Agency Without Control

                                    Rethinking the Self in an Age of Distributed Intelligence

Most people I speak with today share a quiet, recurring discomfort. It appears when they work with artificial intelligence, when they collaborate inside fast-moving teams, when they try to make sense of ecological crises that refuse simple solutions. The feeling is not panic. It is not fear. It is something subtler: the sense that one ought to be in control—and isn’t.

We reach for familiar strategies. We try to improve our prompts, sharpen our skills, optimize our workflows. We assume that with enough mastery, the system will once again behave. And when it doesn’t, the failure feels personal, as if we are falling short of a role we are supposed to play.

But what if the discomfort isn’t a skill issue at all?

What if it is a metaphoric mismatch?

Modern life trained us to experience ourselves as autonomous individuals acting upon a world of tools, resources, and problems. We learned to locate agency inside the self and to treat the surrounding environment as something to be managed, controlled, or overcome. For a long time, this image worked. It aligned with relatively stable institutions, slow feedback loops, and technologies that extended human effort without fundamentally reshaping human cognition.

Today, that alignment is breaking down.

Artificial intelligence does not behave like a tool in the traditional sense. Ecological systems do not respond to command and control. Collective intelligence does not move in straight lines. Yet we continue to approach these domains as if the self remains a sovereign actor standing outside the system, issuing instructions from a position of oversight.

The resulting friction is often interpreted as anxiety about technology or uncertainty about the future. I think it runs deeper than that. I think it arises because the metaphoric structure through which we experience agency—who we believe ourselves to be in relation to the world—no longer fits the environments we inhabit.

Before we ask how to use AI well, or how to coordinate action in complex systems, we may need to ask a more fundamental question: what kind of self do these environments require?

That question does not point toward better techniques or stronger willpower. It points toward a quieter, more unsettling shift: a change in how we imagine the concept of the self.

The modern conception of the self did not arise by accident. It emerged alongside a particular world—one shaped by industrial production, scientific rationalism, bureaucratic institutions, and technologies that amplified human effort without dissolving human boundaries. In that world, the individual made sense as a discrete unit of agency: a thinking subject who possessed skills, made decisions, and acted upon an external environment.

This self was imagined as bounded. Cognition happened inside the head. Responsibility resided inside the person. Tools were inert extensions, subordinate to human intention. The world, though complex, was assumed to be ultimately legible and governable through analysis, planning, and control.

Within those conditions, autonomy was not an illusion—it was an achievement.

The modern self learned to specialize, to master domains, to optimize performance. It learned to separate means from ends, facts from values, subject from object. It cultivated a posture of distance: stepping back from the world in order to understand it and understanding it in order to act effectively upon it.

This posture worked remarkably well. It powered scientific discovery, technological innovation, and unprecedented material abundance. It supported stable careers, professional identities, and coherent life narratives. Cause and effect were slow enough to track. Systems were bounded enough to manage. Expertise could accumulate without immediately destabilizing the environment that produced it.

Crucially, the modern self did not experience itself as lonely or alienated by default. On the contrary, it experienced competence. To act autonomously was to be effective. To be effective was to matter.

The problem, then, is not that the modern self was misguided. The problem is that it was ecologically tuned to a world that no longer exists.

As feedback loops accelerated, as cognition began to spill into networks and machines, as agency became distributed across systems no single actor could fully oversee, the assumptions that once grounded autonomy quietly eroded. Yet the image of the traditional self remained intact. We continued to expect command where only coordination was possible. We continued to seek control where responsiveness was required.

What once felt like strength began to feel like strain.

The modern self, trained to stand apart and act upon the world, increasingly finds itself embedded within processes it cannot step outside of—systems that respond, adapt, and evolve faster than individual intention can track. And because the self has not yet been reimagined, this mismatch is often experienced as personal inadequacy rather than ontological lag.

We try harder. We optimize further. We double down on mastery. But the ground beneath the metaphor has already shifted.

As the limits of the modern self become harder to ignore, a new metaphor has begun to circulate—especially in creative, intellectual, and AI-mediated work. It is the metaphor of the conductor.

In this image, the individual is no longer the sole producer of outcomes. The conductor does not generate sound. The musicians do. The intelligence of the system lies not in execution but in coordination—in timing, pacing, emphasis, and attunement to the whole. Authority becomes lighter. Mastery becomes relational rather than possessive.

It is an appealing metaphor, and for good reason.

The conductor loosens the grip of heroic individualism without abandoning agency altogether. It acknowledges distributed contribution while preserving coherence and meaning. It reassures us that there is still a role for human judgment, taste, and responsibility—even as the complexity of the system increases.

