Joan Is Awful—and So Is the Lie of Digital Empowerment

Inverse Agency

noun

Inverse Agency describes the moment you mistake engagement with a machine for control. You click, customize, optimize, and curate, convinced you are authoring your own life, while the real authorship happens elsewhere—in systems engineered to harvest your attention, your data, your habits, and eventually your obedience. Everything feels frictionless and flattering. The menus are intuitive. The options feel abundant. But the architecture is doing the choosing. You feel active while being managed, sovereign while being sorted. The freedom is cosmetic. The agency is staged.

This inversion works because it seduces rather than commands. Inverse agency flatters the ego so effectively that resistance feels unnecessary, even silly. The more certain you are that you’re “in charge,” the less likely you are to notice how your desires are being nudged, your behaviors rewarded, and your choices quietly narrowed. Power doesn’t bark orders; it smiles and asks permission. The result is a system that governs best by convincing its subjects they are free.

No recent pop artifact captures this better than the Black Mirror episode “Joan Is Awful.” Joan believes she is finally taking control of her life through self-reinvention, only to discover she has handed herself over to an algorithm that strips her identity for parts and streams the wreckage as entertainment. The episode skewers the central lie of platform culture: that self-optimization equals self-authorship. Joan isn’t liberated; she’s monetized. Her personality becomes content, her choices become inputs, and her autonomy dissolves into a subscription model. What looks like empowerment is actually self-erasure with better lighting.