Network Notion #6 – Vectoral Agents 2: Are You Agentic Enough?
Edited by Jernej Markelj
We are increasingly embedded in highly complex and intelligent machinic networks that enable and shape our capacities to act. Recommendation algorithms organize our search results, feeds, and playlists; LLMs doctor our emails, plan our travel itineraries, and help us flirt on dating apps; AI agents are said to be on the brink of becoming hyper-efficient, self-directed optimizers operating across all domains. At the same time, social expectations of individual autonomy, control, and self-determination seem higher than ever. Symptomatically, Silicon Valley, where programming is increasingly outsourced to coding agents, is currently obsessed with ‘highly agentic’ individuals: proactive actors who can ‘just do things’, or at least appear capable of doing so. These figures are framed as unrestrained sources of creativity, spontaneity, and action.
The second volume of Vectoral Agents interrogates the deadlock between vast agential networks of computational capitalism and the persistent demand for sovereign subjects fully in control of our destinies. The essays gathered here respond to the need for not only more adequate concepts and theories, but also new stories and thought experiments, capable of making sense of our intricate entanglements with intelligent technologies. Taken together, they seek to rethink the technopolitical conditions under which agency is attributed, modeled, and contested in the age of neural networks.
Authors: Jernej Markelj, Marianne Gunderson, Claudio Celis Bueno, Jakko Kemper, Amy Ireland, and Sophie Publig
Edited by: Jernej Markelj
Series Design: Alex Walker
Production and Typesetting: Anielek Niemyjski
Published by the Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam 2026
ISBN: 9789083672175
Email: info@networkcultures.org
Web: www.networkcultures.org
This publication is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommerical ShareAlike 4.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). To view a copy of this license, visit www.creativecommons.org/licences/by-nc-sa/4.0
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