Real Safety AI Foundation / Research

Ethics, Design Responsibility, and Moral Agency

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

Publisher: Real Safety AI Foundation

Working paper. Not peer reviewed.

Written
June 2026
Version
v1
Pages
10
Download PDFPlain language slides (PDF)Export BibTeXExport RIS

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.

Keywords

  • philosophy of technology
  • ethics of attention
  • persuasive design
  • dark patterns
  • gamification
  • manufactured scarcity
  • behavioral economics
  • Mark Twain

Plain language slides

First slide of the plain language summary of The Corporate Villainy of Tom Sawyer: Manufactured Scarcity, the Ethics of Attention, and the Literary Prehistory of Dark PatternsOpen the 14-slide summary (PDF)

Suggested citation

Gilly, Travis. "The Corporate Villainy of Tom Sawyer: Manufactured Scarcity, the Ethics of Attention, and the Literary Prehistory of Dark Patterns." Real Safety AI Foundation Working Paper, June 2026. https://realsafetyai.org/research/corporate-villainy-tom-sawyer/

Other versions

This paper is also posted on SSRN.

SSRN version

References (18)

  1. Ariely, D., Loewenstein, G., & Prelec, D. (2006). Tom Sawyer and the construction of value. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 60(1), 1–10.
  2. Brignull, H. (2010). Deceptive design (formerly Dark Patterns). Retrieved from https://www.deceptive.design
  3. Federal Trade Commission. (2022, December 19). Fortnite video game maker Epic Games to pay more than $500 million over FTC allegations of privacy violations and unwanted charges [Press release]. Retrieved from https://www.ftc.gov
  4. Fogg, B. J. (2003). Persuasive technology: Using computers to change what we think and do. Morgan Kaufmann.
  5. Kim, H. (2021). Can mandating corporate social responsibility backfire? Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, 18(1), 189–251.
  6. Lee, G., Lifeson, A., Peart, N., & Dubois, P. (1981). Tom Sawyer [Song]. On Moving Pictures. Anthem/Mercury.
  7. Lepper, M. R., Greene, D., & Nisbett, R. E. (1973). Undermining children’s intrinsic interest with extrinsic reward: A test of the “overjustification” hypothesis. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 28(1), 129–137.
  8. Marx, L. (1953). Mr. Eliot, Mr. Trilling, and Huckleberry Finn. The American Scholar, 22(4), 423–440.
  9. Mathur, A., Acar, G., Friedman, M. J., Lucherini, E., Mayer, J., Chetty, M., & Narayanan, A. (2019). Dark patterns at scale: Findings from a crawl of 11K shopping websites. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 3(CSCW), 1–32.
  10. Mathur, A., Kshirsagar, M., & Mayer, J. (2021). What makes a dark pattern…dark? Design attributes, normative considerations, and measurement methods. In Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1–18).
  11. Monge Roffarello, A., Lukoff, K., & De Russis, L. (2023). Defining and identifying attention capture deceptive designs in digital interfaces. In Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1–19).
  12. Twain, M. (1876). The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. American Publishing Company.
  13. Twain, M. (1958). The new dynasty (1886). In P. S. Foner, Mark Twain: Social critic. International Publishers.
  14. Twain, M. (1990). The autobiography of Mark Twain. (C. Neider, Ed.). Harper & Row.
  15. Twain, M., & Warner, C. D. (1873). The Gilded Age: A tale of today. American Publishing Company.
  16. Verbeek, P.-P. (2011). Moralizing technology: Understanding and designing the morality of things. University of Chicago Press.
  17. Williams, J. (2018). Stand out of our light: Freedom and resistance in the attention economy. Cambridge University Press.
  18. Winner, L. (1980). Do artifacts have politics? Daedalus, 109(1), 121–136.

All research