Reclaiming Agency

The overbearing force of our times is consumption. It is an entropic force that seeks to replace creation with something passive and helpless.

Just let this service or tool solve this problem for you. Let the LLM think for you. Don’t go grocery shopping, order through the app. Don’t leave your fucking house, experience the world through TikTok, curated news feeds and YouTube.

I know, this is hypocrisy. Who doesn’t enjoy the convenience of technology and the elimination of friction in mundane chores? I do. I also enjoy a good spiral into the gallows of YouTube and don’t especially enjoy grocery shopping. But I enjoy having agency over my mind and direction and purpose in my life more. I value the presence and grounding of friction. 

The duality of technological convenience and personal agency doesn’t have to be zero sum, but it takes discipline and awareness to counter the pull of the machine to cede control. 

Passively consuming is weakening our spirit. It numbs and detaches from the complexities of the human experience. It makes us insecure and jealous and fearful when we need to be empowered, tolerant, and reassuring. 

And its not just consuming. 

Mindlessly creating content for data mining monopolies is just as cynical as refusing to create anything at all. 

Social media is a burn pit of low value content. Nothing on those platforms is meant to last or serve as any sort of record of human achievement, except perhaps the platform itself as a monument to the megalomania and narcissism of the digital Anthropocene -  a ‘service’ that served to enrich a small few and impoverish the many. 

The algorithms that eviscerate our attention, gamify our labor, isolate us into angry tribes, and manipulate our sense of reality are those that began as interesting product development problems to, presumably, give us agency - to stay connected to others, to create new opportunities, to facilitate transportation, food, housing, jobs, etc, but have become the driving force destroying our agency.  

This happens slowly as corporations consolidate power, and we as users cede our personal data and, increasingly, our intellectual property (writing, photography, art, music, etc) to byzantine ‘terms of use’. Or more commonly, these things are just outright stolen. 

Use is always contingent upon acceptance of anything the Company wants you to accept. The agency you had is illusory as you need this tool or to be on that platform, so you accept. What’s more, that service is owned by the same corporation that owns the dozens of other services you are obligated to use for daily modern life.

When you publish on someone else’s service, you don’t own your work, the Company does. You are led into believing you do and that the Company is facilitating an audience in exchange for your content, but they are taking everything and you are imprisoned by a login screen and an authority that can simply lock you out, remove your work, or report you to thought police, or just disappear in the next AWS outage.

This probably won’t happen, but it will because you don’t own the platform. Your agency is rented. So while we can’t all provision and administer our own servers and digital infrastructure, we can elect how we create and distribute our creations and be more aware of who benefits from our work.

Using open source software and tools and making an effort to support the creators who keep these services running is a good place to start. There is also a growing force of reclaiming the 'small web', where content creators publish on independent platforms or simply run their own. 

We can’t escape monopoly but we can offset its reach by choosing alternatives. The battle for personal agency is one of the most critical and under-recognized of the our era, and its taking on renewed importance in the face of tyrannical AI. 
Consume with a conscience, create purpose and value, share with intention, and be a decent human!