Attention Management

Attention Is a Commodity

The world runs on commodities; wars are fought and have been fought over commodities: oil, natural gas, gold, silver, copper, wheat, corn, coffee, cotton, sugar, and cattle. Attention is a commodity. It is a newer commodity that is not typically traded or handled in markets like the ones I've just listed. If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's a duck. This is the first commodity we cannot necessarily touch, see, or smell. Commodities drive the strategies and initiatives of entire governments, and attention is the new invisible commodity that has shaken up the arena over the past 20 years.

Herbert Simon named the problem in 1971, in an essay called “Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World.” His argument was that a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention because attention is what information consumes. So the scarcity is not new, but attention has become tradable at scale. This is no longer a new observation, but the implications are becoming more pronounced. If you can hack attention, you can extract money from users on a roughly indefinite curve. More attention is more revenue, directly and indirectly. Attention is scarce on any given day and renews the next, so the supply is finite per person but perpetual in aggregate, which is why the extraction curve has no ceiling.

Social media companies harvest attention on purpose. The apps are engineered to be hard to look away from. Infinite scroll, by default, makes you opt out rather than opt in, because the company designing it knows very well that one direction requires much more willpower than the other. Layer the TikTokification of everything on top, and the quality of how we engage with material drops to whatever virality rewards. Right now, that's reactionary outbursts and polarized takes. This messes with where people focus their attention. Once attention is hijacked, tasks fail to be completed, and the overall goal a person or group is trying to achieve is sabotaged.

The future belongs to the people who can manage their attention; it belongs to the companies that can manage their attention, and it belongs to the governments that can manage their attention. This has always been a thing at any level, but now that it's a commodity that can be transmuted, altered, hacked, hijacked, sold, and bought in ways we never imagined 3000 years ago, we must be hyper-aware of it.

There's an observation going around that captures the result of all this: everyone is 12. Online, people increasingly interact, share viewpoints, and argue about issues the way 12-year-olds do, because that's what the new mediums of communication reward. Mark Manson offers a useful framework for why this happens at the biological level. The prefrontal cortex is the part of the brain that handles executive function, decision-making, long-term planning, and the ability to hold conflicting viewpoints in mind. It is also metabolically expensive. Humans are wired to conserve metabolic resources, so we avoid using the prefrontal cortex whenever an easier alternative is available. Short-form video is the largest, most enticing off-ramp ever built. The more you take that off-ramp, the more your ability to self-regulate atrophies: less patience, less capacity to sit with boredom or ambiguity, and less willingness to revisit your own assumptions. All of those are necessary to live a fulfilling life and to run a successful organization. Evaluation is the first thing to go. This is one of the processes in which the transmutation of attention occurs.

Atrophy Scales

My 5th-grade social studies textbook, whose title I cannot remember, defined culture as a way of life. Examples of culture include tools, technology, architecture, languages, behavior, rituals, and fashion. One of my GOATed YouTube professors, Professor Ashley Hodgson, defines institutions as rules, roles, and ways of enforcing those rules that structure human interactions. Some examples of institutions include markets, marriage, higher education, corporations, etc. Culture and institutions co-evolve. They shape each other over time, and culture is what's currently being eroded. So this atrophy doesn't stay on our phones. It eventually shows up in the institutions that shape the most important parts of our lives. Then suddenly, we have a feedback loop that increasingly gains momentum, guiding our institutions and cultures into the abyss.

Before, there was serious intent behind the world's cultures and institutions. Each had its own incentives, communities, goals, and directions, all of which were carefully catered to by many people. Historically, institutions are difficult to change because they tend to throw their weight to maintain the status quo, or what I'd call institutional homeostasis, but with enough conviction, resources, and ATTENTION from participants within an institution, they can change. Change = (Conviction × Attention) + Resources. Institutional inertia resists conviction and yields to capital. The status quo isn't neutral; it's just expensive to move, and only one party can afford it.

Now that attention falls out of the equation, our institutions become vapid and devoid of the intentional culture meant to sustain them. Attention falling to zero means the institution is handed over to the highest bidder that is focused on their own agenda rather than stewarding the institution for the greater good, meaning the institution's longevity and cultural health.

Precise, but NOT Accurate

That brings me to what OCC Research does. We are an institutional memory company that improves attention management. Most institutions, especially local municipalities, are in a phase where decision-making is precise but not necessarily accurate. By “precise,” I mean confident, repeatable, and well-articulated. By “accurate,” I mean focused on what's most beneficial to the majority of people affected. Those two don't automatically travel together.

