Agency in the 21st-century: the key to navigate a complex future through language learning

Every day that passes feels like a step towards the obliteration of the current civilisational system we hold together with our labour. However, I don't say this in a fatal way. Technology is breaking barriers beyond the mechanical and informational to the point that we need to reconsider our role in education and society as a whole.

In fact, we need to rediscover our agency, but what is it exactly?

Agency refers to the capacity of an individual or entity to act independently, make choices, and exert control over their actions and decisions. In philosophy, it denotes the ability to act intentionally and purposefully within a given environment. In sociology, agency pertains to the power of individuals to act independently and make their own free choices, despite the constraints imposed by social structures.

In simple terms and from a sociological perspective, it is our capacity to act and make decisions. But in 2025, tech lords will flood the web with billions of AI agents who plan, reason and act. Artificial agency is therefore the precursor of a new hyperobject.

According to Timothy Morton, hyperobjects are entities that are massively distributed in time and space, exceeding human comprehension. Climate change, the internet, and even the concept of evolution are examples of hyperobjects. These entities challenge traditional notions of agency because their vastness and complexity defy individual control or understanding.

Whatever is coming through AGI implementation, autonomous agents and quantum chips, will probably make our current work methods and ways of understanding the world obsolete. We won't be able to compete with artificial agents at work or even robots. But it is not necessary anyway.

What we have to understand is how to relate to our agency across its multiple layers.

It starts within our cells. At the most fundamental level, individual cells exhibit a basic form of agency as they navigate their local environment, seeking nutrients, avoiding threats, and maintaining their internal states. As if they were mini-versions of ourselves in this mad world, actually. They also demonstrate problem-solving competencies in physiological and metabolic spaces despite not having a brain.

What's even more astonishing is that cells align with their collective goal through bioelectrical networks for communication, forming the basis of collective intelligence and more complex forms of agency beyond their individual capabilities.

They create entire organisms like us and catapult the agency scale even higher to the human level. At this point, it is no longer a matter of bioelectrical networks but rather linguistic and symbolic spaces unique to humans.

Things like language, science, civilisation, and paying taxes take place at this phase thanks to our capacity to communicate and cooperate through coordinated agency.

This is why, at the brink of an unprecedented technological avalanche and cognitive revolution, I decided to use my courses at the university as a holistic microlab.

My students are clever and most of them know that their job will be done by LLMs in a few years even though they keep following the traditional path. I don't blame them, though.

We haven't learned how to step outside of the restrictive norm without a radical take, like living in the woods disconnected from everything modern.

We need to harness our human potential and extend the tentacles of our agency in order to recover what we have lost in the industrial era and find what technology and information allow us to go for: a quest into the maze of infinity that starts with our own alignment and reflection.

A quest that starts within ourselves

Away from the psy-ops and manipulation strategies potentially deployed through screens and algorithms, there is a door that, if opened, shall lead every individual to higher, yet accessible plains through introspection. In these plains lies the key to systemise and reorchestrate thoughts, dismantle preconceived ideas and widen creativity and cognition.

As an educator aware of the importance of resetting our priorities as learners in today’s context, I want my students to understand this through a framework that will allow them to rewire their mind and unlock the hidden power of words.

Learning a language is the perfect opportunity to get closer to a state that allows this level of introspection by incorporating dynamic and static inner work if language is seen as intentional.

Intentional language begins with reflections based on one's life, cognitive tasks and the will to act. Then, it is manifested through enunciations that create thoughts and reinforce ideas through a new construct of self-identity: the Spanish-speaking persona.

The goal of my program called "el profesional del siglo XXI" is to create a new system within the students using these elements.

Spanish is, therefore, seen as a system—a set of elements working together to achieve a specific goal. In this case, the goal is to shape the profile of the 21st-century professional.

What is that profile and why focusing on the 21st century, you might ask, and the answer is: a free individual capable of living in the intersection of

• Wisdom and common sense,

• Self-assessment,

• Physical and mental well-being practices,

• Open-ended applications of their specific-domain skills (in their case, law studies),

• Purpose-driven exploration of the self and knowledge discovery.

Naturally, the development of this profile encompasses a high degree of conscientious human agency. Bringing the human dimension forward is essential in a future where diverse and far superior intelligences will be part of our ecosystem.

Therefore, the program unfolds in four sections: health, relationships, learning and ressources. Four quintessential aspects that everyone should take care of.

Intersectionmaxxing and self-alchemy through enunciation

Every section of the framework is commented and an activity is planned to develop concepts and good practices. Then, students need to go further and make a statement of their personal situation in order to become agents in the arena.

John Vervaeke, who has done an incredible job at exploring the Meaning Crisis, explains this idea and highlights the parallels with participatory knowing, a way of understanding knowledge as a form of contact and conformity, where the knower participates in the known. By actively participating in the process of knowing, students get to develop a sense of meaning within their own life experience (arena).

