ABSTRACT
Human agency, the capacity to act, is typically conceived of as centered on the human body. But a careful assessment of the necessary conditions for almost all capacities to act reveals that these capacities are realized via engagement with material technologies. This essay argues that we should therefore understand human agency not as the capacity to do things with a typical human body, but instead as the capacity to use technologies for the sake of some end. As a consequence, there are no universal, generic act-types we are capable of performing. Instead, each human’s capacities are realized in the technological moment in which they live, conditional on the technologies to which they can access.