Imagine a group on a hike that doesn't want to be out too long and has come to a fork in the road. Instead of pulling up the map, everyone cohesively agrees to go left. The right turn was the shorter loop. That's a precise decision that was inaccurate. The agreement felt like the work, but work has to be accurate before it can be efficient or effective. They got neither.

The Reversal

A lot of data on institutions is already public, and in the U.S., we have the civil liberties to make them public as well. When you walk through the internet, you pass through a jungle of cookies, hidden trackers, and brokered data flows. Companies, websites, and institutions trade this data among themselves to push their operational agendas. They know who your mutuals are. They know where and how you spend your time. They use that to shape your behavior in directions that improve their margins or make their lives easier.

It's time to reverse-engineer the process and make the institutions you're a part of work for you. These profit-seeking institutions can still have profit margins, but reverse-engineering the process means ensuring they earn them by providing value rather than extracting it. Institutions are made of people you can influence, which means the same channels they use to influence you can run in the other direction.

Decision Points

Society is a web of interdependent decisions guiding the direction of human flourishing. There's a lot of data you can extract from these institutions to refocus their attention, and it starts with what I call decision points. A decision point can be a board vote, a meeting, an email, a contract, or a budget. In most cases, decision points cluster around capital. They either affect the money or they turn up once you follow where the money went. From there, you get to analyze decisions about personnel, resources, vision, and policy. Money is a good indicator of the influences and attention that shape where institutions are headed and how they will or won't change.

Again, when it comes to culture and institutions, it's about preservation and direction; success is not one discrete location or state. If you understand how to influence or alter critical decision points, the institution is more likely to change direction. This starts with attention, though. If you remember the formula mentioned earlier and set resources to zero, you get Change = Conviction × Attention, which suggests a movement with no money can still move something as long as both people and eyes are on it for an extended period.

GMS as a Transducer

In physics, a transducer converts energy from one form to another, usually a signal from one form to another. Transducers sit at the boundaries of measurement and control systems, where an electrical signal is converted to or from a physical quantity such as force, light, motion, or position. The conversion itself is called transduction.

Think of the Governance Memory System as a transducer for institutional attention. It takes scattered, misdirected attention and steers it toward the structural problems within an institution, then forces us to take the step the current media environment trains us to skip: evaluation. Over time, institutions have offered fewer and less actionable things to focus on, because what the broader system monetizes is sharp, repeatable emotional reaction. That shows up in culture, and what shows up in culture shapes the institutions we live in.

A transducer is also a technical term in organizational cybernetics, and it has been since Stafford Beer built the Viable System Model. In Beer's principles, a transducer is what sits at the boundary where information crosses from a channel into another part of an organization, and its variety must at least match that of the channel feeding it. If it doesn't, the message gets garbled or lost. The channels themselves need higher capacity than whatever generates the message, and the whole arrangement has to recur through time without lag, because a signal that arrives late cannot be the basis of action. Beer's illustration of this in his lectures is a First World War message that left the front lines as “send reinforcements, we are going to advance” and arrived as “send three and four pence, we are going to a dance.” Perfect transmission but total failure. Every institution I've looked at has a version of this running constantly, and nobody in it thinks of it as an attention problem.

Herbert Simon set the bar for what a system like this has to clear in the same 1971 essay mentioned earlier. He argued that an information-processing system only conserves an organization's attention if it absorbs more information than it produces, or, as he put it, if it listens and thinks more than it speaks. His complaint was that designers kept framing their problem as information scarcity when it was attention scarcity, so they built things that delivered more and more of what nobody had the capacity to read. That failure mode is still the default, and it's the one GMS is built to avoid.

Listening before speaking is an important life skill. It is also the basis of Zohran Mamdani's Commission on Government Efficiency (learn more about it here). A flower shop owner in the financial district testified during the hearings and urged the commissioners to “Listen before legislating.” To prevent building something no one has the capacity to engage with, I used a few components of GMS to surface and track what voters and commissioners need to consider when engaging with the new ballot proposals. It will help folks better understand the direction the city will head after adopting the new charter revisions. We can see what moves from testimony to deliberation amongst the commissioners. Then we assess what moves from deliberation to the ballot, and once the new charter revisions are voted on, we will analyze how they improve or degrade New Yorkers' quality of life. Feel free to look over the case study and see how things are shaping up so far.

The World After Implementing the Governance Memory System

Imagine a network of memory systems that work together to keep the institutions shaping your society focused on what the population actually intended, rather than what a plutocracy designed. It starts with making institutional memory legible, attention management feasible, and builds from there.