The Marketplace Where Engagement Is Everything

As platforms, political campaigns and artificial intelligence compete for our attention, public communication progressivly rewards engagement over truth. Hustlers exploit the system, Suckers continue to trust it, and rational citizens retreat into a stable Nobody-Cares equilibrium.

Skrevet af Vincent F. Hendricks, dr. phil. PhDProfessor of Formal Philosophy.Dept. of Communication / Section for PhilosophyUniversity of Copenhagen, Denmark

There is an old economic idea that has quietly stopped being true. It says markets exist to allocate scarce goods. Oil is scarce. Housing is scarce. Labor is scarce. Even capital may become scarce. Then prices emerge because scarcity forces choices. For more than two centuries this picture described capitalism remarkably well.

It no longer describes the economy that steadily shapes our lives. The defining scarcity of the twenty-first century is neither oil nor labor nor capital. We are finally beginning to really understand that it is … attention. Every day billions of human beings wake up possessing exactly the same finite endowment: A limited number of hours, a limited capacity for concentration, and a limited willingness to care. Against that fixed supply now stands an almost unlimited demand. News organizations compete for it. Political campaigns compete for it. Advertisers compete for it too. Then comes universities competing for it. Streaming services. Social media platforms. Artificial intelligence now competes for it. Our friends and families compete for it as well.

Information has become abundant. Attention has not. That simple observation explains far more about contemporary politics than many of our familiar debates over ideology, misinformation or polarization. Because wherever scarcity exists, markets emerge. And wherever markets emerge, incentives will follow.

The most valuable companies in the world are no longer primarily manufacturers. They are brokers in human attention. Google, Meta, TikTok, X, YouTube, Instagram and increasingly AI platforms do not merely distribute information. They organize competition for the most valuable commodity modern societies possess: Sustained human attention and attached data harvest. Everything else follows from that.

Hustlers of Bullshit Engagement

For generations we assumed information itself carried value – intrinsic value. Today information is almost free. Artificial intelligence can generate articles, speeches, policy briefs, campaign slogans, images and videos at astonishing speed. The cost of producing persuasive communication is collapsing.

Abundance destroys price. What remains scarce acquires value. The scarce commodity is no longer information. It is the willingness of another human being to stop, look, read, listen and care. That fundamentally changes the logic of public life. 

More often than not these days we imagine ourselves living in an information society. In reality, we inhabit an engagement society. The distinction much: Where information seeks understanding, engagement seeks continuation. Understanding ends the transaction. Engagement prolongs it. One creates informed citizens. The other creates active users. Platform capitalism understands this better than almost anyone else.

The ideal citizen for a democracy is informed enough to exercise independent judgment – that’s a central Enlightenment thought; that’s what individual autonomy really is all about. The ideal user for a platform is engaged enough never to leave. Those are not necessarily the same person. Indeed, they often are not.

This new marketplace rewards three distinct strategic responses. Call them the Hustler, the Sucker and the Nobody-Cares agent. They are not psychological personalities. They are adaptive strategies inside the political economy of attention. The Hustler immediately recognizes the incentives. If engagement produces revenue, then whatever generates engagement acquires economic value. Truth may generate engagement – but unfortunately, whatever goes viral is not necessarily true – and whatever is true doesn’t necessarily go viral. But outrage may create engagement and independently of whether what one is upset about is true or not. So may fear. So may conspiracy. Humor. Lies. The point is not which one is morally superior. The point is which one keeps attention longest.

This is why Harry Frankfurt's famous analysis of bullshit seems strangely prophetic today. Frankfurt argued that the liar still respects the distinction between truth and falsity – otherwise you can’t even define what a lie if no such disnction between true/false is operating somewhere in the background. Now, the liar wishes to conceal reality. Yet, the bullshitter is different. Truth is just beside the point. Only effectiveness matters. Does the audience react? Does the message spread? Does it persuade? Does it capture attention? 

Bullshit has therefore become one of the most successful communication technologies of our age—or “salient features” of our time as Frankfurt would have it—not because citizens suddenly became irrational, but because information markets increasingly reward visibility before verification. Surely, marketing has understood this for decades. The purpose of advertising is rarely to educate. Its purpose is to interrupt. To be noticed. Only afterward comes persuasion. Political communication often enough operate according to exactly the same logic. Candidates become brands. Campaigns become marketing exercises. Policies become products. Voters become customer segments.

Every speech competes against Netflix, TikTok, Spotify, YouTube, WhatsApp and an endless stream of notifications arriving on the same screen. Politics has not become entertainment because politicians suddenly lost seriousness. Politics has become entertainment because entertainment owns the marketplace in which politics now competes. So, it’s tough and no traction to do serious politics – no entertainment value. The platform economy has quietly rewritten the rules. Success no longer begins with being right. It begins with being impossible to ignore.

Artificial intelligence acts as a force multiplier and accelerates this transformation dramatically. Generative AI does not possess political beliefs. What it does possess is astonishing productive capacity. That distinction is not to be dismissed easily. AI significantly lowers the cost of producing communication. One campaign staff member can now generate what previously required teams of speechwriters, graphic designers, copywriters and communications specialists.

