Vitrinization and Framing as Technology: notes for a political economy of attention (Part 1 of 5)

There is something in the present that leaves me intellectually uneasy, and I have been trying to name this discomfort. It is not a private matter: it has surfaced in conversations with colleagues in Portugal, with friends in Brazil, with people I knew from my earlier public-sector work and who today hold a range of positions. There is a diffuse exhaustion, the sense that we are all carrying out a task whose terms we never formally accepted, a permanent demand to appear, to perform, to remain relevant, and an exhaustion that does not yield to eight hours of sleep, a vacation, or therapy. The phenomenon is collective enough not to be an individual symptom, and structural enough not to be a matter of willpower. It is something to be thought through.

I bring to this thinking a specific trajectory. In 2011, I worked as a strategic-planning officer for digital media in the Government of the State of Ceará. That year I presented, at the Social Media Brasil conference held at Fecomercio in São Paulo, a case on the use of digital media articulated to the Cinturão Digital do Ceará project, a state-owned fiber-optic infrastructure of 3,000 km, with planned coverage of 92% of the state’s urban population, designed to support distance education, telemedicine, public transparency, and direct dialogue channels with citizens. The text I wrote argued, citing explicitly Pierre Lévy on cyberspace, Foucault on power as productive network, Santaella and Lemos on connective cognition, and Rosenau on governance, that the combination of the infrastructure plus the qualified presence of public power on social networks could generate “a democratic and participatory environment, [with] broad-ranging discussions for the emergence of a network of collaborative solutions”. The normative horizon, stated explicitly in the conclusion of that text, was Lévy’s collective intelligence at the service of what Liberation Theology has called a just and supportive society.

Almost fifteen years later, it is difficult to reread that text without discomfort. Not because the premises were wrong… the theoretical toolkit was robust, and several of the references are the same ones I encounter today in serious discussions about networks, but because the institutional configuration that followed made that aspiration almost unreachable. Not through failure of the technology, but through capture of its governance. The same platforms that then seemed infrastructure for participation became infrastructure for the extraction of behavioral surplus. Lévy’s collective intelligence was replaced by what I have been calling, in conversations and drafts, vitrinization (from the Portuguese ‘vitirine’ – ‘shop window’, in English): people constructing appearances, lives, happinesses, and opinions that exist only in the digital field, always artificially shaped to fit patterns that exist precisely to compare us to one another. A world of digital ideas, in an almost Platonic sense, where lived life becomes a paler shadow of the posted life.

I am, at the moment of writing, reading Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents. I had already read Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle, Byung-Chul Han’s The Burnout Society, and Paula Sibilia’s O Show do Eu [The Spectacle of the Self]. I recently began Gustave Le Bon’s The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, which Freud, incidentally, discusses explicitly in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, from 1921. There is a clear lineage here on collective behavior: Le Bon, Freud, Türcke, Han. The diagnoses are phenomenologically precise. I miss, however, something my training allows me to look for: a theory that explains not only what we feel, but why this equilibrium is stable. Why people who know that the networks leave them worse off continue using them. Why “the machine that cannot stop” is, at once, individually rational choice and collective trap.

This question is close kin to those I have been working on in my doctorate. I am a doctoral student in Economics at the School of Economics of the University of Porto, with current research centered on the emergence of cooperation in agent-based models (ABM) with cognitively heterogeneous agents. Earlier, at the Federal University of Ceará, I defended a master’s thesis on framing effects in the Graph Model for Conflict Resolution, applied to the conflict of the Cocó viaducts in Fortaleza. The tools (game theory, behavioral economics, multi-agent modeling) converge on a common object: how individual decisions, under specific choice architectures, produce collective outcomes that no one asked for but everyone sustains.

I intend, in this series of five texts, to organize a conceptual architecture that connects the humanist diagnosis of contemporary exhaustion (Lévy critically revisited, Castells, Han, Türcke, Sibilia, Debord, Le Bon, Freud) with the quantitative toolkit of behavioral economics and game theory. The background thesis is simple and perhaps still underexplored: vitrinization is a contemporary instance of a broader problem – the political economy of cognition under personalized choice architectures at scale.

This problem operates in four layers, and I will dedicate one text to each:

1. The cognitive layer, where framing acts on the individual (this text).
2. The strategic layer, where framing produces non-cooperative collective equilibria.
3. The institutional layer, where the architecture of the game is a political choice, not a technological destiny.
4. The algorithmic layer, where generative AI enters as a new layer – simultaneously amplifier and attenuator.

A fifth text will close the series with the synthesis and a research agenda that articulates this program with my doctoral thesis. Let us proceed to the first layer.

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Framing as cognitive technology

In 1981, Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman published in Science an experiment that became classic. They presented subjects with a public-health problem (a disease that could kill 600 people) and two treatment options. The difference between the two experimental groups did not lie in the options: it lay in the framing. For one group, outcomes were described in terms of lives saved; for the other, in terms of lives lost. The choices reversed. Preferences, supposedly stable according to standard economic theory, turned out to be sensitive to the frame in which the problem was presented.

This finding opened decades of research in behavioral economics and established an epistemologically fundamental point: framing is not noise over preference; it is constitutive of it. In many decision contexts, the observed preference is not independent of the framing that produces it. It emerges from the interaction between subject, context, and form of presentation.

