Agency, Agency, Agency: Sophie Haigney on the Three Things All the Worst People Want

00:00:31 Andrew Keen: Hello, everybody. It came out on April 1 in The New York Times. It was an op-ed entitled "All the Worst People Seem to Want to Be High Agency," but it wasn't a joke. It was quite serious. It's a very interesting op-ed about how the word "agency" has become deeply problematic. It was written by my guest today, Sophie Haigney, who's a writer based in Brooklyn, grew up in San Francisco, and she's joining us today. I was particularly taken with the piece. Sophie, you've spent a lot of time in San Francisco. Of course, the A-word — agency — is on everyone's lips today. Everyone wants to be agentic in one way or the other. So, how did you begin to realize that all the worst people seem to want to be high agency? Who exactly are these worst people?

00:01:27 Sophie Haigney: Well, I will say what writers always say: I didn't write the headline.

00:01:33 Andrew Keen: Blame those terrible people at the New York Times. Right?

00:01:36 Sophie Haigney: Yeah. It wouldn't have been what I would have chosen. But if we think about the people who I think of as corrupting the term "agency," it would be the sort of tech overlords who want to dismantle the Department of Education, who see education in general as a kind of anti-agency programming where you learn to stand in line instead of how to cut it. So that would probably be the worst people referred to in the headline. But I first started hearing it maybe a year ago, and it was something that bubbled up even in casual conversations with people I knew. People would just say, you know, do you think of yourself as a high-agency person? Are you in the driver's seat of your own life? That was kind of how I was introduced to the term, and then I started seeing it more and more, especially in the intersection of self-help writing and entrepreneurship — podcasts, LinkedIn posts, places like that.

00:02:51 Andrew Keen: Yeah. I even found a website that promised high agency in thirty minutes. It sounds like Tim Ferriss's book about the four-hour workweek. So, of course, the usual suspects are the people you're talking about — Sam Altman, who was the subject, if that's the right word, of two assassination attempts over the weekend. You quote in your piece that when Sam was asked what skills to develop in the age of AI, the first one he listed was "become high agency." Also, you mention Mark Zuckerberg and his notion of moving fast and breaking things. Is this just another way of arguing, Sophie, that the tech bros are ruining the world?

00:03:41 Sophie Haigney: I think it comes out of the same ethos as "move fast and break things," disrupt stuff. But it strikes me as a little distinct, maybe because it's specifically something that people seem to be arguing is like an AI-proof trait — a uniquely human capacity, supposedly, that we have for making decisions, thinking outside of the box, taking big swings and risks. It seems to me like there's a new formulation of some old ideas. Obviously, agency is something that has been around for a long time and discussed in philosophy and debates about free will. But the way it's being used today, it has a lot of connotations about risk-taking. If you're high agency, you're the kind of person who is not taking no for an answer. If someone tells you your credit is too bad to start a business, you find a way to do it anyway. That's kind of the mentality of the high-agency person in the Silicon Valley sense.

00:04:52 Andrew Keen: Maybe there's another A-word we can associate with agency, which is "American." The whole idea of agency, of the American dream, of self-realization — all this stuff is very much bound up in traditional notions of Americanness, isn't it, Sophie?

00:05:10 Sophie Haigney: Yeah. I think it very much is, and I was thinking when I was writing this piece about Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay "Self-Reliance," which is kind of a classic American text — self-sufficiency on the frontier. All of that feels very old to me. And it is, in some ways, a version of that individualism and resourcefulness that we associate with Americans. I do think there's something slightly new about this particular packaging of it. When I was growing up — I'm 30, so I'm not that old — people, especially on the right, would say, you know, pull yourself up by your bootstraps, climb the ladder. The idea was you had to get a job, save up some money, maybe buy a house. You kind of incrementally build up success and make a life for yourself. And when I was working on this piece, I happened to be in San Francisco, and I talked to someone who said the lowest-agency thing you can do is have a 401(k). That's a very low-agency thing to do with your money. You should be taking that money and putting it somewhere where it's going to make a lot more money a lot more quickly. So I think it's this kind of new individualism that has a little bit more of a gambling element to it — not just regular old work your way up, more like put it all on red and see what happens, because the rewards for that are so much more significant, potentially.

