Difference between revisions of "Agency"

Revision as of 22:02, 6 May 2025

Full Title or Meme

For this wiki all Agency begins with living organisms, typically humans. They may delegate some agency to other humans or to machines, there agents. The question about whether legally constituted entities have inherent, or inherited, agency is not addressed.

Context

User agency is a term used with digital Identifiers and Wallets to designate that the user will have agency when Verifiable Credentials and EU Wallets become ubiquitous. As to be expected, this does not work in practice. The people who are promoting these changes are software developers who want to create code that will be the User Agent. We can use the experience with digital Blockchain to see exactly what the User Experience will be. Lots of people like Sam Bankman-fried create agents which reuse your cash (or your identity) for their own purposes. How can the user be considered to have agency when the software developers are working as hard as they can to avoid regulations? Biance was just sued for the very same thing.

Problems

Human agency—the ability to make independent choices and act upon them—can be usurped in various ways, often through systemic, technological, or psychological influences.

Ways Human Agency Can Be Undermined:

• Technological Control: AI and automated decision-making systems can limit personal choice by subtly guiding behaviors or restricting options.
• Institutional Power: Governments, corporations, and social structures can impose regulations or economic constraints that reduce individual autonomy.
• Psychological Manipulation: Social media algorithms, propaganda, and misinformation can shape perceptions and decisions, sometimes without
• Economic Dependence: Financial systems and employment structures can create conditions where people feel forced into decisions due to lack of viable alternatives.
• Legal and Political Restrictions: Laws and policies can limit freedoms, such as surveillance measures or restrictions on free speech.

Power

When Agency appears in opposition to power, power always wins. two cases of power, one raw physical power and the other legal power are:

1. The U. S. Courts acquiescence to a "Contract of Adhesion" allows corporations to over-ride any attempt by individuals to assert their own agency over their own data. No amount of technological wizardry can overcome the force of law and business working together. This legal principle has given the corporations that run the Internet the power to subvert any agency on the part of the network's users.
2. After the passage of the birth-right citizenship amendment to the US constitution, the US southern whites were faced with the reality of the colored agency to vote as they pleased the aggrieved white population turned to raw power. As a result of the massacre of colored voters in Eufaula Alabama in 1874, "a federal Senate investigation concluded The colored people of the country have been taught that they cannot vote without protection and they have seen no evidence that any power exists that can prevent or punish the crimes of [the white political party] when committed for political purposes. Two version of freedom were at stake in November 1874: one was an African-American Civic version that required strong Federal intervention to protect. In contradistinction, the second was a form of White sovereignty that allowed an unbridled minority to do what they wanted. At stake was something more troubling than a simple defense of White supremacy. Tested and confirmed in the violence of 1874 was a core piece of the white American idea of freedom. Despite its promises to the contrary federal government's inaction sustained a freedom that was defined by race rather than a Civic freedom defined by law and democratic ideals. An acrid taste of failure, betrayal and injustice drifts across the centuries and clouds our perception of federal authority, White freedom and African-American agency"^[1]

There remains the open question of free will. Is Agency real or predestined? Is there a larger purpose that drives Agency, or is it primarily random. For most people these are not interesting questions, probably because there is no answer readily available.

Solutions

• The first step to give networked user agency is to require it by law and block the use of the Contract of Adhesion.
• The second step is to assure that all residents have access to the full Digital Public Infrastructure.

References

1. ↑ Jefferson Cowie, Freedom's Dominion Basic Books, (2022-11-22) ISBN 978-1541672802