You Cannot Restrict Without Replacing

My daughter is almost two and she's in the middle of discovering agency. At dinner, instead of sitting where she's asked to sit, she stands up in her chair and screams at the top of her lungs. It's her choice, and she chooses whatever happens next, being picked up and removed from the table. She has learned the natural consequences of doing something and living with what came after. That's what agency actually looks like at its most basic. Action, then consequence, both genuinely hers.

Digital agency gets talked about constantly, but what the word usually means online is closer to the opposite. You can set a screen time limit. You can tell an algorithm to show you less of something. You can opt in or out of a privacy policy written by someone else, for a system built by someone else, with a default you didn't choose. All of that is a kind of control, in the narrow sense that you're adjusting a dial someone else installed. But it isn't agency in the sense my daughter is discovering it. None of those actions originate anything. They only reduce exposure to decisions that were already made on your behalf, somewhere upstream, by a product team you'll never meet.

Cultural institutions offer a version of this too, usually without noticing. An accessibility toggle, a newsletter preference centre, a cookie consent banner with eleven categories to switch on or off one at a time. These are genuinely useful, and I'm not arguing against them. But they're all subtraction. None of them ask a visitor to actually do or make anything. They just let you turn down the volume on choices an institution already made about what to send you and how.

On social media specifically, agency mostly means accepting terms you didn't write and scrolling while your time, attention and willpower get sold onward to advertisers who never have to ask your permission for that part. The tools marketed as giving you more control, screen time dashboards, "time well spent" features, algorithm sliders, mostly just give you a slightly more efficient way to comply with a system that was never going to let you actually opt out, because opting out isn't a button anyone builds when the business model depends on you staying.

I felt more agency at fifteen, walking door to door around town handing out my CV, mostly unsuccessfully, than I do now being able to hypothetically apply to a hundred jobs in a single day from a laptop. At fifteen, I walked into a shop, asked for the manager, handed over a piece of paper I'd written myself, and got a real answer, usually no, sometimes a raised eyebrow, occasionally a genuine conversation, right there on the spot. Applying online today means uploading a PDF into a form, watching a progress bar, and waiting for silence or an automated rejection two weeks later, from a system that never has to look at you while it decides. There's something about the act of actually doing a thing, in front of another person, with a visible outcome, that produces a feeling no volume of frictionless online applications ever will. It doesn't matter whether you're ploughing through productivity tools or AI-generated cover letters to get there faster. Efficiency isn't the same as doing.

The result of all this restriction-dressed-as-control is that your actual sense of agency quietly wears down, to the point where you don't have the energy left to exercise the one piece of agency that's genuinely available to you, closing the tab and doing something else. Restriction, even well-meaning restriction, is still a message about what not to do. It doesn't hand you anything to do instead, and a person who's spent all day being told what to limit, avoid, or opt out of has very little left over to go build something of their own.

You cannot restrict without replacing. That's part of why I was genuinely sad to watch the Metaverse movement fade the way it did. For all its problems, the clumsy hardware, the corporate ownership, the sense that half of it was built for shareholders rather than users, it was at least attempting to build a place where you could interact and make things happen rather than just consume and be consumed by an algorithm. That kind of space is still deeply needed, on a much smaller scale than anyone was originally promising. It's part of what I'm trying to build with Texture Grid, in miniature: a space where the only available action is to actually do something, not to adjust how much of something else you're willing to tolerate. It's just going to take longer than a hardware cycle and a marketing budget. It's going to take more agency from the people actually building it, not less.