00:06:44 Andrew Keen: But isn't all that true? That having agency is, for better or worse, essential in the 2020s in America? And if you don't have it, for better or worse, you're screwed.

00:06:59 Sophie Haigney: I think agency is an essentially neutral trait. It's really about what you do with it more than about having it or not having it. So it's a really good thing to be in control of your own life, to have the ability to act of your own free will. I worry about a society, though, that puts so much emphasis on risk. I don't actually think it's a great idea for many people to start a business with terrible credit. I think there are some really positive things about working within a specific framework — like, how can I have more agency in my job? Can I find a way to take a little bit more initiative even if my boss doesn't totally control me? That seems like a straightforward good to me. It seems less positive that we're emphasizing gambling and risk-taking as the defining value of our time, because risk is just really different for different people. And I don't think it's an inherently bad thing to slowly and incrementally build up a life. I don't think having a 401(k) should be frowned upon — for most people, including myself. It's probably better for me to just put my money in the S&P 500 and see what happens than to try to do some crazy day-trading maneuver.

00:08:41 Andrew Keen: You mentioned Emerson. His close associate, the person who's always talked about in the same breath as Emerson, is Thoreau. Thoreau famously, of course, went to Walden Pond and claimed to be independent, claimed to have agency, but he also famously got his mom to do his laundry. Is there a gendered quality here? I mean, you've mentioned Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk in your piece. You're obviously a woman. I'm not suggesting that women don't have agency or have different notions of what agency is. But should one approach this debate about high agency in gendered terms too?

00:09:27 Sophie Haigney: I think there probably is a gendered element. Certainly when I've seen agency talked about — for instance, in that "high agency in thirty minutes" essay you referenced — I was kind of waiting for when they were going to name a woman with high agency. I can't remember if he ever did. There were not many women mentioned. And partly that's the risk of using historical examples: you end up with history being mostly written about and by men for a bunch of reasons. But I think there are some gendered elements to it. When I was talking about risk — and this isn't inherently gendered — but if you have a family you're thinking about, if you have ties to a certain community that you care a lot about, whether that's a city where you live or maybe your parents living somewhere, you're much less likely to think, should I move to the desert and start a business in the American West by myself? That does seem like a traditionally masculine thing to do. And so I think there might be some masculine qualities to the way that this ethos is being promoted, and some more feminine qualities to the more cautious or community-oriented or family-oriented way of thinking about ties and weighing risk.

00:11:04 Andrew Keen: Your piece cites some very popular podcasts — male podcasts of muscular men with beards talking to one another about agency. I was watching a couple of them while I was preparing. We've done many shows, Sophie, as you can imagine, on this supposed crisis of the male. Scott Galloway has a bestselling book. Richard Reeves came on the show. Jonathan Haidt — there seems to be a whole class of male writers on this crisis. Do you think that the issue of agency is one way we can get to the problem with young men these days? That these young men grow up, particularly on the Internet, in a culture where high agency is promoted as the thing in itself in a highly seductive way. But, of course, the world makes it very hard for most people to actually be high-agency individuals — which explains the anger, the resentment, the misanthropy, the hostility toward women, the violence sometimes online.

00:12:20 Sophie Haigney: Yeah, I think there's a lot in there. We live at a time when sports gambling is at an all-time high, and that's not all men, but it's a very, very male-dominated space. That's one area where you can really see masculinity and risk-oriented agency come together with some really negative consequences. I think one thing I found interesting in the response to my piece is that people who disagreed with me most tend to see passivity as the biggest issue in society — maybe passivity specifically for men. People growing up as passive consumers of social media, not making the most of their life, getting kind of stuck, and that being the real crisis of our time. Whereas people who agreed with me more are much more concerned about the pace and scale of technological disruption, and think that the worst thing is really that we're moving too fast and breaking too much. Both of those things are obviously bad, and I see the latter as much more of a threat. But there's this weird interplay between the two. We're at a time when a lot of people feel really, really stuck, but also feel like they're two steps away from winning the lottery or something. There's this really odd combination of stuckness and desire for big rewards — a belief that it's all possible if somehow they could just win at a system that feels rigged against them.

