“Confusion in her eyes that says it all.
She’s lost control.”Joy Division, Control, 1979
On the radio a couple of days ago Amol Rajan mentioned a blog by James Kanagasooriam, suggesting that ‘agency’ could be the Next Big Idea in political discourse. It reminded me, infuriatingly, of something that I have been mulling over trying to think about maybe planning to write for ages. How could he? I have now read James’ excellent piece (and recommend you do too), and am relieved. He takes a different perspective from the one I have been mulling, so I thought it was worth articulating a few fuzzy thoughts in response.
James identifies a growing proportion of people, particularly in the UK, who see themselves as lacking agency. They feel left behind, and nurse grievances and a sense that they are being discriminated against. They vote for the Greens, Reform and (slightly surprisingly) the Lib Dems. James sees this trend as largely the result of “agency-suppressing beliefs”, including intersectionality and the sense that everybody can find some measure according to which they are under-privileged (what he calls the ‘Nietzschean Trap’ in another post). He also alludes, intriguingly, to modern forms of media consumption, including the quick-hit ‘dopamine culture’ of clickbait, dating apps and tiktoks, adding to this sense of disempowerment.
I like this analysis, which I think does a great job in explaining why the past five years or so have seen a particularly sharp drop in the number of people feeling that they are masters of their fate. But I think there are longer term trends and explanations too.
I started thinking about agency and control in the aftermath of the EU Referendum, when ‘Take Back Control’ had been such a potent and persistent slogan, taking in border security and national sovereignty, but also reflecting a deeper sense of disquiet about something lost in the previous decades. I think this disquiet is real, though it has been gingered up, stoked and even weaponised by politicians and other political players since 2016.
I think this simmering disquiet is about a perceived loss of control over our own lives and over an ever more visible world. And I think that the roots of the disquiet are entwined with technological progress and its impacts, with individualism and the decline of certain types of identity politics, and with a broader sense of political and civic impotence.
“We were brought up on the space race,
now they expect you to clean toilets.
When you’ve seen how big the world is,
how can you make do with this?”Pulp, Glory Days, 1998
Technology has dramatically increased visibility and connectivity since the 1990s: we can now see the lives of people across the world, often people who present themselves as ‘living the dream’ – fulfilled, happy, in control. We can compare ourselves and our lives with theirs in a much more granular and immediate way than we could when watching ‘stars’ on television or reading about them in papers. We may come up wanting, and wondering why we cannot acquire those lives, that seemingly effortless poise. At one level this is simple resentment – as evidenced by poisonous postings on celebrity social media accounts – but there is also a sense of disempowerment. If anyone can make it, why haven’t I?
At the same time technology has made our own lives more visible. The early 20th Century saw the disciplines of ‘scientific management’ imposed on factory workers, but technology has sharply extended the scope of soft surveillance and control – to warehouse workers, coders, consultants and lawyers. This is not just a matter of spyware and barcode scanners, but also productivity norms, compliance checks, performance reporting, real-time analytics and timesheets. In the 20th and 21st centuries, technology enables us to see the world, but also to be seen.
In overcoming spatial distance, technology has fostered social distance and alienation. We are all familiar with the magical ease of ordering goods and services online, the low-friction transactions that have transformed our day-to-day lives and lightened the burden of ‘life admin’. But we are also familiar with the struggle through defensive thickets of chatbots, FAQs, online forms and ‘noreply’ email addresses that make it almost impossible to resolve queries or seek support outside of a very narrow defined set of algorithms.
This may be trivial if tooth-grindingly frustrating for consumers, but this mode of tech-enabled disengagement also affects public services, as anyone who has tried to seek support from HMRC, to book parking permits or to request repairs from a social landlord recently will testify. (As a side note, it was incredibly pleasing, when dealing with the Irish state recently, to receive letters from named individuals, with email addresses and phone numbers to follow up if needed).
Technological advances have also amplified the emptier promises of individualism. As workers, more and more of us are autonomous agents, freed from the norms (and security) of jobs for life. We can work freelance, in the gig economy, on short-term contracts. But while such arrangements may feel empowering for comfortable middle-class people (yes, people like me), it doesn’t look like that for everyone.
It is true that an industrial worker in the mid-20th Century had limited personal autonomy, but the structures of union, party and class solidarity offered other ways to exert control over working and living conditions, at least in theory. There may not have been that much power in a union, but there was arguably more than an individual gig economy worker can deploy today.
“What happens to the rat that finally stops running the maze?
The doctors think he’s dumb, when he’s just disappointed.”American Music Club, Hollywood 4-5-92, 1993
The collapse of traditional class and party identities has sharpened and been sharpened by a sense of the impotence of mainstream politics (as indicated by very low voting turnout by some groups). Some problems – climate change, ageing populations, health and care spending running ahead of tax revenues – seem simply intractable, at least by single states. Others – sovereign industrial capacity, control over borders, building homes and infrastructure – seem to get stuck in the messy undergrowth of the ‘rules-based international order’, and the plethora of (self-imposed) constraints, protections and prohibitions it contains. When Leviathan has lost it, what hope is there for the rest of us?
Writing the paragraphs above, I am conscious that this may read as nostalgia for a more corporatist or communitarian past, or even as Reform- or MAGA-coded. That’s not my intention; I’m seeking to articulate not to advocate. Personally, in the terms used by James Kanagasooriam, I am broadly OAT (“optimistic, agentic and trusting”); on balance this world works OK for me.
But I can understand that it does not seem like that for everyone, and can see why this can make simple atavistic solutions appealing. So I think we do need to acknowledge that people feel disempowered and to talk about why that is, and what can be done to restore a sense of agency. We probably do need less time on mobile phones, strengthened local institutions, and a public discourse that focuses on possibility rather than disempowerment. But we may also need to think more fundamentally about what can be done to address the causes as well as the manifestations of this disquiet.
Richard Brown 