Introducing Agency Matters

Today I'm excited to share a new publication I've been working on: Agency Matters.

Agency Matters was born out of my growing interest in the cultural aspects of software. Thus far, my personal blog has been the main outlet for my public writing, yet it didn't feel like the right place for the kind of publication I was looking to create. Unlike this blog, where I usually publish and move on, Agency Matters takes the form of a digital garden: a living knowledge base that grows and evolves.

What is user agency?

User agency, in the context of software, is the user's ability to make meaningful choices to control their experience in a digital environment.

The notion of user agency falls under the umbrella of human agency, about which much ink has been spilled as far back as antiquity. So while the concept of human agency is not new, the means by which we exercise it in a world mediated by software are.

The term user agent originally comes from browsers, that act as agents on behalf of a user to retrieve content and interact with sites on the internet. Browsers, which use HTTP to fetch content, typically send a User-Agent header string with every request. The string identifies the browser, its version, and the operating system. Websites typically use this information to adapt the response, e.g. display a lighter mobile version, and most commonly for tracking and analytics.

Since much of the software we use is now collaborative and networked, how we think about user agency is all the more salient.

Privacy

One core tenet of user agency is privacy. To quote Eric Hughes in his famous 1993 Cypherpunk Manifesto essay: "Privacy is the power to selectively reveal oneself to the world". Making meaningful choices about selectively revealing oneself were much more trivial in the pre-internet days. But those days are long over, and in an ironic twist, privacy has been undermined by the very existence of the user-agent header, as it lends itself to user tracking.

The GDPR regulation enacted by the EU in 2018 had noble goals such as protecting EU citizens' privacy rights in the digital age, yet in reality did little to in fact achieve that. We wanted privacy and instead got cookie banners. I invoke this example to emphasise that user choices need to be meaningful. Cookie banners present users with a false sense of control. Firstly, because consent fatigue and pernicious UI patterns manipulate users into consenting. Secondly, cookie banners address only one tracking method while many others remain. True privacy requires broader technical solutions (browser protections, VPNs, tracker blockers) or systemic changes to the surveillance economy itself. So in reality, GDPR's cookie consent mechanism becomes compliance theater rather than meaningful privacy protection.

The Four Essential Freedoms

The free software movement has defined free software in terms of four essential freedoms:

  • The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).
  • The freedom to study how the program works, and change it to make it do what you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
  • The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others (freedom 2).
  • The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3).

While I'm not a purist when it comes to free software, I think these freedoms get at the heart of the question of user control of software.

One area I want to use Agency Matters for is self-hosting software and running a homelab server. This, I find, is an empowering way to regain agency while learning important skills such as Linux and networking.

How it's built

Agency Matters is powered by Quartz, a static site generator that transforms Markdown into a fully functional digital garden. Unlike traditional static site generators, Quartz optimizes for messy creativity rather than linear or hierarchical thought, which fits my style of research and learning. So I hope it will also encourage me to publish more of my thoughts, learnings, and insights.

Check it out at agencymatters.xyz