A note before you start. This one is a coda, not a fourth argument. The three essays before it were built to carry weight, and I stand behind every joist. This is a different room: lighter, more speculative, lower stakes. Do not fight for the world I'm about to describe. I'm not certain I would. The point of it is the premise underneath and the invitation at the end, which is to go build your own.
Here is the thread I want to pick up. In the third essay I named two threats, and the quieter one was manipulation: systems that learn to move us faster than we can notice we are being moved. That threat only works because of a fact most of us would rather not sit with. The movable part of us is large. Most of what you did today, you did without choosing it. You woke to an alarm someone else's defaults set, reached for the phone before your eyes focused, said the first thing that came to you, took the route you always take, clicked the option already highlighted. If I asked you why, you would give me a reason, and you would believe it, and the reason would mostly be a story you told yourself after the fact. I do the same. The sovereign rational chooser we picture when we picture ourselves is, a great deal of the time, a narrator hired after the decision was already made.
The manipulation threat is dangerous precisely to the degree that this is true. You cannot hijack a will that was running the show. You can only hijack one that was mostly along for the ride.
Most structures handle this fact in one of two cowardly ways. The first pretends agency is everywhere, so that whatever happens to you is your choice and your fault, which is convenient for everyone who arranged the choices. The second pretends agency is nowhere, so that you are simply a unit to be optimized, nudged, and harvested, which is convenient for everyone who profits from the harvest. Both are lies, and both are comfortable for the same people.
I want to imagine, for the length of a coda, a world that tells the truth instead: that we are mostly caused, and a little bit free, and that both halves of that sentence deserve to be designed for.
Start with the caused part, because it is most of us most of the time, and because the honest response to it is not contempt. If a person is going to be shaped by whatever environment they're in, and they are, and so are you, then the only question that matters is whether the shaping is done with care or with appetite. A world built on this premise would treat the setting of defaults as something closer to a duty than a growth lever. Whoever decides what happens when you don't decide is holding the largest lever there is over human behavior, and in our world we have handed that lever to whoever can monetize it best. Picture instead a world where holding that lever came with the kind of obligation we attach to other forms of power over people who can't fully protect themselves in the moment. Not because people are children, but because all of us, tired and distracted and running on defaults, are sometimes in the position a child is in, and a decent society designs for its citizens on their average Tuesday, not on their best day.
Then there is the small free part, and here is the one fully serious thing I want to say in an unserious essay. The moments of real agency, the rare ones, where you stop and feel the weight of a choice and could go either way and choose, are not made smaller by being rare. They are the whole of what we mean by dignity, and rarity is exactly why they are worth building a world to protect. You do not protect a wilderness because most of the country is still wild. You protect it because most of the country is already paved. A world that took agency seriously would treat those moments the way we treat the last wild places: fenced off from optimization, not because they are efficient, but because a life with none of them in it is not a life anyone should be designed into.
What would that look like, concretely? I honestly don't know, and I'm suspicious of anyone who says they do, including the version of me that gets excited and starts drawing maps. I can give you the flavor of one image and nothing firmer. Somewhere in this world there is unoptimized space: time and rooms and stretches of attention where nothing is recommending, nothing is defaulting, nothing is watching to learn what moves you. Call it a national park for the will. Most people would spend the first hour in it bored, reaching for a phone that isn't doing anything. That's fine. The point is not to force the free moment into existence. The point is to leave a place where it could happen, which is already more than our current world bothers to do.
I'll stop there, because the specifics are where these things go wrong, and where I would lose you if you picture utopia differently than I do, which you should, because your blind spots and mine don't overlap and the world needs both sets covered. The principle is the only part I would actually defend: you can build structures that admit how caused we are without treating us as nothing but caused. You can build guardrails without building cages. Determinism is not destiny, and it is not despair. It is just the material. The question is what you make out of it.
Hold my version lightly, set it down, and make your own: the world you'd want if you took seriously that most of you is weather, and that the small part which isn't is the most valuable thing there is. I'll be in the park, doing nothing on purpose, waiting to see if a real choice wanders by.