I wrote this preparing my lecture for the excellent Paying Attention conference in Linkoping, Sweden:

“1. When information becomes abundant, attention becomes scarce

2. Scarce resources can become a part of a for-profit economy which will do everything in can to attract the attentional flows in its direction

3. However, the attention economy can never be the basis of the capitalist economy, it can only be a derivative, a food that drives the machine. You can’t eat attention. However, the Wisdom Game can become the driver of the Money Game, i.e. the successful attraction of attention can become the basis for business models and ecologies.

4. In a peer to peer environment, where attention becomes distributed and subject to viral mechanisms, and peer production through the mutual coordination of contributions on a global scale becomes a real possibility, mass media inevitably loose in influence, but the combination of vertical and decentralized mass media, with distributed micromedia, creates a hybrid diagonal media landscape, in which integrated media ecologies can vy for attention

5. In a distributed environment, the previous socialization through centralized or decentralized institutions can no longer function, and a societal crisis and transformation becomes inevitable

6. In a period of flux, emancipatory possibilities have more room to grow, as the old ways of mainstreaming social consciousness loose their efficiency

7. While the dominant system still attempts to direct our agency to their market-based communion, we can use our agency to direct our attention to alternative forms of socialization and legitimation

8. In fact, after a transition period in which peer to peer relational forms, institutionalized through various commons of knowledge, code and shared design, move from emergence to parity level, the new logic can become dominant, and subsume the market to the common good through the intermediary of the Commons and the Partner State.

9. In the new social arrangement of the successor civilization, the central institution becomes the Commons, which protects vital resources for the next generations, and can rent out its usage to market-based entities. At the core of the new system of peer production is a commons, a community and a collaborative platform, surrounded by an entrepreneurial ecology, and managed through a new type of for-benefit foundations, which protects, sustains and expands the necessary infrastructure of cooperation.

10. However, the present form of cognitive capitalism, which expropriates the wealth of social cooperation through financial mechanisms, and does not have a feedback loop to reward the value creators, is not sustainable. In addition, a system that exponentially increases use value, but can only linearly monetize exchange value, creates a crisis of accumulation for capital, as well as a crisis of precarity for distributed labour.

11. In the successor civilization, cooperation is no longer secondary to competition, but competition becomes secondary to cooperation. Competition occurs within cooperation, by for-benefit entities that succeed in attracting the most productive ecology around its shared goals and object of production.”