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@ Tim Bouma
2025-05-07 09:20:16
This is worth reading. If you believe in nostr you are fighting for human agency.
I did not write this, but sharing from someone I respect and am maintaining their anonymity.
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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. Businesses have the law (and thus the power) on their side.
2 When the US southern whites were faced with the reality of the colored agency to vote as they pleased after birth-right amendment, 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 versions of agency 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(in some states) to do what they wanted. That election after Grant's presidency returned agency to the whites for the next hundred years.
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.