The Strange Geometry of Unrealized Futures

Toward a taxonomy of possibility space

Attractors

An attractor is a state or pattern toward which a system naturally tends to evolve over time.

Just as a massive object curves spacetime and influences the trajectories of nearby bodies, an attractor exerts a kind of gravitational pull in possibility space, making some futures more likely than others.

Talking about attractors shifts our understanding from linear causality to field-based emergence. Instead of asking: “What causes X,” we can ask: “What kinds of patterns in the field of possibility space make X more likely to emerge?

Possibility Space

Possibility space is the field of all things that could happen. In addition to attractors, it is shaped by:

• Constraints: what is physically, culturally, economically feasible.

• Imagination: what can be conceived or desired.

• Path-dependence: past decisions shape the structure of future possibilities, making some paths easier to continue and others harder to access.

We can think of these as hills and valleys in possibility space. Because its topography is uneven, this means that not all futures are equally within reach.

Forms of Potential

There are a few major forms of potential in human systems. When latent, these energies remain dormant as possibilities, but when activated—made visible, extractable, or aligned with a system’s logic—they become resources that can be mobilized to reshape the topography of possibility space toward certain futures.

Each form of potential behaves differently, responds to different attractors, and shapes possibility space in its own way.

Attention 

Attention is the allocation of perceptual and cognitive resources. It determines what enters awareness and what is filtered out. What receives attention becomes eligible for investment, protection, amplification, or belief. What doesn't receive attention effectively doesn’t exist, regardless of how promising or real it might be.

Core Dynamics:

• Finite capacity: Attention is limited. Only a small number of stimuli or ideas can be actively processed at once.

• Competitive environment: In information-dense systems, stimuli compete for attention via salience, novelty, or emotional valence.

• Volatile: It is unstable and short-lived without reinforcement. 

• Attractors: novelty, clarity, spectacle, virality, charisma.

Attention makes certain futures visible and thinkable. It does not guarantee actualization, but it is a prerequisite for any potential to be selected or acted upon.

Desire

Desire is the emotional force that drives action toward specific outcomes, often before those outcomes are rationally evaluated. It precedes logic and often emerges before we can name it clearly.

Core Dynamics:

• Affective origin: Desire arises before logic; it is pre-rational and emotionally charged.

• Mimetic structure: Often shaped by social context; people want what others appear to want.

• Perceptual disorientation: Increases perceived urgency or value of certain futures, regardless of feasibility.

• Activation function: Provides the initial motivational energy necessary to initiate a trajectory within possibility space.

• Attractors: mystery, seduction, beauty, prestige, risk, lack.

Desire is a catalyst that initiates action by increasing the perceived value of particular futures relative to others. It makes certain paths appear urgent and compelling, regardless of their long-term viability. Desire can significantly distort the terrain of possibility space—like in speculative bubbles or revolutionary movements—though its effects can also be short-lived.

Trust

Trust is the expectation of consistent, non-adversarial behavior over time. It allows agents to act under conditions of uncertainty without requiring constant verification or guarantees.

Core Dynamics:

• Cumulative: Develops gradually through consistent and coherent behavior.

• Efficiency enabling: Reduces oversight, enforcement, and friction.

• Fragility: Trust can be destroyed by a single high-salience violation.

• Distributed or institutional: Trust can be interpersonal (between individuals) or embedded structurally (in brands, protocols, legal systems).

• Attractors: integrity, familiarity, reliability, coherence.

Trust reduces volatility in possibility space by increasing the reliability and stability of certain futures. These paths are repeated, scaled, shared, and invested in.

Energy

Energy is the embodied capacity to do work, whether muscular, mechanical, or electrical. It is the material substrate of all change. Without energy, attention cannot be directed, desire cannot be enacted, capital cannot be deployed. Every realized future is underwritten by a transfer or expenditure of energy. It is the most literal and irreversible form of potential.

Core Dynamics:

• Physically constrained: Governed by thermodynamic laws; cannot be created from nothing or used without cost.

• Embodied carrier: Resides in bodies, machines, ecosystems, and infrastructures; unlike symbolic potentials, it cannot be abstracted away from material form.

