“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.