00:14:22 Andrew Keen: Yeah. I think I agree with you. You introduced the word "stuckness." We've done lots of shows on that — there have been a number of books written about why America is stuck and why nothing can get done. I think you're also right to bring in gambling, because life itself has become a kind of lottery, which goes against the notion of high agency. If it's a lottery, it doesn't matter what you do — you just buy your ticket, make your bet on the future, and it doesn't really reflect any kind of self-determination or self-management. So it speaks to the paradox of our condition: we want high agency, but we live in a world where it's increasingly hard.

00:15:15 Sophie Haigney: Yeah. Gambling is such a weird thing, especially online sports betting. Thinking about men who get addicted to it — you feel like you can win at the system. You feel like you have all this inside knowledge, and maybe you can a little bit. But ultimately, there are ways in which it is rigged against you, or the average person just isn't able to reach the level of knowledge or professional ability required to actually win at gambling. And I think it's this trap of people having the sense that they are so close to using their very specific knowledge to crack out of their stuckness, and yet the system itself is making them more stuck.

00:16:13 Andrew Keen: Yeah, it is in a way the new drug. You wrote an interesting piece in the New York Times Magazine about TikTokers trying to — and maybe this was another headline writer at the Times — "detox their timelines." The memes were too strong. So all this stuff about agency is bound up in an age where we're all addicted to one thing or another. I know you wrote something interesting about the Grateful Dead — your parents were Deadheads, and you grew up in that culture, at least in a San Francisco nostalgic sense.

00:16:54 Sophie Haigney: Mhm.

00:16:54 Andrew Keen: In the sixties, the Grateful Dead and the drug culture was one kind of addiction. Today, that addiction has taken a new form — digital form — with TikTok, with online gambling, and, of course, ultimately, the biggest addiction on the horizon is AI.

00:17:16 Sophie Haigney: Yeah. And I think what I find troubling is that the people who are promoting high agency the most seem to be the people who are building the tools that are most inclined to rob people of their agency. That's how I view it. I realize that's a particularly negative view of technology. But if Sam Altman, to use him as an example, is saying "become high agency" — that will be the tool of the future — I don't see AI, for the average person, as a particularly agency-enabling tool. I think it is more likely to be like social media and ultimately lead people astray down rabbit holes into addictive behavior. I can see that for some people, AI is the most agency-inducing thing, because suddenly you don't even need to know how to code and you can start a company. I just don't. My view of how these tools will be used is more pessimistic, shaped by the time through which I've grown up.

00:18:29 Andrew Keen: And, of course, with smart machines, as many pessimistic analysts and writers on AI suggest, we are inventing — this is our last invention. We're writing our own obituary as a species. So this issue of agency and smart machines is particularly acute these days. On the one hand, you have the Sam Altmans of the world who argue that AI will empower us, will enable our agency. On the other hand, the pessimists — I don't know if you saw the AI documentary, a new film which pits the pessimists against the utopians. So AI seems to have reached a kind of climax. And I wonder — and I think you hinted at this in your op-ed — we live in an age where the old ideological divisions, left, right, liberal, conservative, communist, capitalist, none of them seem to make much sense anymore. I wonder whether the A-word, "agency," will become the axis around which new political organizations and ideologies will develop.

00:19:56 Sophie Haigney: Yeah. That's interesting, because I do think it's a word that right now is somewhat being claimed by people with right-leaning ideas — say, people who want to abolish the Department of Education because it isn't being innovative enough. And it's also true that people on the left, or liberals, or leftists, have for a long time really emphasized structural inequality, structural racism, the way that if you were born in a certain way, that would come to define you — perhaps almost to a fault, though I do also believe basically in structural inequality. But I think some of it is breaking down weirdly. If you think about the older brand of pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps conservatism, that actually looks very low-agency from some vantage points. Or if you look at people farther to the left with radical ideas about how we might reform prescription drug pricing — that's also very high agency, extremely outside the box, risky. And so I do wonder how this will end up, and if it just means that people with more extreme or more outside-the-box ideas will be the ones claiming the agency side of things, while people who are more in the center or clinging to old political orders will end up looking kind of low agency.

