There was a meme flitting around Twitter this that included a link to an article on Technium about money following attention.  The article is worth reading, by the way, even though it was posted last year.  The main thing it says that if you get attention, then you are likely to get money.  A similar meme I’ve heard is that “obscurity is the enemy of the creative person.”  I’m sorry I don’t have a reference, but maybe one will show up in comments.  A while ago, I blogged that I’m spending  more time out on “the Internets” for just that reason – I need to help my publisher market my books by marketing myself.  Not to mention that my futurist career is totally freelance.

Well, a related thread I’ve been working on is about what kind of governance/economic models are going to work in the future.  We just saw what we built up over the last few decades fail spectacularly.  We need change.  To get the right change, we need to have our attention on the right stuff.  I don’t know about you all out there, but I feel like I live in a world smacked with so much information I can’t even look at all of the data that’s directed at me, much less at everything I should be looking at.  So how do I know where to put my attention?  On a bigger scale, what kind of governance draws attention to the right stuff?

The press and the blogosphere are part of that, but they are also often directing attention away from critical ideas or events.  I have my own list of important stuff, but I bet we don’t all have the same list.  Centralized control over what’s deemed important doesn’t work (that was the allure of communism). Democracy has the best track record, but democracy and runaway unfettered capitalism created the current mess.  So what do we tweak?  What needs more attention and how do we get it there?