> *Market economies do not merely tolerate deception as an occasional failure — they structurally reward it, because information asymmetry is a source of profit. Yet deception cannot become total, because it parasitically depends on a background of trust it simultaneously erodes. The economy is therefore not "built on deception" but locked in a permanent, unstable equilibrium between exploitation and trust — and the modern attention/data economy has shifted that equilibrium dangerously toward the former.*