In many contexts, this metaphor is a genuine improvement. It reflects how people increasingly experience creative collaboration, including work with AI: less as issuing commands to a tool, more as shaping conditions under which something coherent can emerge. The conductor listens as much as they lead. They respond as much as they direct.

And yet, for all its sophistication, the conductor metaphor quietly preserves a familiar architecture.

The conductor still stands outside the orchestra.
They retain a privileged vantage point.
They oversee a bounded system governed by a score, a tempo, and a shared frame of reference.

Coherence, in this image, is still something that can be imposed from above—if not forcefully, then skillfully.

This is where the metaphor begins to strain.

The environments we now inhabit—ecological, technological, cognitive—do not resemble orchestras. There is no fixed score. No stable tempo. No clear boundary between performers and instruments. Feedback loops are fast, recursive, and often opaque. Agency is distributed not only across people, but across machines, infrastructures, and environments that respond in ways no single participant fully controls or understands.

In such conditions, there is no place to stand outside the system.

This is the point at which a deeper shift becomes necessary—not just in how we coordinate action, but in how we conceive of the self itself.

The ecological or 4E conception of self—embodied, embedded, enactive, extended—offers a different starting point. Rather than imagining the self as an autonomous agent or even as a coordinating authority, it understands the self as a participant in ongoing processes of sense-making that unfold across bodies, tools, environments, and social fields.

From this perspective, cognition does not reside solely in the head. It arises through interaction. Agency is not something the self possesses and deploys; it is something that emerges through engagement with a landscape of affordances. Action is not primarily about issuing decisions, but about responding skillfully to changing conditions.

The self, in this frame, is less a conductor and more a node—a site of sensitivity within a distributed network. What distinguishes one node from another is not authority or control, but attunement: the capacity to register shifts in the field and to adjust in ways that allow coherence to propagate.

This is a more difficult metaphor for modern minds to inhabit. It offers no overview, no command position, no guarantee of narrative centrality. And yet it more accurately reflects how intelligence already operates in complex systems—biological, ecological, and increasingly technological.

Seen this way, the task is no longer to coordinate the system from above, but to learn how to participate well within it. Not to impose order, but to sense emerging patterns. Not to control outcomes, but to move in phase with forces that exceed any single point of view.

What feels like a loss of agency from the standpoint of the modern self begins to look like a different kind of agency altogether—one grounded not in mastery, but in relationship.

If the ecological self is not a conductor, a natural question follows: how does coordination happen at all? If no one stands outside the system, if agency is distributed and situational, what accounts for moments of alignment, direction, or shared movement?

One way to answer this is through the notion of affordance attractors.

An affordance attractor is not a rule, a command, or a plan. It is a pattern in the landscape of possibilities that makes certain actions more likely, more stable, or more resonant than others. Rather than telling agents what to do, it reshapes what can be done with relative ease. It tilts the field.

Affordance attractors operate quietly. They do not announce themselves. They are sensed rather than interpreted. When people find themselves moving together without having agreed on a strategy, when conversations suddenly flow, when collaboration “clicks,” it is often because participants have entered the same affordance basin. Action becomes coordinated not through control, but through shared responsiveness to the same gradient.

From this perspective, coherence does not need to be imposed. It emerges when multiple nodes become sensitive to the same attractor and adjust accordingly. No one leads. No one follows. Movement happens because the terrain itself has changed.

This helps explain why the ecological self does not experience agency as choice alone. Agency feels more like navigation: the ability to register subtle shifts in the environment and to move in ways that remain viable as conditions evolve. Skill lies not in prediction, but in attunement. Intelligence lies not in command, but in timing.

Seen this way, the growing discomfort many people feel in complex systems takes on a different meaning. It is not evidence of inadequacy or loss of control. It is a signal that an older metaphor of selfhood is being stretched beyond its ecological fit.

The conductor metaphor marks an important transition away from heroic individualism. But it still imagines coherence as something overseen. The ecological self lets go of oversight altogether. It accepts that there is no external vantage point from which the whole can be grasped. What remains is participation—partial, situated, responsive.

Living as a node in a distributed network does not mean disappearing into the system. It means understanding influence as relational rather than sovereign, and responsibility as attentiveness rather than command. It means acting in ways that deepen coherence where possible and reduce harm where alignment fails.

This is not a call to abandon agency, but to reimagine it. Not as control over outcomes, but as the capacity to sense affordances and move with them skillfully.

In a world shaped by accelerating feedback loops, ecological instability, and increasingly non-human forms of intelligence, this shift is no longer optional. The question is not whether the modern self will be replaced, but whether we can learn—gradually, imperfectly—to inhabit a different one.

Not the conductor of the orchestra.

But a participant in the music.