The platform is not a neutral tool. It is a designed environment that shapes behaviour in the interest of the people who built it.
This cluster maps how platforms operate, steer, and profit. The terms here describe the technical and economic architecture that produces user behaviour — not as an accident but as an outcome. Recommender systems surface content that keeps you engaged. Dark patterns make it harder to leave than to stay. Gamification creep turns every interaction into a scored performance.
The vocabulary here is useful because it names things that are easier to resist once named. You cannot unsubscribe from the attention economy, but you can recognise when it is working on you.
The question this cluster asks: what is this platform designed to make you do?
Terms in this cluster
AI as a Utility
AI as infrastructure — like electricity or water. Useful, invisible, and dependent on systems you do not control.
AI Slop
Mass AI-generated content of low quality, filling the web. The floor of the information environment falling away.
Attention Economy
Attention as scarce raw material. Every platform is competing for the same limited supply of human focus.
Attention Harvesting
The systematic extraction of attention through interface design. Not a side effect — the primary function.
Biometric Surveillance
Body signals — heartrate, face, gait — as data points. The body becomes legible to the platform.
Bot Farms
Networks of automated accounts that simulate human presence to manipulate public discourse at scale.
BUMMER
Lanier’s acronym: Behaviours of Users Modified and Made into an Empire for Rent. The business model, spelt out.
Clickbait
Content designed to generate clicks, not to inform. The headline is the product.
Dark Patterns
Brignull, 2010. Interface design that misleads users — making the wrong choice easier than the right one. Now codified in EU law.
Deceptive Design
The legally and academically preferred term for dark patterns. Stronger in regulatory and judicial contexts.
Dopamine Feedback Loops
Variable reward schedules that keep users active. The slot machine in your pocket.
Echo Chamber
Everyone around you agrees. Not because you are right — because the dissenters left or were never there.
Filter Bubble
You see what confirms what you already think. The algorithm is not lying — it is optimising for engagement.
Empathy Exploit
Empathy as a design strategy — emotional connection engineered to bind or manipulate users.
Enshittification
Doctorow: platforms structurally deteriorate for users over time. First they attract users, then advertisers, then they extract from both.
Gamification Creep
Game logic entering non-game contexts. Points, streaks, and leaderboards in places that were never games.
Ludic Loop
Schüll: the cycle of anticipation, action, and reward that sustains compulsive engagement. Designed in, not designed out. (also in: Consequences of Digital Behaviour) (new V10)
Microtargeting
Highly specific audience targeting based on behavioural data. The same message, tuned differently for each recipient.
Neuromarketing
Measuring brain activity to optimise persuasion. The consumer research that does not ask — it observes.
Nudging
Steering behaviour through environmental design, without prohibition or instruction. The default as the decision.
Ragebaiting
Content deliberately designed to provoke outrage. Anger is the most shareable emotion.
Recommender Systems
Algorithms that determine what you see. Not a window on the world — an editorial system with hidden criteria.
Shadow Banning
Invisibly restricting a user’s reach without notifying them. Moderation exercised without accountability or appeal. (new V10)
Synthetic Generation
AI-generated content at scale. Text, images, video — produced faster than humans can evaluate it.