TikTok's reported ambition to become a super app, a single destination for commerce, communication, entertainment, and finance, lands in the same news cycle as The Atlantic's piece on AI causing a crisis of human agency. This is not a coincidence. Both stories are about the same systemic compression: fewer decision points, more frictionless pathways, less room for the kind of deliberate detour that makes humans feel like agents in their own lives.
Platform Consolidation as Agency Erosion
The super app model, pioneered by WeChat in China and now being pursued by TikTok, Uber, and various Western platforms, works by reducing the cognitive overhead of switching between apps. That friction reduction is also a reduction in the moments when you might choose to do something else entirely. The browser wars story, with a new generation of alternative browsers challenging Chrome and Safari, is interesting here as a counter-signal. People seeking alternative browsers are performing a small act of platform refusal. They are insisting on a different surface layer. Similarly, the Internet Archive as a free Spotify alternative story is not really about music. It is about choosing an infrastructure that does not harvest your preferences to sell back to you.
AI Agents and the Outsourcing of Taste
The Atlantic's agency crisis piece argues that as AI takes over more decision-making, humans lose the practiced capacity to decide. This connects to the Pope Leo encyclical story: the Pope's challenge to Big Tech is less about technology and more about what it means to be a subject rather than an object of systems. TikTok as super app and AI as agent both move in the same direction: toward a world where your preferences are anticipated before you form them. TurboFund's spotlight on flipping screen time from passive to active is a weirdly apt venture-world parallel to this exact anxiety. The question for platforms and founders alike is whether agency is a bug or a feature.