This session examines how major digital platforms are intentionally engineered to extract attention by exploiting well-documented cognitive weaknesses. Rather than treating harmful outcomes as accidental side effects, we trace how engagement-driven business models have hard-wired practices like infinite feeds, variable reward schedules, and mindless interaction into the everyday mechanics of digital life.

Using digital ecology as a lens, we look at platforms as interconnected systems whose behavior mirrors extractive patterns found in degraded natural environments. Drawing parallels to mycelial networks and other distributed biological systems, we examine how information spreads, how attention is captured and recycled, and how incentive structures favor amplification over understanding. In both natural and digital systems, instability emerges when short-term yield is prioritized over long-term balance.

Participants will study concrete interface patterns used by large technology companies to prolong engagement, accelerate consumption, and remove stopping cues. The session closes by sharpening one’s ability to recognize extractive design at the level where it actually operates. Participants will leave better equipped to distinguish between systems that serve users and systems that quietly train them, plus a clearer sense of what it means to design digital environments that do not depend on cognitive exhaustion to function.

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