Political campaigns often speak about platforms as if they come with built-in “superpowers” — magical affordances that can be unlocked with the right tactic or the right creator. But what if platforms don’t truly offer possibilities at all? What if they merely operate within shifting contingencies: algorithmic volatility, social dynamics, cultural moods, and political context? This workshop reframes the attention economy away from platform determinism and back toward human behaviour, motivation, and societal conditions.

Michael Bossetta (University of Lund), Jonathan Tanner (Root Cause), and Martina Orlea (Electica) will guide participants through how campaigns can read and anticipate these underlying forces — from micro-level identity signals to macro-level media trends — and design strategies that travel across platforms rather than depend on any single one. The core lesson: the winning campaigns of the 2020s and 2030s will be those that understand attention as a context, not a feature set, and can operate effectively no matter how the platform landscape shifts.