When the World Depended on Human Agencies

Rahul Ramya

01.11.2025

1. The Earlier Phase When the World Depended on Human Agencies

Before the rise of digital technologies, the world functioned through the visible hand of human agency. Human labour, judgment, and moral responsibility were the central forces that animated all economic, political, and social activities. Every significant act — from farming and trade to governance and art — required not only skill but also a deliberate human choice rooted in experience, reflection, and community understanding. The world was not efficient by mechanical standards, but it was deeply human by existential ones.

In pre-industrial societies, the human body and mind were the primary instruments of production. A weaver’s rhythm, a potter’s hand, or a clerk’s arithmetic were irreplaceable acts of cognition and craft. Even when machines began to enter workshops during the early Industrial Revolution, they were seen as extensions of human will, not replacements of it. Karl Polanyi, in The Great Transformation (1944), warned that the danger lay in turning human life itself into a machine component — a prophecy that feels strikingly fulfilled in our digital age. In his time, however, society still retained moral limits that resisted such total commodification: religion, community, and social obligation often checked the market’s intrusion into human dignity.

The world of human agency was therefore one where decisions were slower but richer in meaning. A bureaucrat in colonial India or a village headman in an Indian panchayat could not rely on predictive data or algorithmic dashboards; their decisions were shaped by oral testimonies, local ethics, and a sense of fairness grounded in lived human experience. There was no illusion of perfect rationality — instead, the world accepted human fallibility as an essential condition of justice. As Hannah Arendt would later argue, action was the highest expression of freedom precisely because it was unpredictable and bound by conscience. A society animated by human agency was, therefore, a society capable of forgiveness, responsibility, and moral imagination — qualities no machine could replicate.

Even in the industrial 20th century, when automation began to dominate production, the sphere of judgment — governance, education, medicine, law — remained firmly human. Doctors diagnosed by observation and empathy; teachers taught through dialogue; judges weighed context and intent rather than data points. Amartya Sen’s capability approach later captured this spirit: human flourishing depended not only on the availability of goods but on the freedom to act, choose, and imagine. The earlier world, for all its inequalities and inefficiencies, recognized this human-centeredness as essential to civilization.

This human agency was also deeply collective. The village cooperative in India, the town guild in Europe, and the trade union in early capitalist societies all reflected a shared understanding — that work and decision-making were social acts, not algorithmic outputs. Collective intelligence emerged through conversation, debate, and participation — what Arendt called the public realm, where human beings appeared before one another not as data, but as moral and political equals. In this realm, to act meant to begin something new, and the unpredictability of such beginnings was the essence of human freedom.

But this older order contained the seeds of its own vulnerability. As economies expanded, the demand for efficiency, predictability, and scale began to overshadow the moral value of participation. Frederick Taylor’s scientific management in the early 20th century was an early attempt to dissect human agency into measurable fragments. What was once an act of skill became a procedure; what was once judgment became compliance. Yet, even then, the human remained the last frontier — machines could automate movement, but not meaning.

In India, the planning era of the 1950s and 60s still placed faith in human judgment. The Indian Administrative Service, cooperative movements, and the Five-Year Plans relied on educated human minds interpreting data and crafting welfare policy through normative reasoning. The idea of “public service” still carried moral weight. But as markets globalized and digital capitalism rose, these human mediations were increasingly seen as obstacles — delays in an otherwise frictionless world of data.

The transition from that world of deliberate, reflective human agency to the current world of automated, self-optimizing systems marks not merely a technological shift, but a civilizational rupture. When the hand of the human guided the machine, humanity remained the subject and the machine the object. Now, as we move toward automated systems that decide, predict, and manipulate on their own, the roles seem dangerously reversed.

The earlier phase, therefore, is not just history; it is a mirror. It shows us what we have lost — the moral density of decision-making, the ethical hesitation before action, and the irreplaceable dignity of human fallibility. It reminds us that the world once turned through the unpredictable agency of people — not through the smooth calculations of code.

Excellent — let us now move to Point 2: How Digital Technologies and AI Started the Abduction of Human Agencies by Machines — Views of Shoshana Zuboff.

2. How Digital Technologies and AI Started the Abduction of Human Agencies by Machines

(Shoshana Zuboff’s Framework)

The transition from the age of human agency to the age of digital domination did not occur abruptly. It emerged stealthily — not as a revolution, but as what Shoshana Zuboff calls a “coup from above”. In her seminal work The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019), she argues that digital technologies began to seize human experience itself as raw material for translation into behavioral data. What earlier generations called “using technology” has inverted into technology using us. This marked the beginning of the abduction — not of human labour as in industrial capitalism, but of human agency itself.

In classical capitalism, workers produced goods through their labour; in surveillance capitalism, human beings produce data through their existence. Each click, movement, and hesitation is harvested, processed, and monetized. Zuboff terms this process the expropriation of behavioral surplus — the extraction of more data than necessary to provide a service. When you search on Google, your query is not just answered; it is mined for predictive insights about your future behavior. The same applies to social media, health apps, online education, and even digital governance platforms. In this new economy, you are not the customer; you are the source material.

The Shift from Instrumental Use to Instrumentarian Power

Zuboff distinguishes between two eras of technological control. The first, the industrial, was instrumental: machines were tools to enhance productivity. The second, the digital, is instrumentarian: machines now shape, direct, and tune human behavior itself. Through ubiquitous sensors, algorithmic personalization, and machine learning, corporations have learned to create not only products but predictions — and, eventually, behavioral certainties.

This transition transformed capitalism’s logic. Earlier, firms competed to meet human needs. Now they compete to predict and modify human actions. The logic of the market has moved from responding to human demand to engineering it. What used to be called advertising or marketing has mutated into a science of behavioral nudging, microtargeting, and digital conditioning. This is not the automation of work; it is the automation of will.

The Indian Context: The Silent Capture of Everyday Life

In India, this abduction of agency is visible in both corporate and governmental domains. Platforms like Google, Meta, Amazon, and domestic giants such as Reliance Jio have seamlessly integrated into daily life. A villager checking fertilizer prices on a smartphone or a student using a free education app unwittingly contributes to data streams that feed predictive and commercial ecosystems. Meanwhile, state projects like Aadhaar, Digital India, and India Stack — though designed for inclusion — have gradually created a behavioral map of the citizen, merging welfare with surveillance.

This convergence of public and private data power exemplifies what Zuboff calls “the dispossession of the human future.” People no longer act; they are acted upon by invisible architectures of choice. Their agencies — to decide, to err, to dissent — are quietly absorbed by algorithms that pre-empt decision-making.

From Automation to Abduction

Earlier automation — the mechanization of production — replaced human muscle. The new automation replaces human mind and motive. Machine learning systems do not merely calculate faster; they decide which realities are visible to us. Our newsfeeds, recommendations, even job applications are filtered through algorithmic judgments we neither see nor understand. Zuboff calls this the “black box society” — a realm where power operates without visibility and accountability.

Through predictive analytics, human spontaneity becomes a liability to be managed. The unpredictability that Hannah Arendt celebrated as the essence of freedom is reinterpreted by data capitalism as risk noise — something to be neutralized. Thus, technology begins to replace the human condition with machinic predictability.

The Psychological Coup

Zuboff insists that the genius of this new regime lies in its non-violent coercion. Unlike totalitarianism, which suppresses through fear, digital capitalism seduces through convenience. It does not command obedience; it rewards compliance. In the name of personalization, it narrows the horizon of imagination. Every user is locked within what she calls a “behavioral habitat” — a curated environment where the self is shaped by unseen feedback loops.

In India, this is evident in the way digital platforms have absorbed political participation itself. Microtargeted propaganda, WhatsApp groups, and algorithmic news curation have created what political theorist Pratap Bhanu Mehta calls “the crisis of collective reasoning.” The citizen who once acted as an agent of democracy is now increasingly reduced to a reactive node in a behavioral network.

The Philosophical Turn: From Homo Faber to Homo Algorithmicus

To comprehend the depth of this transformation, it is helpful to recall Arendt’s distinction between homo faber (the maker) and animal laborans (the laboring being). In the digital age, a third figure has emerged — homo algorithmicus — the being who unknowingly serves the algorithms that interpret, predict, and direct his behavior. The human no longer produces meaning; he is produced by meaning systems engineered for profit.

This marks a profound civilizational shift. As Amartya Sen would note, human freedom has been narrowed not by visible constraint but by structural reduction of choice capability. What appears as a multitude of digital options is, in fact, a pre-scripted theater of behavior. The more the system learns, the less it needs the human.

Zuboff’s insight is devastating: the machines did not steal our agency; we traded it away for convenience, connectivity, and control. The abduction was voluntary before it became structural. The next stage, as we will see, is how these mechanisms — subtle, data-driven, and self-reinforcing — deepen the capture of human decision-making and imagination.

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