What even is “agency”?
2026-03-02 — 2026-04-14
Wherein the boundaries of agency are explored through edge cases drawn from coercive control, addiction, cult membership, and the manipulation of attention and preference.
We are very exercised about whether we have agency. What is it actually? What does it even mean to say that we have agency? Can we ground our intuition about agency in something precise?
Do we even want it, or is being the grown up not necessarily in our best interests?
These are all questions I don’t have answers to.
Here I have collected a list of edge cases for “agency” that I hope might help me delineate its boundaries.
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 Incoming
-
The Carbon-based AI Analysis Method (CAAM) redefines human freedom as a “Non-Lock-in State” within a five-dimensional phase space—characterized by diffused goals, controllable leverage, native pain interpretation, accessible exit, and weak coupling. If CAAM withstands rigorous mathematical proof in the future, human rights, within this framework, cease to be abstract moral halos and become computable dynamical constraints for maximizing the accessible set in phase space.