Agency Alert

How much agency do you have with your government, bank, or internet provider?

The Word for this Sunday: AGENCY

A noun that means organization, institution or business

The government agency denied my request for a passport.

Strong synonyms: action activity auspices channel efficiency influence intercession

If you want to use it as a verb, you need a helper verb, to have:

I have no agency in our health care system.

Everyone living in a western democracy takes ‘having agency’ for granted. We believe in our Constitutional Rights, the Magna Carta and the Fifth Amendment and five hundred years of democratic institution building. We vote, we argue, we can move the needle, if only slightly. I certainly did, until the pandemic hit and revealed how easy it is for a government to cancel whatever agency we might have had. All they needed was a fear-based rationale, and voila, your agency to determine what goes into your body, how you live and work is over. Done. The fact that they were lying about the danger of Covid-19 is immaterial; it suited their purposes. It worked except for a sizeable minority that refused to go along with this lie. Remember the Canadian Truckers? The Canadian government invoked a national state of emergency because they were so dangerous (!), cancelled the leaders’ bank accounts and eventually, took them to court. Today, they’re still harassing and keeping them under house arrest after years in detention. So much for having real life agency in a modern Democracy. When Covid push came to political shove, citizens discovered they had very little agency indeed. I’m not sure if we have recovered from that shock because of certain things that are happening worldwide and especially here in knucklehead Canada.

Earlier this year I came across someone I have admired, a controversial British investigative Journalist, Carole Cadwalladr. She was among the first of the journalists confronting something new: digital surveillance and data use without permission, also known as a data breach. We’re used to it now but back then, in March of 2018, now known as ‘the before time’, all this was new and shocking. At that time, we still believed we had some kind of power, some influence and agency over the big tech platforms. Now we know that we don’t; we all meekly submit to rent paying for Microsoft Word and putting up with Google algorithms downgrading content they don’t approve of. But back in 2018, we didn’t know that our political and personal agency was getting compromised via digital technology. People still trusted big tech agencies like Facebook and willingly handed over all sorts of information that was then mined, used, and sold.

It was CC who broke the Cambridge Analytica story at the Guardian, creating a firestorm of shock, outrage and controversy. This story was about Facebook’s digital harvesting of personal data during the 2016 US election and Brexit and how this data was used to micro target voters and to manipulate them with messages based on intimate knowledge of habits, beliefs and association. It was a huge scandal, and one of the strong supporters of Brexit, one Aaron Banks, sued her for asserting that he was getting funds from Russia. CC says she felt like she was ‘on trial for my life’. Without her loyal readers who paid her legal bills, she would have had no agency whatsoever. The CA story is now largely forgotten, but it was regarded as a clear win for journalism in the public interest. But Cadwalladr isn’t finished. She is back, warning us yet again that we’re still living through a digital coup engineered by ‘the Broligarchy’. ‘We are already living in the architecture of totalitarianism’, she warns and calls out the tech bros—Musk, Zuckerberg, Altman—as careless men stealing her words via AI without permission. The LLMMs are in fact feeding off every word ever written by actual people, and no tech bro ever asked for permission. Copyright be damned.

You may not agree with CC equating Trump, Putin and Stalin, but she is a voice that is timely and urgent. Unfortunately, her story and her warning about the tightening of the ‘digital noose’ is not being heeded among ordinary folk. We might have learned not to trust the big tech companies and not sign up for ‘free tests’ that deliver the data the company craves, but in truth, we have even less agency with our government. That’s where the fight over digital agency is grinding on, and it’s bitter. Yes, you can vote every four years, big deal. That’s just pathetic. Perhaps we should rethink representative democracy and have a second look at the Swiss Model. It’s close to being a Direct Democracy, where nothing ever happens unless the citizens vote on it directly. In a digital environment, that would actually work and may in fact be less prone to endemic corruption.

The irony of the situation is that because of the CA scandal and other abuses by the tech giants, governments have now decided they need to be policed with all kinds of laws that forbid ‘hate speech’ and other ill defined content. Western governments have already passed a host of terrible bills like the Online Hate Act, that allows governments to lock you up for saying or thinking something ‘bad’. In Germany they arrest you for critical comments on MPs. So much for learning from the Nazis. Here in Canada, they’re working on passing equally vague and terrifying laws. And this process is most advanced in Britain, the cradle of western democracy, no less. We have very little agency here short of occupying Legislatures and rioting in the streets. Which is so un-Canadian. If government simply takes over and interferes with how you interact online, remember CC’s brave stand against the agencies that may not have our best interests at heart.

I wonder why nobody has ever asked us, the end users, the normies and ordinary hard working citizens for an opinion on how we want to be treated online. Did you ever get a phone call, a questionnaire, any sign that the elites who run these ‘agencies’ give a hoot about our opinions, wishes and demands? Governments and tech moguls have all the agency they need to become what CC says we already are: a digital surveillance autocracy. I think that’s overstating it, but given the enormous power of these elites, I fear for us and what comes next. A recent update on the CA scandal using carefully modulated, non-partisan language can be found here.

