‘Between Order & Chaos’
The Third Attractor
a civilisation design that avoids the attractor state of decentralised destruction without committing to the attractor state of centralised control, instead initiating a process of autopoetic alignment — systematically addressing the generative mechanisms of both global catastrophe and global totalitarianism by aligning the objectives of all agents at all scales.
Core Concepts
Civilisation design: The intentional architecture of social coordination systems, institutional structures, incentive mechanisms, and cultural operating systems at scale. Moving beyond emergence or evolutionary drift to consciously engineer civilizational patterns that align individual agency with collective flourishing—requiring integrated design across governance, economics, technology, education, and meaning-making.
Attractor states: Stable equilibrium configurations toward which dynamical systems naturally evolve and from which they resist deviation. In civilizational dynamics: basin attractors that "pull" societies toward particular stable patterns. The two primary dystopian attractors are decentralized chaos (multipolar coordination failure) and centralized tyranny (power consolidation)—both self-reinforcing once reached.
Generative mechanisms: The fundamental causal processes that produce and maintain system behaviors. For decentralized destruction: competitive dynamics, information asymmetries, coordination failures. For centralized control: power concentration feedback loops, surveillance infrastructure, ideological capture. The Third Attractor requires addressing these mechanisms rather than symptoms.
Second-order Cybernetics: The cybernetics of cybernetics—systems that observe and modify their own observing and steering mechanisms. Where first-order cybernetics treats the observer as external to the system (studying "observed systems"), second-order cybernetics recognizes that observers are participants within the systems they observe and influence ("observing systems").
The Three Attractors (Alliterations)
Decentralized destruction (rogue actor risk & state actor x-risk): Rogue actor risk: Capability diffusion enabling individuals or small groups to cause catastrophic harm (bioterrorism, AI misuse, cyber attacks) as technology democratizes power without democratizing wisdom. - State actor x-risk: Great power conflict (nuclear war, AI arms races) and experimental techno-science (dual-use research, AGI development) where sovereign competition generates civilization-level threats.
Centralized control: Global stable totalitarianism: Planetary coordination achieved through authoritarian control—surveillance panopticon, social credit systems, algorithmic governance creating inescapable techno-dystopia. - AI-augmented surveillance capitalism: Market-based totalitarianism where corporate platforms achieve total information awareness, predictive control of behavior, and capture of human agency through optimized manipulation—"soft" totalitarianism through technological behaviorism.
Autopoetic alignment ("autopoethia"): Self-creating, self-organizing alignment where the system maintains its own coherence and stability through distributed intelligence rather than top-down control. The cybernetic mechanism by which the Third Attractor maintains itself — not through state force or central planning, but through synergistic self-organization where the goals of all agents - individual humans, groups, institutions, subsystems - operate in 'mutually programming harmony' (All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace).