Conjure Utopia

What is political agency? Agency is the faith that your actions will have an impact on the world. Ideally, the impact you want to have. This is something we acquire pretty early in our development. You throw a pillow towards the pile of toys, and the pile collapses. We lose it over time, bombarded by distractions, expectations, demands, or constraints. Everything is provided to us under the condition that we stay on the tracks. In the past, these limits of what we could do were explicit: go to school, go to work, marry, make babies, raise them, die. Now these diktats are less explicit, but equally disempowering: be an individual, be unique, innovate, think for yourself, grow, thrive, consume social media, prosume data, develop niche tastes, experience experiences. Like a fever dream, we act, but with no consequence. The world keeps crumbling, and our sleep paralysis demon wears a formal suit.

Political agency is the same thing, but the world you want to shape suddenly includes people with opposing motives.

The reconquest of agency, individual and collective, is the new political imperative. The foundation without which no battle can be fought. You do a thing, the world changes. Ask a baby. They are experts. They know. Or ask a tech oligarch. They know they can shape the world. They also happen to have the same impulses and sense of responsibility as a baby. Maybe the two things are connected, who knows?

Here, I want to offer some different paths to reconquer your agency, without the need to regress to a 5-year-old. I mean, do it in bed if you like. No kink shaming.

The first, but hardest path, is what I call magical agency. No, you won't be throwing fireballs. Not at the beginning, at least. Magical agency is about planting a little seed at the deep core of your being. A seed that says: “You already won. You're already saved. You already played the best move.” If exposed to the scorching sun of reality as it is, the seed doesn't sprout. Why? Because the evidence is that you haven't won yet. The evidence of external truth kills the faith of the inner truth. To sprout the seed, you need action.

Action is the water that feeds the seed, so that your inner truth can align with your environment. The seed creates a fundamental tension between the world as you want it and the world as it is. Now you're fucked. You have to protect the seed. You have to live with the tension, go out in the world, and reshape it to ease the tension. You will die way before the seed will have turned into a towering tree. If you're lucky, on your deathbed, you will rest in the shade of a couple of microscopic leaves; a privilege reserved for a few nowadays.

Within magical agency, victory comes before action. You approach the world knowing you're already saved, and if trained with enough critical tools, strategic thinking, and surrounded by equally critical peers, you can develop a plan of action with peace of mind. At night, you will rest knowing that with the information available to you, in the conditions offered to you, in the position you were, you picked what looked like the best decision. Ego, fears, insecurity, and self-doubt won't be in your way, because you're already saved. Within magical agency, victory is a premise, not an outcome. The game is maximizing your chances to create, for the world you want, the conditions to flourish. If you're true to your proposition, honest to yourself and to your peers, what happens next is just mere execution.

The second path to agency is experiential agency. Experiential agency is a form of agency absorbed from your environment. The people around you have agency, believe in their own agency, and they put you on a path to rediscover your own agency. Agency cannot be explained. It must be experienced, and so you might not notice. You will wake up one day, look back and think: “Motherfuckers, they know all along. They did it on purpose.” In political organizations, this often takes the form of small tasks to give to unripe newcomers. These are activities designed to set baby agents up for success. They experience agency directly, first in a safe, restricted setting and progressively in more challenging situations, until they are safe on their feet.

Experiential agency is a feedback loop: victory follows action and action follows victory. Agency is accumulated on the way, getting stronger by the day. You observe the world, you take action, you observe your impact. If you win, you celebrate and come back the next day, aiming higher. If you lose, you take a step back, you change your assumptions, your strategy, your tools, and even yourself, and you try again, until you win. Experiential agency is delicate because if you lose too much too early, the game is over: you're burned out, traumatized, rejected, depressed, and you give up. Some political spaces are completely oblivious to this dynamic, thinking that “losing better” is an appealing, empowering message. Fuck you and fuck twenty generations of your descendants. These spaces tend to attract people who find validation in defeat, revelers of victimhood, serial losers, who traumatize those who still have normal reactions to defeat. It's pointless to promise big wins from the beginning, but it's manipulative, delusional, and repulsive to give a higher meaning to every defeat, especially those scored without trying your best. Persistence is a virtue only if you have a good strategy. Otherwise, you're no better than Arachnids in Starship Troopers, fighting a galactic fascist empire by amassing themselves in front of machine guns for the Terrans to mow them down effortlessly.

Experiential agency must be an act of collective care. It doesn't happen spontaneously. Not in our days, at least. When is the last time you developed agency for somebody you love? When is the last time somebody did it with you?

I'm personally more of a magical agency kind of guy, at least in politics and in my social life. Most of you might be wondering where the seed comes from and how you plant it. What is the seed in the end? Well, I can only answer for myself, and the answer is: drugs. I've been at the end of a very long acid trip in which I was dubious whether I was actually doing fine or convincing myself I was doing fine. I asked the Mother Goddess Transcendental Luminous Being at the end of Time and Space, and she said: “All good, bro, chill 👍”. Who am I to question such a majestic being?

I have no single way to develop magical agency. Some religions might help, but if you are an edgy atheist, this might be harder. Nonetheless, after reading this article, when you find your little seed, you will have a way to recognize it and give it a name.

I've also gone through experiential agency in other fields than politics, though. One episode that I can clearly identify in such a way is the first time I tried to preserve garlic with honey. While both ingredients have strong anti-bacterial properties, they also carry spores of Clostridium botulinum, which, if developed in the right environment, can produce botulinum toxins. In very small and diluted amounts, they are great to give you plump lips. In higher dosages, they kill you quite quickly.

Now, garlic preserved in honey is very tasty: the garlic softens over time, loses the stronger flavor compounds, and starts slowly turning into a sort of candy. I recommend it crushed, mixed with butter and salt flakes, to offer as a spreadable appetizer. It's relatively easy to ferment: if there's no contamination, no pools of water on top of the honey or other weird stuff, you can be sure it's safe. But if it's not safe, you die. Ah, I forgot: botulism toxins are odorless, flavorless, and invisible. You might have visual clues from other forms of contamination that correlate with the toxins, but the botulism bacteria, per se, cannot be spotted.

Back to the agency part: most of us, due to the takeover of the industrial mode of food production, have lost agency over the preservation of our food, together with the most obvious problems with the loss of agency over the production and processing (i.e. you can't cook an egg). Everything is provided to us under the condition that we don't leave it out of the fridge for too long. If we do that, we are promised we are not going to get food poisoning. I mean, sometimes you die anyway because somebody cut costs in some factory. 🤷 Not much agency there.

While it's more common to start from ferments that, in the worst case, give you bad food poisoning for a few days, my partner was already moving at a different pace and pulled me into this experiment. At some point, I had to try it and trust that I did everything right. Yes, there's a minuscule chance of dying, I'm aware of the risk, and yet I trust that tomorrow I'm going to be alive.

Well, I'm still alive, less afraid of unnoticed food contamination, and with a stronger trust in good, rigorous sanitation practices. My partner also went on to start a professional career as a fermenter while I'm writing a blog post about it. Draw the conclusions you prefer. I'm a writer, not a cop, and it's time for you to stop reading and grow some agency.