Concept
Two flavors of institutional capture at the platform scale, structurally different. External capture: an adversarial selection-tuner (propaganda operation, state actor, ad-tech firm) learns the platform’s gate criteria and crafts variants that win at them — the asymmetric arms race shape. Self-capture: the institution’s own business model is the captured selection-tuner — engagement maximization is itself a tuning of the gates against truth, with no external adversary. Self-capture is more stable than external capture because there is no captor to defeat, only an equilibrium to dismantle; the captured state and the functional state are the same state. Per the capture-taxonomy these are the two endpoints of the source axis, and the empirically dominant third case is composite capture — external actors riding the gradient self-capture has already established.
Connections
- Defined in: Capture Taxonomy, Political Economy of Attention
- Discussed in: Ch 11 — AI as a New Kind of Node, Ch 12 — Infrastructure for Integration, Ch 10 — Political Economy of Attention
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