“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, 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. 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 AI age: become high agency. The new individualism has a gambling element the old bootstrap conservatism lacked. Having a 401(k) is low agency — put it all on red. Incrementalism looks like passivity now.

• The People Promoting Agency Are Robbing You of Yours. The loudest advocates for high agency are building the tools most likely to strip it from everyone else. AI will function like social media: addictive, a rabbit hole. High agency, in practice, concentrates at the top.

• Stuckness and the Lottery Mindset. A moment of extreme stuckness combined with the fantasy of the big break. High-agency ideology exploits this — become the person who cuts in line. What nobody says: the cutting-in-line ethos produced the rigged system people are trying to escape.

• Hitler Was High Agency. Agency without values is just power. FDR: packed the court, overrode term limits. Dictators are quite high agency. Tech has stripped the term of moral content entirely. Emerson’s “Self-Reliance” is the ancestor. Thoreau, its practitioner, got his mum to do his laundry.

• High Agency Could Mean Repair. Build a better railway. Fix the Department of Education rather than abolishing it. Systems required enormous collective agency to build. There’s another definition of the term — creating rather than just disrupting. It doesn’t get much airtime on the podcasts.

About the Guest

Sophie Haigney is a critic and journalist whose work appears in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Harper’s. She is working on her debut essay collection, Future Relics, for Liveright.

References

“All the Worst People Seem to Want to Be High Agency,” The New York Times, April 1, 2026

About Keen On America

Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen.

Website: https://keenon.tv/ Substack: https://keenon.substack.com/ YouTube: https://youtube.com/@KeenOnShow

Chapters:

00:00:31 “All the worst people seem to want to be high agency” — the April 1 op-ed
00:02:51 The Silicon Valley definition: risk, disruption, cutting in line
00:04:52 Emerson, self-reliance, and the new American individualism
00:06:44 Is high agency essential to survive the 2020s?
00:08:41 Thoreau’s laundry: the gendered dimension of agency
00:11:04 Male podcasters, the crisis of young men, and the seduction of high agency
00:12:20 Stuckness, gambling, and the lottery mindset
00:16:13 TikTok, the Grateful Dead, and the age of addiction
00:17:16 The people promoting agency are building tools to take it from you
00:18:29 AI: the biggest addiction on the horizon
00:19:56 Agency as the new political axis: left, right, and disruption
00:21:29 Is skepticism of agency just nostalgia for the twentieth century?
00:24:16 California’s failed railways, China’s success, and democracy’s agency problem
00:25:16 Hitler was high agency: the moral vacuum at the heart of the term
00:26:45 Models for better agency: Mamdani, repair, collective action
00:29:47 San Francisco: agency and its absence in the same city block
00:32:47 Future Relics and historicizing the A-word