CONCEPT
Access vs. Agency
Allen's analytical distinction between the capacity to use what others have built (access) and the capacity to participate in the decisions that determine the conditions of use (agency)—the distinction between the consumer and the citizen.
Access is the ability to use what someone else has built, under conditions that someone else has set, for as long as someone else permits. Agency is the capacity to participate in the decisions that determine the conditions of your participation. The distinction is not rhetorical but structural. Access without agency is the condition of the consumer, not the citizen. It is the condition of the feudal peasant who is permitted to farm the lord's land under the lord's terms—formally free, substantively dependent. For AI, the distinction exposes a gap between the democratization narrative and the democratization reality: billions of people now have access to AI tools built by organizations whose decisions they cannot influence, in languages they did not choose, under terms of service they had no role in drafting.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The distinction runs through the history of democratic theory from classical republicanism to contemporary capability theory. The republican