The territory doesn’t exist until you’ve built it
Hacking up some Dan Davies:
You’re building systems which collate and structure massive archives of personal data
Since the technological and architectural factors are to do with your information set itself, it’s much more difficult to get information about them. It’s much more difficult to analyse alternatives because it’s not just a matter of looking at a map and deciding how much you’re prepared to spend to go around a lake rather than building a bridge. The territory itself doesn’t exist until you’ve built it.
a consequence of this is that as systems get more complicated, and more of their energy and resources are taken up in matters of organisation and information, rather than physics, then agency is likely to become less important, as more and more decisions are constrained by factors which are hard to even recognise as constraints, because the capacity doesn’t exist to represent altenatives.
I think the trick here isn’t that there’s no agency, it’s that if you can see how agency is enabled or constrained then you can decide where else to intervene to increase your agency here.