Political messages may be personalized for thousands of demographic groups simultaneously. Campaign advertisements can be tested continuously. Counterarguments may be generated instantly – just prompt it. Images can be synthesized in seconds. Persuasive communication becomes industrialized. The technology in and by itself remains neutral. Yet, markets are not. Markets reward whatever proves economically successful. If engagement is the dominant currency, AI will inevitably become an engagement machine. And why? Not because engineers intended it. Because incentives select for it.

This is the very reason why the current attention economy differs fundamentally from older media environments. Television broadcasters competed for audiences. Platforms compete for behavior. Every click teaches. Every pause teaches. Every hesitation teaches. Algorithms do not simply measure preferences, they assist in producing them. They discover what keeps people engaged and then systematically provide more of it. The remarkable feature of this process is that nobody needs to conspire. Every participant behaves rationally.

Platforms optimize engagement. Advertisers optimize conversions. Campaigns optimize persuasion. Influencers optimize visibility. News organizations optimize readership. Artificial intelligence optimizes production. Each actor follows perfectly understandable incentives. Collectively they transform the ecology of public attention. The result is not merely more information. It is a public sphere increasingly organized around engagement itself.

This has profound consequences for liberal democracy. Democracy depends upon citizens paying attention to issues that frequently produce no immediate reward. Reading legislation. Understanding public budgets. Listening to arguments from political opponents. Evaluating evidence. Accepting complexity. Compromise. These activities require sustained cognitive investment. The attention economy rewards almost the opposite characteristics: Speed. Emotion. Certainty. Conflict. Novelty. Virality. 

The marketplace therefore progressively favors the Hustler. Not because Hustlers are more intelligent. Nor because citizens suddenly became gullible. Because the structure of incentives has shifted. In a marketplace where engagement determines value, the ability to capture attention becomes economically and politically decisive.

Suckers of Sincerety

This leaves the second strategic type—the Sucker—in an ever more precarious position. The Sucker continues to believe that public communication exists primarily to discover truth, exchange knowledge and build common understanding. They invest in institutions that depend upon reciprocity, trust and good faith: Higher education, universities, journalism, science and democratic deliberation.

Those institutions remain indispensable. But they now compete inside a marketplace whose dominant currency no longer is truth. It’s again engagement again. That changes the game entirely. If the Hustler thrives in the attention economy and the Sucker struggles to survive within it, then what happens next? One might imagine that the Hustler eventually wins. Surprisingly, that is not where the game ends. The long-run equilibrium looks quite different. To see why, we need to borrow one of the deepest ideas in modern game theory.

In 1976 the economist, Robert Aumann, proved a remarkable theorem now known as Agreeing to Disagree. Stripped of its mathematical formalism, its intuition is pretty simple: If perfectly rational individuals possess common knowledge of one another's rationality and have access to the same relevant information, persistent disagreement of a certain kind cannot survive indefinitely.

The theorem concerns beliefs. Its lesson extends much further. Games change once everyone understands the game. That observation matters significantly for contemporary platform society. Imagine the early years of social platforms. The Hustler enjoys a substantial advantage. Users trust what they encounter. Institutions remain comparatively slow. Platforms reward novelty. Verification lags behind virality. Attention is relatively cheap to acquire. The Hustler prospers big time.

Eventually, however, something changes. Citizens begin recognizing the incentives. They realize that influencers optimize engagement. They understand now that political campaigns optimize outrage. They figure that advertising gradually resembles journalism; then realize journalism more often than not resembles entertainment. They clue into the fact that artificial intelligence may indeed produce persuasive communication almost without much cost. While at it, realize that algorithms are not showing them the world. They are showing them what is statistically most likely to keep them looking.

The game becomes transparent. The Hustler has been discovered. At first glance, this appears encouraging. Surely transparency defeats manipulation? It may, but only partly. Once everyone knows the Hustler is hustling, the Hustler's advantage begins to vanish. Promises lose credibility. Sensational claims receive greater skepticism. Clickbait grows recognizable. Propaganda becomes expected. The Hustler can no longer rely upon asymmetries of knowledge.

Common knowledge begins eliminating the strategy. The Sucker disappears as well. As everyone understands that communication has become strategically optimized for engagement, unconditional trust turns steadily more irrational. One no longer assumes every headline aims primarily at informing. One no longer believes every viral post seeks understanding. One no longer figures every political message is principally about policy.

Blind trust turns more and more costly. The Sucker therefore disappears for precisely the opposite reason. Trust without verification ceases to be a rational strategy. Game theoretically, something remarkable has happened. The two extreme positions eliminate one another. The Hustler requires unsuspecting victims. The Sucker requires trustworthy environments. Once both sides recognize the incentive structure governing platform society, neither condition survives.

One cannot successfully exploit people who universally expect exploitation. One cannot rationally trust environments universally recognized as strategically manipulative. The familiar game dissolves. But the game does not end. A third strategy quietly remains.

Nobody Cares

This is the genuinely novel figure of the attention economy but the Nobody-Cares agent is easily misunderstood. They may initially come across as apathetic. Cynical. Disengaged. Politically lazy. Yet, this diagnosis misses the point.

