Agency, Agency, Agency: Sophie Haigney on the Three Things All the Worst People Want
“I find it very odd that agency is being promoted for its own sake rather than being connected to any kind of value system. Because without those things, agency looks pretty scary. Dictators are quite high agency.” — Sophie Haigney
On April Fools’ Day, The New York Times published an op-ed entitled “All the Worst People Seem to Want to Be High Agency.” But it wasn’t a joke. Sophie Haigney — former web editor of The Paris Review, currently working on a debut essay collection entitled Future Relics — warns that “agency” has become the defining buzzword of Silicon Valley bro culture. From Sam Altman to Mark Zuckerberg, Haigney observes, our new tech overlords have made becoming “high agency” their top priority in self-realization. Haigney argues that these entrepreneurs touting high agency most insistently are the very same people building the tools most likely to rob everyone else of theirs. Like her New York Times jeremiad, it’s no joke. Altman and Zuckerberg’s agentic technologies are often exploitative and addictive. They will make the worst people worse. Ha ha. It will be April Fools’ Day every day.
Five Takeaways
• The 401(k) Is Low Agency: Sam Altman’s first answer to “what skills to develop in the age of AI”: become high agency. The term has migrated from philosophy and debates about free will into Silicon Valley self-help, LinkedIn posts, and entrepreneurship podcasts. In its new form it has a gambling element the old bootstrap individualism lacked. Someone in San Francisco told Haigney that having a 401(k) is the lowest-agency thing you can do with your money. Put it all on red. The rewards for big risk-taking are so much larger now that incrementalism — get a job, save up, buy a house — looks like passivity. That’s a new development, and a dangerous one.
• The People Promoting Agency Are Robbing You of Yours: Haigney’s sharpest observation: the people promoting high agency most loudly are building the tools most likely to strip it from everyone else. Sam Altman says become high agency. His product — in Haigney’s view — will function like social media: not liberating but addictive, another rabbit hole that makes people more stuck. The gambling epidemic is the same logic. Sports betting offers the seductive illusion that your specific knowledge can crack the system. But the system is designed so the average person can’t win. High agency, in practice, tends to concentrate at the top.
• Stuckness and the Lottery Mindset: We live in a moment of extreme stuckness — people who feel two steps away from winning the lottery and yet completely unable to move. This odd combination — paralysis plus the fantasy of a big break — is what the high-agency ideology exploits. Haigney connects it to the gambling epidemic, to the male podcasters with beards, to the young men who feel the system is rigged against them and are being told: the solution is to become the kind of person who cuts in line. What nobody says is that the cutting-in-line ethos, scaled up, is what produced the system they feel rigged by in the first place.
• Hitler Was High Agency: The most unsettling move in the piece. Agency without values is just power. FDR was high agency: he packed the court, overrode term limits, used wartime powers to push through the New Deal. Dictators, Haigney notes, are quite high agency. The tech adoption of the term strips it of any moral content — agency is promoted for its own sake, disconnected from any question of what it’s being used for. That, she argues, is what makes it genuinely frightening at scale. Emerson’s “Self-Reliance” is the American ancestor. Thoreau, its famous practitioner, got his mum to do his laundr
