What even is “agency”?

1 Cults and agency

The Antidote to Trickery is an interview with Diane Benscoter, a de-radicalisation expert, who argues that there is a distinction between being programmed by a cult and being de-programmed by a non-cult.

Is sublimating my goals to a larger group really a loss of agency?

2 Is domestication a loss of agency?

See Human domestication.

3 Coercive control

Researchers seem to agree that coercive control is a thing, and that it’s bad (Lohmann et al. 2024). So intuitively some of the things that agency should include are things that should be diminished by coercive control.

cf What the research evidence tells us about coercive control victimisation.

4 Addiction

Is addiction a loss of agency?

5 “High-agency” vs NPC

Jasmine Sun decodes the Bay Area use of the term

You can be a top-ranked competitive coder or know every world leader’s birthday by heart, but the only real metric of success is whether you can build a life you’re happy with. Cold-emailing your way into a dream job is pretty high-agency; quitting it to become a strawberry farmer is even more so. Agency is initiative, resourcefulness, a high internal locus of control. Not stressing about roadblocks and assuming you’ll figure it out along the way.

6 Attention hacking

If my attention is being hacked, do I lose agency?

7 Reward tampering

If my preferences are altered to be what some other entity wishes them to be, do I lose agency?

8 Empowerment

If I am empowered, do I gain agency?

9 References