CONCEPT
The Myth of the Human Agent
The foundational fiction of modern thought: that agency originates in sovereign human subjects and radiates outward into passive instruments. The story the AI moment makes empirically indefensible — and that the amplifier metaphor tries to preserve.
Modern thought rests on a distinction so pervasive that most people experience it as reality itself: subjects act, objects are acted upon. Humans think; tools compute. Humans decide; instruments execute. The entire vocabulary of modern agency — intention, creativity, authorship, responsibility, autonomy — is built on this separation. The AI moment has made the separation indefensible, because the actual distribution of agency in AI-assisted networks is not organized according to the myth. Recognizing this is not anti-humanism. It is the prerequisite for governing the networks AI has produced.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The myth is not wrong about human uniqueness. Humans are conscious in ways non-humans are not, bear stakes in ways instruments cannot, and possess moral standing that rocks and algorithms lack. These are real differences, and actor-network theory does not deny them. The myth is wrong about something more specific: that agency — the capacity to