This is a good and important essay. I was crazy-lucky, being born at a time and place when kids could be left alone to build stuff and play with real technics when still young. I built hovercraft, rockets, ballistic devices, and hacked with vacuum tubes and transistors and tesla coils and radios and early computer stuff. It was wonderful. Oh, and biotech, too. All before high-school. Now in my sixties, but still like a crazy kid with tech. The tech helped me learn the complex stuff - the math - but it also taught me early I could get help/assistance and better faster results working with smart people. Doing - not just reading about it - but doing it and testing and trying again, and failing and then nailing success - this is so powerful and good. We got airplane crazy for a while - and I built no-airfoil Laminar winged models which flew fine. There were no video games - we built stuff and hacked it and sometimes had accidents... But I learned most of what I needed to know in life doing - doing and failing and fixing and then getting it to work.. This is the algo for life. You will have silly setbacks and make awful boneheaded mistakes - but when DOING you learn quick that nothing is final. If you didnt get killed, you can try again. I never heard this called "agency". But doing - and learning to think, and plan, and then act, and then evaluate - this is really key. Many folks who just write and talk - they never experience true harsh failure of the system. But nature is a really good teacher. She shows clear truth - and you can learn just by keeping your eyes and brain open - and remain curious and driven to know the why and the how. The studio is maybe the kitchen table, or the basement. And maybe the library and Google and DuckDuckGo. But build something. Build a car. Build a go-cart or a rocket. Build a working computer from a bag of parts bought online from Mouser or Digikey. Build a working fusion-generator ( you can buy "lecture bottles" of non-radioactive deuterium. ) Learn to program, and hack together a working version of mplayer from source code, and get it running on a Linux box, and listen to streaming Radio Caroline (the original pirate-radio in the UK from the beginning of open-source hardware). The author here is wise,and makes a very key point. DO something - MAKE something - pull together the bits and pieces of stuff and knowledge that transform nature and get her working for you - instead of you being a slave to her. I remember school was pretty awful... It had to be endured. And it interfered with my experiments. :) I built a TEA laser in my basement. You need a DC power supply, and a bunch of stuff you can buy at Staples - plastic sheets, aluminum foil, etc. It was first written up in Scientific American in 1974. And I also built software machines to hack the markets. To my great surprise, they seem to work. If a dullard like me can do it - any sufficiently motivated person can. :) Do things and make things. You will learn skills that can be used to make the things you want to happen, actually happen. Good essay. - Russel F.