on agency & what it gives us
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
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
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
Positive Friction encourages an alternative design practice in order to restore human agency within online spaces
DVTK • Positive Friction
What underpins them both is an enduring sense of agency: If you mentally view yourself as younger—if you believe you have a few pivots left—you still see yourself as useful; if you believe that aging itself is valuable, an added good, then you also see yourself as useful
Jennifer Senior • The Puzzling Gap Between How Old You Are and How Old You Think You Are
“That feeling of helplessness comes out of the fact that all our agency is being channeled through these media,” he said. “We have these events that are ponderously large, like climate change or gun control, and to view them only through the lens of what happened or the abstraction of what people are saying strips away the notion of our agency and... See more
Charlie Warzel • How The Internet Is Like A Dying Star
tomorrowing — an active mindset of anticipating challenges and opportunities rather than passively waiting for the future.
Sarah DaVanzo • Gen Z’s Curiosity Fingerprint for the Future
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.
Kelly Hayes • Let This Radicalize You
The power of agency is, in practice, the power to build: to direct our intelligence toward the work of understanding the world and adapting it to our needs. It’s how we impose a purposeful order on nature’s chaos.