00:21:29 Andrew Keen: And maybe those who are critical of agency might be accused of a degree of nostalgia. I know you're writing a book called Future Relics, an essay collection about obsession and nostalgia. In your New York Times piece, you say high agency is individualistic, which means systems are suspect — Britain's National Health Service, railways, the American Department of Education. Most people love all three, especially the NHS. So is there a danger that your position — your skepticism towards high agency — is a form of nostalgia for the twentieth century, for longing for things that, for better or worse, can no longer exist? Whether it's railways — certainly American railways, another example of stuckness in America — Britain's NHS, or the American Department of Education, which Elon Musk seems to have got great satisfaction out of demolishing.

00:22:37 Sophie Haigney: Yeah. I think there are likely nostalgic or idealistic elements to being attached to systems. I think it's possible to say, for instance, I'm attached to railways without being inherently wrong, because you could argue we simply need to build better railways — but of course, that's not working, it's not happening. California is the best example of a place where that's not happening. And I think there is some danger to the nostalgic element of things. But one thing that we can be nostalgic for, and could try to reclaim, would be some notion of values and morals attached to agency. That doesn't seem too far gone to me. Couldn't we be high agency and organize to build a better rail? Wouldn't it be high agency to fix the Department of Education rather than abolishing it? It's hard to exactly see the path forward, and I'm obviously not a politician. But I'm not sure it's entirely a lost cause to try to reattach some set of values to the idea of agency, rather than seeing agency only as a means to disruption or to the destruction of existing systems without creating anything to replace them.

00:24:16 Andrew Keen: Yeah. I wonder whether America has just become a — speaking of railways — a low-agency sort of place. The Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson book, I don't know if you saw it, Abundance —

00:24:30 Sophie Haigney: Yeah, yeah.

00:24:31 Andrew Keen: — which is a bestseller, compares the California failure to build, I don't know what it is, a few hundred yards of high-speed train tracks to the Chinese model, which has successfully developed thousands of miles of high-speed rail. Of course, China is not a democracy. So how does this play out in political terms? Is this the promise or the problem with democracy — this whole issue of high agency? Can democracies work when you have a few high-agency characters — the Zuckerbergs, the Musks, the Altmans — and everyone else is, to quote you, stuck?

00:25:16 Sophie Haigney: Yeah. I do think there's a way in which high agency is a little anti-democratic. If I think about a high-agency president on the left, FDR is an example of someone who did the kinds of things I was talking about nostalgically. But he threatened to pack the court, ran things through using wartime powers, overrode term limits. I do think sometimes to get things done in a high-agency way — whether in a corporate sense or in government — does look pretty anti-democratic. And I don't know exactly what to make of that for our moment right now. But one of my issues with agency being promoted to the degree that it is, is that when I look at some of the most high-agency individuals in history, it's someone like Hitler. And I find it very odd that agency is being promoted for its own sake rather than being connected to any kind of value system, any kind of morality. Because without those things, agency looks pretty scary at high levels when it's exercised. Dictators, I think, are quite high agency.

00:26:45 Andrew Keen: Yeah. And we certainly, speaking of the worst people, those dictators — clearly no one's going to argue in favor of them. So if all the worst people seem to want to be high agency, who are the models for the best people, for you? I know you didn't write this headline, but what should we want to emulate? I mean, you're in Brooklyn. You have a mayor of New York City who many people are citing as a good person, as a model for the future. Who are the — maybe not the best people, but the better —

00:27:22 Sophie Haigney: I was thinking about that.

00:27:24 Andrew Keen: — models in the context of this whole problem with agency?

