What follows is my reading of the relationship between technology and attention, with references to the essays I’ve written. It isn’t an anti-digital nostalgia: it’s the conviction that ignoring the civic dimension of the products we build is professional negligence.
Last revised: 7 May 2026.
Thesis, in one sentence
Digital products shape citizens before they shape customers. Designing them without accounting for this is a political choice dressed up as a design choice.
Everything that follows is the reasoning behind that sentence.
How I see it
- Attention isn’t an unlimited resource the user “donates”. It is a finite quantity that gets extracted. The right verb changes the moral judgment.
- “We’re not a newspaper” isn’t a defence. It was one in 2010. Today, any platform with a feed has de facto editorial obligations — and pretending otherwise is more insidious than acknowledging them.
- Design is ethics made tangible. Every default you propose, every friction you remove, every animation you add, says something about what you consider acceptable to do with your users’ lives. There are no neutral choices, only unconscious ones.
Essays on this topic
Work with me
The value here isn’t giving you more sophisticated dark patterns: it’s showing you, from inside your product data, which defaults you’re proposing and what they say about your civic project. Then you decide.
Who it's for
Heads of Product and Design looking at their own metrics with growing discomfort
Executive teams noticing that the ‘engagement = value’ narrative no longer holds, internally or externally
Teams building products for minors, families, vulnerable audiences, who want a product ethics stronger than policy
Boards wanting a keynote or workshop that isn’t a motivational TED talk
How I work
- Engagement pattern review (2–3 weeks)
I look at your current patterns (notifications, feeds, onboarding, gamification) and tell you which are defensible and which aren’t — before a judge, before an adult user, before a ten-year-old. Output: a priority list of changes, with impact estimates.
- Alternative metric design (3–4 weeks)
From engagement to received value. I work with product and analytics teams to build 2–3 metrics that measure the good the product does for users, not just the time they surrender.
- Keynotes and internal workshops (1–2 days)
40-minute talks or 2–4 hour workshops for boards, product teams, design teams. Published references, no generic slides, operational output expected by the end.
Engagement FAQ
- Is this an ideological stance?
No — it’s a professional stance. I’ve seen too many products extract attention without returning proportional value. Saying ‘it’s the market’ doesn’t explain; it just describes.
- Does it apply to B2B products?
Yes. Dark patterns in enterprise SaaS exist — billing pages, cancellation flows, forced onboarding — and they’re more expensive because they erode the trust of a paying customer.
- How long does a typical engagement last?
Two to four weeks for reviews or metric design, one to two days for keynotes and workshops.
- Do you speak on stage?
Yes, for non-sponsored, non-promotional events. No recorded webinars or talks with sponsors masking a pitch.
Email me at hello@margiovanni.it with a couple of lines of context. I reply within a few business days with a concrete proposal, or a polite no if it's not my scope.
Questions & answers
Isn't it late to talk about the attention economy?
It’s late to discover it: it isn’t late to govern it. The difference is that we now have ten years of data on what happens when it’s left alone. It was theory in 2015; in 2026 it’s documentation.
Why invoke humanism?
Because the question ‘which citizen do we want to shape’ is older and more serious than ‘which user do we want to acquire’. Humanism gives us a vocabulary for asking the first without slipping into nostalgia.