When I worked on my master’s thesis applying the framing effect to the Graph Model for Conflict Resolution – in the concrete case of the Cocó viaducts conflict in Fortaleza – I was operationalizing this intuition in a multilateral conflict setting. Decisions on major urban works involve actors with apparently fixed preferences: environmental movements, government, contractors, residents. What I showed is that these preferences, and therefore the stable equilibria of the conflict, change radically depending on the framing of the options.

It is necessary, however, to be methodologically honest about a central difficulty in the use of GMCR and of conflict models in general. The elicitation of decision-makers’ preferences is, by far, the hardest problem of the method. It is not just one step among others: it is the step at which everything can collapse. Decision-makers rarely manage to articulate complete preferences over all possible states of a conflict. When they do articulate, they do so incompletely, inconsistently, context-dependently, and (here a disconcerting circle closes) sensitively to the framing of the interview itself. The instrument we use to measure preferences in conflict contexts is itself subject to the same mechanism we are trying to model. This is a genuine recursion, not a methodological flaw to be circumvented. To recognize it openly is, in my assessment, part of what may become an original contribution of the research program this series sketches.

From experiment to algorithm: framing industrialized

The point I want to defend now is that something profound has changed between the Tversky-Kahneman experiment and the present. In 1981, framing was artisanal: a researcher designing two versions of a problem, a doctor speaking with a patient, a lawyer preparing an argument. It was a manual instrument.

In the 21st century, framing has become computational infrastructure. The Instagram feed algorithm, TikTok, X, YouTube execute, thousands of times per second, the same gesture that Tversky and Kahneman executed one experiment at a time. Each user, in each session, receives a customized framing: the same content, ranked in different order, juxtaposed with different other content, in different emotional moments, generates different decisions. Cass Sunstein, in works after Nudge, called this “personalized choice architecture”.

The difference in scale is not trivial; it is qualitative. A framing experiment affects dozens of subjects. A recommendation algorithm operates over billions of users simultaneously, with real-time feedback and adaptive optimization of the framing that maximizes engagement. Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson, in Power and Progress (2023), describe what one can call, with them, a preferential manipulation technology at industrial scale.

The empirical evidence anchoring this argument is strong, though a critical reading of the most well-known study of the topic requires care. In 2015, Eytan Bakshy and a Meta team published in Science a seminal paper documenting that algorithmic ranking contributes materially to the composition of what each user sees — although the authors themselves, funded by Meta, attributed greater weight to individual choices than to the algorithm, a reading that received substantial methodological criticism. Subsequent studies, with expanded access to Meta data, indicated that changes in the algorithmic feed can alter patterns of exposure and use, though effects on political attitudes and polarization are more difficult to identify. For the argument of this text, the central point is more restricted: the algorithm participates in the composition of the decision environment. The algorithm, in other words, is industrial framing.

Lévy revisited: from aspirational cyberspace to instrumental architecture

It is worth, at this point, returning to Pierre Lévy, an author whose presence in my 2011 repertoire I already noted in the opening of this series. Lévy described cyberspace, in Cyberculture (1997), as “the new means of communication that arises from the worldwide interconnection of computers”, including in this description not only the infrastructure but also “the human beings who navigate and nourish this universe”. The formulation is hospitable: the network includes, by construction, the human agents who inhabit it and constitute it as co-authors.

What happened between 1997 and 2026 is, in part, an inversion of that hospitality. The network still includes humans, but no longer as co-creators of a space of collective intelligence rather as input to a behavioral-extraction operation that frames their choices to optimize engagement. The difference is not in the Lévy of 1997; it is in the institutional configuration that took over the infrastructure he was describing. This will be the central argument of the third text in this series.

The epistemological consequence

There is a consequence here that seems to me underexplored in Brazilian, Lusophone, and even international academic public debate. If we accept the behavioral evidence (that framing constitutes preference) and if we accept the empirical evidence (that the algorithm frames at scale) then preferences expressed in digital space should not be read as simple pre-existing preferences of users. They are co-produced preferences: part comes from the subject, part comes from the computational architecture.

This destabilizes both the liberal discourse about “freedom of choice” in media consumption, and the reactive discourse about “total manipulation”. The truth is more uncomfortable: we are subjects partly authors, partly co-authored by an infrastructure we do not control and whose design we never voted on.

The practical question that opens is: if framing is a technology, and if this technology operates on our cognition at scale, who has the right to use it? Under what rules? With what responsibilities? These questions lead directly to the next layer — what happens when billions of individuals co-produced by algorithms interact with one another?

That is the topic of the next text.

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References

ACEMOGLU, D.; JOHNSON, S. Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity. New York: Public Affairs, 2023.

BAKSHY, E.; MESSING, S.; ADAMIC, L. “Exposure to ideologically diverse news and opinion on Facebook”. Science, vol. 348, no. 6239, pp. 1130-1132, 2015.

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CASTRO, D. P. “Cinturão Digital do Ceará e as mídias digitais” [The Ceará Digital Belt and Digital Media]. Proceedings of Social Media Brasil 2011, Fecomercio, São Paulo, 2011.

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HAN, B.-C. The Burnout Society. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015.

KAHNEMAN, D. Thinking, Fast and Slow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011.

LE BON, G. The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind. Mineola: Dover, 2002. [Original French: 1895.]

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SUNSTEIN, C. R. Sludge: What Stops Us from Getting Things Done and What to Do about It. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2022.

THALER, R.; SUNSTEIN, C. R. Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008.

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TVERSKY, A.; KAHNEMAN, D. “The Framing of Decisions and the Psychology of Choice”. Science, vol. 211, no. 4481, pp. 453-458, 1981.