The Nobody-Cares agent understands the game perfectly. Indeed, they may in fact understand it better than anyone else. For all we know, they know that platforms monetize attention. They know campaigns optimize engagement. They know outrage has commercial value. They know algorithms privilege interaction rather than truth. They know artificial intelligence can generate persuasive communication at industrial scale. They know all this.

That knowledge produces an astounding conclusion: If everyone is competing for my attention, perhaps the most rational response is to protect it. Withdrawal becomes optimization. But not moral withdrawal. Economic withdrawal. Attention becomes too valuable to spend carelessly. 

In classical economics we speak of opportunity costs. Every decision excludes another. The same holds for attention. Every hour spent following manufactured political outrage is an hour not spent reading a book, speaking with one's children, caring for aging parents, doing meaningful work, attending to quilting hoppy or participating in local communities. Attention becomes crescively expensive.

The Nobody-Cares strategy therefore conserves scarce cognitive resources. This is not irrational. Quite the contrary. Within the platform economy it may become the dominant best response. Notice how different this diagnosis is from conventional discussions about democratic decline.

There is word going around that citizens have become uninformed. They have not. We hear they have become irrational. Most have not. We hear they have become selfish. Many have simply become selective. That’s a very very important difference.

The Nobody-Cares equilibrium emerges not because citizens stop believing democracy matters. It emerges because every additional investment of attention appears to generate progressively smaller returns. Platforms continue profiting whether users understand politics or not. Campaigns proceed optimizing engagement. Artificial intelligence continues producing communication. Information carry on multiplying. Only attention remains fixed.

Under those conditions, indifference becomes individually rational even while producing collectively undesirable outcomes. That is precisely what economists call an equilibrium. Nobody necessarily likes it. Nobody intentionally designed it. Yet no individual possesses sufficient incentive to deviate. The result is extraordinarily stable.

Here lies the deepest irony of platform capitalism. The platform economy requires engagement. Individual citizens slowly but surely maximize welfare through disengagement. Platforms want endless interaction. Citizens increasingly survive by rationing interaction. Engagement is everything—for platforms. Selective disengagement sooner or later becomes everything—but for people.

(Dis)Engaged Democracy

This creates one of the defining tensions of our century. The commercial logic of digital platforms systematically diverges from the cognitive logic of democratic citizenship. Platforms flourish when attention never stops. Democracies flourish when attention occasionally slows down enough for judgment to emerge. Those are fundamentally different optimization problems.

Artificial intelligence amplifies both simultaneously. It allows platforms to generate engagement more efficiently. It also permits citizens to delegate more cognitive labor. The technology itself remains by and large neutral. Its effects depend entirely upon the institutional incentives surrounding it.

This means the future of democracy will not primarily be determined by artificial intelligence. Nor even by misinformation, disinformation or fake news. It will be determined by the incentives governing attention. The central political question is therefore rather modest:

Can democratic institutions once again make caring worthwhile?

Not through moral exhortation. Not even by demanding that exhausted citizens simply pay more attention. But by redesigning environments where attention produces visible returns: 

• Schools that cultivate judgment instead of information overload. 
• Journalism rewarded for reliability rather than outrage. 
• Platforms that compete partly through trust instead of engagement alone. 
• Political communication that values explanation more than interruption. 
• Artificial intelligence reducing cognitive overload instead of multiplying it. 

Changing the game rather than blaming the players. That’s what we need!

The lesson of game theory has always been that behavior follows incentives. If the equilibrium changes, behavior changes. The Nobody-Cares equilibrium is therefore neither destiny nor pathology. It is an adaptive response to a particular institutional environment. Different institutions can generate different equilibria.

History demonstrates this repeatedly. Markets have been regulated before. Public infrastructures have been redesigned before. Communication technologies have been domesticated before. The printing press, radio, television and the internet all transformed democratic life before eventually becoming embedded within new institutional norms.

Artificial intelligence and platform capitalism will prove no different. But only if we recognize the real scarcity governing the system. The battle before us is not ultimately over information. Information has never been cheaper. It is over attention. Who captures it. Who profits from it. Who protects it.

And whether democratic societies continue treating it as merely another commodity or begin recognizing it as one of the essential public resources upon which free societies ultimately depend. The greatest political economy of the twenty-first century is therefore not the economy of information. It is the economy of attention. I’ve stressed it many times before, I’ll do it again fearing redundancy. The difference now is that the game theory and epistemic logic of Hustlers, Suckers and Nobody Cares proves the point unequivocally. 

The greatest political conflict is not simply over ideas. It is over the conditions under which ideas can still be heard. And the greatest challenge to liberal democracy is not that too many people have stopped believing in truth. What it is, is that too many perfectly rational citizens have begun believing that the most valuable thing they can do with their scarce attention is to spend it somewhere else.

If that continues, the Hustler will eventually lose. The Sucker will disappear. The Nobody-Cares agent will remain. And that may become the defining equilibrium of the platform age.

Vincent F. Hendricks is the author of “Sucker Nation: The Philosophy of Trading Wits for Vanity” and “Nobody Cares: The Philosophy of Indifference” both of which were just published with Springer Nature