on agency & what it gives us
taste can be a practice—a result, even, of living authentically.
Haley Nahman • #176: Accounting for taste
Humanity needs Gen Z’s ideas and dreams to shape the future, which means giving them a seat at the table
Sarah DaVanzo • Gen Z’s Curiosity Fingerprint for the Future
Positive Friction encourages an alternative design practice in order to restore human agency within online spaces
DVTK • Positive Friction
Meanwhile, the majority of “normals” (to borrow a term from the sci-fi film Gattaca) are expected to take orders, complete tasks, stand in line, clock in and out . . . punctually, obediently, subserviently. No dancing in the halls, and certainly no daydreaming about a world put together differently.
Ruha Benjamin • Imagination: A Manifesto (A Norton Short)
guerrilla gardening is a way that people can take back not only their present, but also their future – even as it seems under dire threat from an economic and social system apparently hellbent on human self-eradication.
Damien Gayle • ‘I Call It Botanarchy’: The Hackney Guerrilla Gardener Bringing Power to the People
Chat” evokes what search engines and databases cannot: a sense of personal involvement. It implicates one’s selfhood, which helps cultivate certain behaviors
Anna Wiener • The Age of Chat
Gaining agency is gaining the capacity to do something differently from, or in addition to, the events that simply happen to you.
Simon Sarris • The Most Precious Resource Is Agency
Often, hope works best alongside tools for proactively tackling future challenges. If our work becomes a catalysing force for people to imagine things they would not have been able to imagine otherwise and act upon that imagination, then that’s powerful, and for me, this is a slow form of critical activism.
Anab Jain • Calling for a More-Than-Human Politics
the most important thing you can do to transform the world is to act. Taking action is a practice of hope. Experience and meaning are derived from doing.