Attention engineering erodes self‑government

Digital platforms and adjacent industries (gambling, social media) use proven habit‑formation designs — variable rewards, notifications, streaks — to shape users' moment‑to‑moment preferences. When aggregate institutions adopt these techniques, individual ends (what citizens want) become malleable, shifting political choice architecture and weakening the psychological capacities needed for deliberative democracy. — If attention engineering systematically alters citizens' preferences, it changes how democratic preferences are formed and creates a new regulatory domain where preserving civic autonomy becomes a public policy objective.