monarchies, which rely on energy and centralized control to sustain themselves, democracies endure not because of powerful individuals, but because of sustained collective commitments: to a shared narrative (e.g., a better future) and to an explicit set of rules (e.g., the rule of law).
These commitments constrain the degrees of freedom available to individual agents but ensure the continued viability of both the agents and the system—as long as the system maintains its capacity to generate reliable predictions about the social environment.
In simple terms, there is a co-dependency between agents and systems in open societies: when the system functions well, agents have no reason to revisit their commitments. But if an open society becomes increasingly incapable of offering viable predictions, energy alone cannot sustain it. Agents will begin to reassess their commitments and develop alternative arrangements to sustain their lives.
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The Morphism
from Attraction to Attention
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The move from attraction to attention is subtle, but profound: Attention is the directed focus of cognitive resources, while attraction is an affective pull or interest that draws one toward something, often without conscious effort. Social and technological advancements, despite their immense power, are fundamentally reactive forces—they require a plot (or a programme) in order to exist and function. People on the other hand, may no longer possess the fastest or most efficient form of intelligence, but they hold a definitive advantage: they experience their environments inside-out. People don’t merely react to changes in the environment; they respond to them deliberately. They don’t need a plot to exist—they have an ablity to create and co-produce plots and change them on the go. That's where people's attention plays a key role in shaping sociopolitical environments.
Attention at the Interpersonal Level
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While both attraction and attention describe a relationship between an agent and their environment, attraction implies a reactive stance—something must occur in the environment to trigger action. Attention, by contrast, is responsive: the agent is attuned to their own mind, desires, dreams, and needs as part of a continuous, co-creative interaction with the world. We are now called to be more deliberate about the things that attract our attention.
Ask yourself: What attracts most of my attention during the day?
There are no wrong answers—but I invite you to consider yourself a strange attractor of what you focus on.
Whether you like it or not, if your attention is fixed on something, you're creating more of it and feeding it with your energy. This is not an invitation to look away from what draws your attention, hoping it will disappear. Rather, it's a call to embark on a quest: to direct your attention toward things that seem to work 'against all odds,' to the 'weird' forms of knowledge that bring unexpected clarity, and to improbable collaborations that have withstood the test of time.
A new version of 'a better future' begins with a decision to focus attention on what makes you feel safe and excited about the future—no matter how small, rare, or unlikely it may seem. If it caught your attention, it’s already big enough. And if it makes you feel safe, open, curious, light-hearted, or even optimistic—it has a role to play in your life. Shifting your attention toward what makes you feel good, even amid crisis, allows you to ask more accurate and meaningful questions, to see the whole picture and to better understand your unique role in relation to it
Attention at a project level
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At the project level, attention moves us away from concepts like users, customers, investors, and producers, toward terms such as peer production, contributors, stakeholders, and intent-based commitments. This shift reframes how agents design and understand network initiatives. In this respect, liveliness—the ability of a network to self-sustain its activities—is a crucial component of network design. Instead of designing a platform with predefined activities, a lively network harnesses people’s ability to commit, belong, and contribute to spaces they feel part of. Harnessing attention can turn agents into stewards and advocates, especially when they are encouraged to share their unique perspectives (the letters C, D, and L, in the upcoming posts will add important pieces to the puzzle when considering the politics and structure of such initiatives).
Think of people’s sustained attention and participation in your initiative as a measure of the value of its activities—and of its capacity to self-organize around a shared vision. Your ability to draw attention—a verifiably scarce resource that cannot be double-spent—is a signal that what you’re doing matters to others. And for a while, this signal might be the only one you will have to indicate progress in a desired direction.
Beside creating synergies between people and purpose, people attention is far more attuned to environmental signals than any algorithm (yet). By placing people’s attention at the heart of your initiative, you improve its capacity for orientation and progress, while offering individuals a niche in which to develop skills, harness curiosity, and sustain meaningful lives. Instead of focusing solely on skills or returns, translate the attention people invest in your initiative into momentum—an ability to move closer to your stated goals, faster.
Attention at scale
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If Emma Lazarus were to describe the new version of an open society, she might have written something like:
Give me your attention, your desires, your unmet dreams yearning to come true.
At the societal level, commitment to the vision of an open society is both crucial and contingent on the development of corresponding infrastructure and processes. Instead of designing institutions as attractors that people must conform to, these new structures and processes will reflect people’s ability and desire to make a meaningful difference. Systems will mimic intention–perception–action cycles at various scales, and people, in turn, will give their attention and resources to systems that generate the broadest consensus on the interpretation of events in the environment. This mutual dependency is essential for forming and sustaining long-term commitments.
Such systems will make the implicit process of niche construction explicit and part of the political process—one that is typically assumed to be predetermined and intergenerational in existing systems such as nation-states and religions. such systems will offer people a space to become strange attractors of their own desires, dreams, and ideas—by encouraging all agents to pay attention to one another and to search for synergies, common ground, and alignment for shared action. Everyone can try—but only those initiatives that consistently attract attention and long-term commitment will endure. Here is one of my favorite and most powerful examples of this shift from attraction to attention—highlighting transitions at the interpersonal, initiative, and societal levels.
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To sum up
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People may become increasingly redundant to States and Markets, but they remain uniquely valuable as a responsive fabric for collective orientation, problem-solving, and data processing.
The morphism from attraction to attention will take shape across multiple levels:
Personal level: Your dreams matter—literally. We are now called to become deliberate creators of our sociopolitical environments. To seek even the slightest evidence of a better future and allow it to guide us forward, no matter how strange or counterintuitive the path may seem.
Project level: Center your initiative’s value proposition on people’s attention and care. If you want your initiative to make a real difference, harness attention not just as a resource but as part of your vision liveliness and materiality. Invite people to contribute to what they believe matters, and use that collective focus to navigate toward a shared purpose.
System level:This new version of an open society redefines the meaning of freedom. It treats each person as a strange attractor and encourages the transformation of desires, time and attention into privileges, benefits, and power. It calls for more people to ground their visions of a better future in the bi-directional and embedded nature of their existence. Attention and deliberation are the vital forces animating this emergent paradigm.