00:27:28 Sophie Haigney: I was thinking about Zohran Mamdani as a sort of foil to Trump — and to extremely high-agency politicians generally — both in what he's trying to accomplish and in the way he's approached politics. Trump had very little government experience running for office and then attempted to come in and make big changes, conducting politics in very different ways. I'm myself a fan of Mamdani, and it's pretty early in his mayoralty — I can't quite evaluate it yet — but I think his candidacy, and the way he's approaching politics, strikes me as very high agency from the left. I think there are other models, though — types of people who might be high agency and are not really being considered in the context of this tech civilization. I was thinking about a friend of mine who moved to the desert in New Mexico and kind of lives this out-of-the-box life — he's on a farm in someone's backyard, living in a yurt communally, very happy, doing ecstatic dance, ceramics. He's someone who, just like me, went to university, would have very easily done some sort of corporate job, and thought, this doesn't make me happy, so I'm going to do this other thing. There's something in that form of agency — just personal agency — that's more like the Thoreau model of it. We can't all do that, of course. But doing things that are not what everyone expects you to do, knowing that you're not controlled by a bad boss or by expectations that you go to law school — that all strikes me as a really positive form of agency, and it's a little less divisive.

00:29:47 Andrew Keen: I know you grew up in San Francisco, and I read one of your pieces in which you articulated a degree of nostalgia. You wrote a good piece back in 2019 about San Francisco. I'm in San Francisco right now. I know you grew up there and you've spent a lot of time here. It seems to me that what makes San Francisco — living in it, visiting it — such a surreal place is the coexistence of these two extreme forms: either high agency or the absence of agency. On the one hand, it's full of millionaires and billionaires and high tech and AI — Anthropic and OpenAI are now based here. Sam Altman has a huge estate up on Pacific Heights. And on the other hand, it's a place of tent cities, of massive homelessness, of people without agency. Do you think there's truth to that — that this coexistence is what makes San Francisco so troubling and also so weird?

00:30:59 Sophie Haigney: Yeah. I mean, that really weird oscillation between the extremes of inequality, the failure of government services in some ways, and then these individuals who are obsessed with circumventing taxes — there's a lot of really weird stuff going on with the politics of San Francisco. And San Francisco has always been weird as a site of counterculture, with all these different forces coming together — libertarians, hippies, people whose politics might seem to be at odds with each other but kind of make sense in this weird blend. At least how San Francisco used to be, it was full of misfits and outsiders interested in living slightly different ways or slightly on the margins of society. So I think there is something very troubling and also very compelling about what San Francisco represents to so many people. When I'm there, I often just feel like I'm in a normal, beautiful city — you see the billboards that say "Are you agentic?" and then you see the tent cities. But it's also just a normal place. It symbolizes so much in the American imagination. I think about these extremes of agency, of inequality, of different modes of living in slightly unconventional ways.

00:32:47 Andrew Keen: Finally, as I said, you've got this collection of essays you're working on now called Future Relics. Do you think when it comes to agency, we should be historicizing it? In other words, in fifty or a hundred years' time, will people look back at the 2020s and think, well, that was the period where everyone was obsessed with the idea of agency, and now we know better?

00:33:11 Sophie Haigney: I think that seems right to me — that this set of ideas will have emerged specifically in the face of AI and what we don't know. I really think a lot of this is coming from some place of fear, or for some people excitement, but from some sense of: we don't know what's coming next. And so what do we have to offer that's uniquely human? And this is one answer to it — this idea that we have a very specific capacity for taking risk and making decisions, and that we should cling to and cultivate that as we move into this very unknown period. I think we will be able to look back and say, that was a really strange moment, and a set of values that emerged in the face of a new technological regime.

00:34:01 Andrew Keen: Yeah. It's really the irony — the only way to fight high agency and high-agency people is with an agency of our own. Fascinating conversation, Sophie. We'll look forward — when's the book going to be done? We'll have you back on the show.

00:34:16 Sophie Haigney: It'll be done in the summer. It'll be out next year, so we can talk about it.

00:34:21 Andrew Keen: Well, I hope maybe you'll come back on before then. Best of luck with the book, and thank you for a really interesting and important conversation about the A-word.

00:34:28 Sophie Haigney: Yeah. Thank you. This was fun.