• Finite and entropic: Energy is conserved and depletes through use; systems tend toward disorder without continual input.

• Conversion-dependent: Must often be transformed from latent to active states (e.g. chemical to mechanical) to become usable.

• Non-substitutable: No amount of attention, trust, or capital can replace energy when it is absent; it is a prerequisite for any realized change.

Energy functions as the irreducible substrate of all actualization. It is the only potential that must be physically spent for other potentials to materialize.

Capital

Capital is abstracted, symbolic potential that has been encoded into mobilizable forms such as money, credit, equity, or tokens. It enables action at scale across time and domain by translating value into transferable units.

Core Dynamics:

• System-dependent: Operates through encoded legal and financial rules that define how it can be created, transferred, or used.

• Cross-domain: Capital can be deployed to activate other forms of potential (buy time, hire labor, attract attention).

• Filtering mechanism: Capital flows toward structures that are legible and optimized for return.

• Amplification: Amplifies trajectories that meet its criteria, enabling rapid actualization of those possible futures.

• Attractors: return, scalability, asymmetry, conviction.

Capital functions as a scaling and selection mechanism. It makes certain futures materialize faster and at scale; a future that had low likelihood can be made viable with enough capital behind it. But in doing so, it also narrows possibility space, preferring the futures that are most compatible with its return-driven logic.

Time

Within this framework, there are five mobilizable potentials—desire, attention, trust, energy, and capital—and one structuring potential: time. Time governs if and when the others can be activated. Time is the irreversible medium through which all potentials must be realized. As such, it acts as a limiting factor and a structuring condition, determining when something is possible, how long it will take, and when it becomes too late. Some futures arrive too early and are ignored. Others arrive too late and are dismissed.

Core Dynamics:

• Irreversibility: Time moves in one direction; lost time cannot be recovered.

• Constraint environment: All decisions are made under temporal constraints, which limit the number and type of viable actions.

• Pace and readiness: Some outcomes require rapid response, others long development.

• Opportunity cost: Time spent on one trajectory excludes others; prioritization is unavoidable.

Time sets the boundary conditions for realization. It doesn’t filter potential based on value or intent, but on timing, sequence, and availability. Because only one state of reality can exist at any given moment (at least within this timeline), time is both the medium through which realization becomes possible, and the constraint that ensures most potentials never materialize.

Entanglements

Potentials rarely operate in isolation. In practice, systems are shaped by the interaction of multiple forces, some reinforcing, others conflicting. These entanglements can accelerate realization or introduce friction, depending on how well-aligned the forces are across time and scale.

Some potentials are tightly coupled, forming feedback loops or mutually reinforcing structures:

• Desire and Attention: What we desire captures our attention, and what we pay attention to shapes what we learn to desire.

• Trust and Capital: Capital flows more easily into trusted systems; capital accumulation often signals trustworthiness, creating a recursive loop.

• Energy and Time: Energy availability constrains what can be accomplished within a given time frame; conversely, time pressures demand more efficient energy use.

Others are more loosely connected, with complex or asynchronous effects:

• Attention and Trust: Attention can spike without trust (virality), while trust tends to build slowly and can actually erode under too much exposure.

• Desire and Time: Desire is impulsive and impatient; time disciplines it, dissipates it, or channels it into longer arcs like devotion or practice.

Possibility space doesn’t respond linearly to one activated input. It reshapes most radically when multiple forces align. This kind of alignment is visible everywhere in large-scale collective action, from corporations to grassroots protest movements. Take, for example, a protest movement seeking systemic change:

• Desire fuels mobilization; an emotional charge builds around injustice or possibility.

• That desire captures attention, spreading through imagery, storytelling, and social contagion.

• Trust must quickly emerge in organizers, shared goals, and the belief that action can matter.

• Energy is spent through physical presence, organizing efforts, and emotional endurance.

• Even minimal capital—to print materials, rent space, support logistics—can be critical.

• And time is ever-present; moments of political openness or cultural resonance may close quickly.

If attention peaks before trust stabilizes, the movement loses coherence. If desire burns intensely but energy is exhausted, momentum breaks. If capital arrives too late, the window closes. Success depends not on a single form of potential, but on their convergence in the right sequence and pace.