Even though the exercise is compartmentalized in four sections, it intends to guide the students to an intersection through language practice.

Spanish words are the buttons pressed by the students' agency to generate mental pathways and lead their actions in each section to a future grounded in common sense.

Michael Levin talks about thoughts being thinkers themselves, acting within the cognitive self and contributing to the remapping and reutilisation of information.

Building on Michael Levin's idea of thoughts as active contributors within the cognitive self, summoning thoughts in Spanish becomes a deliberate strategy to remap the reflective landscape. This approach allows certain themes to surface naturally through the smooth deployment of mantras.

Hence, a foreign language becomes the gateway to the foreign self, showing reality under a new light. Max Planck said "when you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change" and this applies here very well in the symbolic and linguistic realm by changing the language we speak.

Therefore, widening the horizon for linguistic and cultural agentic thoughts allows for a conscious intervention:

"Puedo terminar mi proyecto”

“Soy capaz de aprender sobre los temas que necesito”

“Puedo encontrar la solución a los problemas que me preocupan actualmente…"

This kind of phrases, accessible to all my students, are easily encapsulable for repetition and constitute the bricks to build a new functional architecture.

Light and Darkness

Students are invited to write about their positive traits, everything going well in their lives and finally they have to describe the best version of themselves. Then, they have to do the same with their dark side and finish describing the worst future imaginable.

Common sense and discernment are possible when we visualise purposefully our best and worst outcome in the future. However, it is a difficult job at any age, especially in our early twenties. The solution: small and guided steps that work like thought drawers.

These drawers are titled:

• "My current state"

• "My good habits"

• "What I know about this section (health, learning, ressources or relationships) in my life"

• "What I am learning about this section in my life"

• "Ideal vision of myself in the future".

The goal is to synthesise the content of these drawers as much as possible, enunciate it as mantras, and use it alongside inner dialogue exercises.

Enunciation of mantras acts as a way to program neuro-linguistic pathways that can be followed for self-guidance and reassurance.

Inner dialogue—an exercise not everyone is accustomed to (essentially speaking with yourself)—is a way to internally discuss the most intimate subjects.

As humans, we tend to express ourselves in our mother tongue when intimacy or emotions are involved even when we are able to speak other languages. Being aware of this and being a language learner is the perfect opportunity to exercise our target language with the purpose of making our higher self speak.

Once the work is finished, it is up to the students to make a choice for their future.

Of course, throughout the entire course, they are often reminded that they have to work only with things within their control.

However, as Jordan Peterson reminds us, it is more difficult to rule ourselves than to rule an entire city. But to face the arbitrariness of our fixated inner dialogue, another language works as a way to create a persona that, if we decide, is more connected to our light and discernment.

Finally, the roadmap is established and students learn how to practise Spanish in a way that benefits their metacognition and activates their multilingual agency.

Tricking agency and fine-tuning our relationship with words.

Inner dialogue occurs during meditation, introspection, and reflection—practices that uncover layer after layer. Think of it as similar to fractal systems. The particular characteristic of these fractal systems is that they are unique to us as individuals. The process of zooming in and out can continue indefinitely, ranging from a single word to the most complex forms of dialogue.

Participating in this exercise requires a conscious objectivation of the language. This is how agency can be tricked into the exploration of these fractal systems to build a new functional architecture in which Spanish bricks, levers and buttons are part of the persona that is temporarily embodied to illuminate the student's path.

In my classroom experience the results were very interesting. Many students had never thought about doing this kind of exercise in the past and they saw many parts of the work interconnected. For me, as the teacher who found out about Willow potentially proving the existence of a multiverse, o3, the latest model of OpenAI crushing benchmarks and Ilya Sutskever aiming to single-shot for ASI, it is a pleasure to contribute to the navigation of our species within an ecosystem of intelligences and sentient beings that will be radically different in the near future.

If you did read the whole newsletter, thank you so much. I understand that it is very long and dense but I couldn’t find another way to do this. I will be presenting the next ones with a better structure and more clarity. I am still learning :)

Also, as soon as I make my decision regarding which platforms and methods to choose, I will launch the Spanish and French editions of the Artraduc's newsletter, along with guides and products that you might find interesting if you are convinced (or want to be convinced) that learning a new language is a tool for transforming your reality.

The 'Profesional del Siglo XXI' program will be available at some point in the future as well. It will be a downloadable document, free for anyone curious about practicing Spanish (or any other language, if suitable), and incorporating it into their inner dialogue and the creation of a self-roadmap. I will also offer another free resource: a guide with ten questions you need to ask yourself if you want to learn a language. It's a cool document because it stems from my first experiences with metacognition workshops I facilitated for my students and, of course, my own reflections on language learning and the process of exploring my own thoughts.

I sincerely hope you find this exercise interesting. I will continue sharing the ideas about it on my socials, so check them out to make sure you don't miss anything!

See you soon,

Javier