Agency

A lot of what shapes our days is controlled by someone else. Attention is the obvious one: feeds tuned to keep us scrolling, notifications timed to pull us back in. Clive Thompson calls the way out rewilding your attention. Then there's money, the tech we depend on, and politics. They're control systems in the engineering sense, feedback loops that measure what people do and push them toward someone else's goal, and we're constantly being measured.

We can't opt out of most of them. What we can do though is notice where we still have a hand on the wheel: what we read, what we make, which tools we use and how, and to some extent where our money and time go.

That's where agency lives for me. It isn't dependent upon having control over the systems. It's making my own choices within them, and making them on purpose.

I think of Ariel in Moonbound by Robin Sloan after visiting a Wizard to alter his substance:

Hughes told Ariel to lift his arms. Below each armpit, on the cool, smooth flesh of his flanks, the wizard had signed her work: 
So the number of authors grew. Ariel peered from one armpit to the other. He liked these new marks. They seemed to stand for taking control (left armpit) and making decisions (right armpit). They made him feel more adult.

and

Mike Rugnetta in an interview with The Verge

Sometimes the most helpful thing is to be reminded that you do have agency within your own life, though it may be remote, forgotten, unused, underdeveloped. 
I think of this advice as a reminder to look for the ways I have control over my life and use them in service of my goals. For me, that is what “taking life seriously” means; it is something no one else can do for me.

also

Of course, as mentioned at the top of this note, CJ Eller in Rewilding Your Attention:

rewilding attention is an active practice. One must not only pursue those tiny signals but share them as well, whether that means writing about them on your blog or by word of mouth.

and

Finally, Dene Grigar speaking in The Future of Text III:

I think it’s that kind of intellectual laziness that drives people to just allow themselves to be swept away by algorithms, and not intervene on their own and take ownership over what they’re consuming.

Paths from here

• The Now and the Not Now: rewilding your attention
• Building Things Here: building at a human scale, not on someone else's platform
• Bespoke Software: control of your own tools
• My Personal A.I. Policy: the decisions I keep for myself
• Ad Reads vs. Produced Commercials: whose recommendations you trust