The Hall of Mirrors: On Agency, Screen Time, and Getting the Hell Out

How Big Tech ate freedom—and how to take it back.

To readers of Colligo:

I’m excited to open up the line of thought I introduce here. I’ve also got a post in the works connecting “the tyranny of metrics” with what’s wrong in the current wave of data-driven AI. Thanks for your patience—it’s coming soon. I’m also nearing a deadline on the MIT Press book, and The AI Author’s Playbook will have a new chapter up shortly as well. In the meantime, something too long dormant has awoken…

Something I’ve been thinking about lately—more and more, actually—is the hall-of-mirrors quality of so much of our cultural talk about freedom and agency. The dominant story goes like this: the modern technological, consumerist age is robbing us of our agency—our ability to think clearly, to act freely, to choose meaningful paths in life. And I don’t disagree. That may well be true. But what’s strange—almost surreal—is that this critique often unfolds on social media. We’re lobbing rhetorical bombs at Big Tech through the very platforms built to neutralize resistance. And from a commonsense perspective, it’s difficult to take the whole thing seriously. More to the point, it’s hard to see how it leads to any real change.