So that’s a short glimpse of how long and pervasive this battle over agency on the Internet is and how it’s continuing. But it’s not just at that level that we don’t seem to have much agency. It’s popping up for me personally in almost all my interactions with any kind of official body, be that the taxman, the health care system, the bank or even my car insurance. Call it anecdotal but I bet there are hundreds of people who have similar experiences.

For example: getting my Synthroid prescription filled is now impossible because the woman on the phone to the Clinic speaks very bad heavily accented English and wants to know if Synthroid is a protected drug. When I start to giggle at this question, she gets all huffy and doesn’t hear me when I tell her that I’m not laughing at her but at the ridiculous situation in BC where they freely hand out restricted drugs to addicts but ask me if my Synthroid tablets, an old well established medicine for thyroid dysfunction, might be in the same category as heroin. I am not comfortable with this, she informs me. Since she’s more concerned about her state of mind than in doing her actual job, I give in. OMG, you’re so woke, I say, goodbye dear.

Maybe I’ll find another clinic? I have to somehow find a doctor somewhere to give me a Driver’s Medical Exam because I am so old and might be gaga. They have to check up on me and others of my advanced age. That’s fine except the system has seized up, as the agency rep that administers BC drivers’ licences confessed over the phone. The backlog is over a year before they actually get to my ‘case’. So in spite of government overreach, it doesn’t work because they’re basically incompetent. The Government Agency isn’t working, thank God. I watch with grim satisfaction as Carney is constantly exhorting old drivers to do this and that but nothing, absolutely nothing, gets done where we actually live. Even he doesn’t have always have agency. It’s called ‘drag in the system’, bedevilling all official agency attempts to subjugate us and is perhaps our best hope of surviving this apocalyptic moment.

But Carney has other ways to make us do his bidding. He has just informed the poor plebs that they’re not doing their tax returns any longer; the government itself is doing them, and to hell with obvious conflict of interest concerns. You, poor low income citizen of Canada, have no agency in the matter. Since they stopped access to my CRA account as soon as I filed my last tax return, it’s now painfully clear that this has been carefully planned and is being executed. They are literally beheading my personal agency. Chop chop.

In a similar vein, if they decide to digitize the currency tomorrow, I have no agency to stop them. I’m not sure anyone has. The trend is clear and if you do not do as your bank tells you, like doing all your banking on their favoured phone app, they will hobble you at every turn. They can and do just cancel your account if they decide you’re too much trouble. As a pensioner, I’m utterly dependent on my government pension that they can give me/or not, in any form they choose. Since I trust this government as far as I can throw a car, let’s say, I’m left with a gut level unease that has become permanent. Surely that is bad for my health, I will die sooner and …oh I forgot: the government of Canada wants us oldies who cost too much money to die sooner rather than later. Hence, MAID. The maid of death is very popular, well-funded, and has replaced actual health care in certain cases. No, this is not an exaggeration.

I am now more paranoid and anxious than at any other time in my life, including that period when I had to turn Canadian in a hurry. Yes, in those days before multiculturalism lifted its head, immigrants did that. The only agency I had as a thirteen year old immigrant was to learn English. I did and actually never stopped. It became an obsession called writing for a living.

What about the legal system? Don’t we have some agency there, at least. In a word, not any more. Canada’s legal system is so weak that everyone, from the Drug Cartels to pregnant ladies from India or wherever, are taking advantage. They’re abusing the system and taking agency away from law abiding Canadians. The Cartels are laundering money and drugs, and the foreign pregnant ladies are giving birth in our overstressed hospitals so that their babies automatically get Canadian citizenship, no matter the status of the parents. They have agency and they’re using it.

If Canadians had any, we would put our legal system in order. Which would include firing the nine Supreme Court judges, including the Chief Justice Richard Wagner, the latter for egregious far-left bias and systematic weakening of the legal protections that Canadians still take for granted. Why? Because legal preference for ‘protected groups’, i.e. anyone who can prove Aboriginal descent, or anything else that makes them somehow worthy of special treatment under the law, is now entrenched in our legal system. It’s a two tiered system of justice and that spells the death of Democracy. Especially here in Canada, where we are currently busy giving huge chunks of territory back to the Aboriginal inhabitants and if that interferes with private property rights, oh, that’s too bad. We’re all bad ‘settlers’ now, and therefore have no agency says the Government Agency.

I hate being so gloomy all the time. It’s not my natural inclination at all; I tend towards a jolly optimism that is now slowly sinking into the mud of age and apathy. I must muster more of my old self, the one that had agency in her personal life. So, I am actively searching for something to be optimistic about. It’s a matter of mental health. My Amygdila must not rule my roost, and I must remember that old CBT maxim that the only real agency I have is over how I choose to feel about life, Canada, the whole thing. So, keeping the in mind, next week’s Word will be Optimism. Or Joy. I’m feeling good about it already.