Gilly on The Corporate Villainy of Tom Sawyer: Manufactured Scarcity, the Ethics of Attention, and the Literary Prehistory of Dark Patterns

Travis Gilly, Real Safety AI Foundation, has published The Corporate Villainy of Tom Sawyer: Manufactured Scarcity, the Ethics of Attention, and the Literary Prehistory of Dark Patterns. Here is the abstract.

The whitewashing scene in Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) is conventionally received in one of two ways: as a comic illustration of the malleability of value, the reading made canonical in behavioral economics by Ariely, Loewenstein, and Prelec (2006), or as a celebration of the boyish individualist, the reading carried into popular culture by works such as Rush's 1981 song of the same name. This paper proposes a third reading. It argues that the scene is the earliest structurally complete literary rendering of the design logic now catalogued under the heading of dark patterns: manufactured scarcity, engineered desire, and the extraction of value from a manipulated audience. On this reading Tom is not a charming rascal but the prototype of the engagement designer who optimizes a system against the people inside it. The paper distinguishes two ethics of gamification, the earned, in which an activity is genuinely made worth doing and the designer participates in it, and the engineered, in which desire for access to a hollow good is manufactured and the designer abstains, and it proposes the designer's own abstention, the refusal to consume the product, as a diagnostic of the engineered kind. Locating the reading within the ethics of attention and persuasive design (Fogg, 2003; Verbeek, 2011; Williams, 2018) and the dark patterns literature (Brignull, 2010; Mathur et al., 2019), it contends that the fence is not a quaint antecedent but a working model of contemporary attention capture, and that the uniformly admiring reception of Tom is itself evidence of how thoroughly the culture has naturalized the extractor as hero. It closes on the irony that Twain, who coined the term Gilded Age and named the capitalist as the oppressor, narrated the con as cleverness and never marked it as harm.

Download the paper from SSRN at the link.