Cognition and Power: 2 Collective Attention and Its Politics

1. Attention Is Relational, Not Private

Cognition is participation, not private computation.

Attention is not something individuals “possess.”

Attention is alignment with a field:

• orienting toward salient possibilities

• tuning into the distinctions that matter

• responding to the trajectories that are stabilised

This is why cognitive phenomena like panic, excitement, or boredom spread collectively.

They are effects of field-aligned attention, not contagion of internal states.

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2. Fields Shape What Can Be Seen and Thought

Power operates by structuring the field, not by arguing or convincing.

Through a field, certain things become:

• visible — obvious, urgent, unavoidable

• backgrounded — hidden, irrelevant, ignored

• thinkable — natural to consider

• unthinkable — cognitively costly or impossible

Shaping attention is the first move of power.

Control the field of attention, and cognition aligns before agents even realise it.

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3. Institutions as Attentional Machines

Institutions do not primarily issue rules or enforce compliance.

They stabilise how attention flows:

• bureaucratic procedures structure what is noticed and acted upon

• deadlines and reporting rhythms prioritise certain tasks

• dashboards, metrics, and performance indicators highlight some data and obscure others

The field persists even as personnel rotate.

Cognition is always guided by the architecture, not by instructions alone.

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4. Collective Cognition Is Structural

Cognitive alignment emerges from the topology of the field, not individual thought.

• Public opinion is not the field — it is a reflection of it.

• Coordination, norms, and habitual responses are field effects, not aggregates of minds.

• Shifts in collective behaviour often reflect field reconfiguration more than persuasion.

This explains why large-scale interventions often fail when the field remains unchanged:

agents may “change their minds,” but participation defaults to the stabilised topology.

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5. Power Is Often Invisible

The more effective a field stabilisation, the less perceptible it is:

• trajectories feel natural, obvious, even inevitable

• participation aligns without coercion

• compliance emerges from structural guidance rather than argument

This is why structural power is often mistaken for free cognition:

people participate in ways the field encourages, not because someone told them to.

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6. Implications for Resistance

If attention is distributed and relational:

• resisting power is not a matter of “convincing” individuals

• it requires reconfiguring the field itself

• small interventions can cascade if they alter field alignment

• breakdowns reveal hidden structures and possibilities for realignment

Resistance is strategic: work on the field, not the minds inside it.

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7. What Comes Next

With the mechanics of attention established, the next post can focus on symbolic and structural scaffolds:

Post 3 — Symbolic Systems as Mechanisms of Field Stabilisation

Here we will examine how symbols, norms, metrics, and routines anchor attention and stabilise participation, making power durable and invisible.