Abstract: Human attention is our scarcest resource. What we pay attention to determines the information we process, and the influence we exert over outcomes. Together, attention and influence form two sides of power: information and control. Two ubiquitous systems for regulating power–democratic and corporate governance–center on balancing two levers: money and voting. Both are tools of attention and influence, enabling principals to express preferences and align their agents in different ways. Yet, in the digital networked age–where attention spans geographic boundaries and goods are rarely “public” or “private”–these systems increasingly collide into a crisis of capture and overreach. This paper introduces PCARE (Plural Community Asset Resource Exchange), a novel model for community currencies that seeks to provision partial and plural goods by explicitly pricing attention and the cost of influence (or the price of entry and cost of exit). Specifically, PCARE is a dual-currency model that separates non-transferable, irrevocable stake for influence from transferable currency for resource exchange and attention–resolving money and voting to the same unit of account, yet introducing a trade-off. Being composable into broader networked currencies, PCARE offers a substrate for decentralized coordination that can scale into complex cooperation, overcoming the limits of economic growth through social innovation. Applied to artificial intelligence, community currencies offer a way to embed social context into neural networks, enabling more context-aware communication that harnesses the promise of AI agents while empowering participants to navigate their perils.
@article{ohlhaver2025community,
title={Community Currencies: The Price Of Attention And Cost Of Influence In A Networked Age-or-The Price Of Entry And Cost Of Exit In A Networked Age},
author={Ohlhaver, Puja},
journal={Available at SSRN},
year={2025}
}