Engagement is the metric. It counts scrolls, taps, minutes, returns, and it is the number a product is built to raise. The word was borrowed from the vocabulary of attention and commitment: an engaged student, an engaged citizen, an engaged couple. It was chosen so that “people cannot stop looking at this” could be reported as a virtue.

The euphemism is in what the word refuses to distinguish. A person who reads something because it is good and a person who cannot put down something that is making them miserable generate the same engagement. The metric does not know the difference, and the word was selected so that nobody has to ask.

Mamet’s theatre test is sharp here. Put an executive on stage saying “we’ve seen a lift in engagement” over a graph of teenagers’ sleep, and the audience knows the word is doing something. In the boardroom it is only a KPI.