The valorization of “agency” is also an adaptation to a crumbling social system which no longer offers support or meaning to the individual
This is a very well-written and insightful piece from James Vincent in The Baffler. It’s about agency and AI, with the punchline being an extension of something I posted about earlier this year in We’re all below the AI line except for a very very very small group of wealthy white men.
The reminder that ‘you can just do things’ feels empowering and emancipatory, foregrounding our ability to make change in the world. However, what it leaves out is the systemic issues that plague our world and—in a world increasingly mediated by AI—feels somewhat like a taunt by the haves to the have-nots.
Some people do things, others have things done to them. The important thing to remember is that sometimes your ability to act in the world is constrained by things beyond your ability to change.
On a personal level the principle that you can just do things is, in my opinion, broadly true, admirable, and helpful. It’s a reminder that we’re frequently constrained as much by our own imagination than by external factors, and that action—any action—is often preferable to overthinking and paralysis. You could try to trace the history of this idea, but it’s so broad that it resists meaningful narrative. It’s simply a truism of the human condition that has been framed and reframed by successive generations. You can find echoes everywhere from the aphorisms of Epictetus (“Now is the time to get serious about living your ideals. . . . How long can you afford to put off who you really want to be?”) to the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson (“The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.”). But while in its simplest form the notion of just doing things has no set ideology (apart from a vague sense of libertarianism), its current vogue exemplifies specific political and social trends. More specifically, it speaks to a pessimism about society’s capacity to improve itself; throwing responsibility back on the individual, like the “entrepreneur of the self” described by Michel Foucault.
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More broadly, the valorization of “agency” is also an adaptation to a crumbling social system which no longer offers support or meaning to the individual. This usage is a rebranding of established neoliberal thought: if you are struggling in life, if you’re anxious or lonely or can’t afford the rent, it’s because you are simply not being agentic, you’re not trying enough. In this framing, social challenges become the responsibility of the individual, and collective responses are framed as a form of moral infirmity. (“The fundamental weakness of western civilization is empathy,” as Musk put it.) The only real change is that the stakes have increased. Instead of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, walking round local businesses with a pile of résumés till you get a job, you should bootstrap your own billion-dollar business. After all, the tools are all there, so why not show a little bit of agency?
The irony is that while political and technological developments are encouraging people to “just do things,” these same developments are making human agency harder to exercise, particularly with regard to AI. In the cultural realm, the replacement of artistic choice by AI tools means removing a level of intent and decision-making. A filmmaker might, in the past, have carefully considered how to light, frame, and block a certain shot; in the future, AI will make these decisions instead, drawing its decisions from a weighted average of its training data. In online spaces, arguments are now ceded to AI adjudicators. On X, the cry of “Grok, is this true?” is slowly taking over from human debate (even though it’s clear that one highly agentic individual, Elon Musk, has his finger on the scales when it comes to Grok’s opinions). Even worse, people trying to make a specific point don’t even bother to formulate the argument themselves. They just get machines to justify their thoughts for them.
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Everywhere we look, the world is ceding control to automatic systems that cannot be reasoned with like humans and whose decisions are often inscrutable, interrogated only after the damage has been done. The delegation of such responsibility is often embraced in the name of efficiency or neutrality, but can also be manipulated by those in power while disenfranchising the masses. This is, perhaps, the real reason that so many people are keen to tell one another that “you can just do things.” It’s a reaction to a world in which, instead, things are just done to us.
Source: The Baffler
Image: Daniel K Cheung