on agency & what it gives us

Positive Friction encourages an alternative design practice in order to restore human agency within online spaces

Most of us really have very little say in the diagnoses we get, even though we all carry a lot of self-knowledge about our bodies and minds. You see the impacts of this a lot when it comes to mental health and neurodivergence: people fighting for years for their autism or ADHD diagnosis, or trying to get an eating disorder diagnosis despite their

Chat” evokes what search engines and databases cannot: a sense of personal involvement. It implicates one’s selfhood, which helps cultivate certain behaviors

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

"[Swaraj] is loosely defined as self-rule but it actually goes much deeper," says Kothari, who has written extensively on Swaraj and the ecological crisis. "It means my own autonomy, self-reliance, self-sufficiency, my independence, both as an individual and as a community. But it's not the American notion of individualism that I can do what I

A regulated woman pauses and gets curious. She stops absorbing what does not belong to her. That pivot is often misread as disengagement, even though it represents the return of agency.