Yesterday I had the chance to attend a lecture by Hartmut Rosa in Copenhagen, invited by the Department of Sociology at the University of Copenhagen. The talk was titled The Atrophy of Discretion: A Plea for Human Agency, and it focused on a question that stayed with me long after the lecture ended: what happens to human beings when more and more areas of life are organized in ways that leave less and less room for judgment, interpretation, and meaningful action?
Rosa is one of the major contemporary voices in Critical Theory, best known for his theory of social acceleration: the idea that we live in societies driven by a constant pressure to produce more, adapt faster, and never fall behind, even at the cost of our ability to inhabit the world with calm, attention, and meaning. Hearing him in person gave that diagnosis a particular force. It no longer felt like an abstract theory, but like a very precise description of the texture of contemporary life.
One of the ideas that struck me most was his reflection on agency. Rosa suggested that emotions provide our agential energy. Emotions are not just private feelings that happen somewhere inside us; they are what move us toward action. They are what give force to our involvement in the world, what allow us to care, to respond, to decide, to act.
But the central argument of the lecture was that this connection is increasingly being weakened. Rosa’s concern was not simply that technology replaces human labor, but that it often disempowers us by eroding our capacity for judgment. What is at stake is not only what we do, but whether we still do it as agents.
One example he gave was the football referee. Traditionally, the referee has to read the game in real time, interpret a situation, make a difficult call, and take responsibility for it. With VAR, however, that discretionary space narrows. The referee is no longer fully exercising judgment, but increasingly deferring to a technical system that claims superior precision. What gets lost is not only autonomy, but a whole practical relation to interpretation, responsibility, and authority.
His second example was the cook, and it was just as revealing. Instead of trusting the cook’s knowledge, taste, and practical judgment, we increasingly approach food through systems of total specification: we order by listing ingredients, exclusions, preferences, substitutions, instructions. Here too, the space for discretion shrinks. The cook becomes less a skilled person responding creatively to a concrete situation, and more an implementer of predefined instructions.
That made me think of another example much closer to my own life: teachers. In many evaluation systems, we are increasingly asked to assess work by ticking off predefined criteria. Did the student cite the literature correctly: yes or no? Is the research question formulated properly: yes or no? Is the structure adequate: yes or no? Of course, criteria matter, and no one is arguing for arbitrariness. But what disappears in this kind of framework is the living space of judgment itself: the possibility of recognizing nuance, promise, intelligence, originality, or even productive failure in ways that cannot always be reduced to boxes on a form. The teacher is still “evaluating,” but increasingly under conditions that leave less room for actual discernment.
The lecture also made me remember my own work at Reuters, where I translated stock-exchange news for Portuguese-speaking markets. There too, everything had to follow a strict pattern. Every story needed to fit a predefined structure, a common style, a uniform logic. There was no room for creativity, no space to shape the piece in a singular way. Everything was already determined in advance, and my task was to adjust myself to the pattern. The work was efficient, consistent, and perfectly functional—but precisely for that reason it also felt like a good example of what Rosa was describing: action reduced to implementation, judgment absorbed into the system. In fact, that atrophy of my discretion was the primary reason I ten quite the world of corporations to start my PhD, although as said, it does not mean that some of those elements are not present in academia.
Seen this way, the problem is not simply that technology or rules make life more efficient. The deeper problem is that they can hollow out the human capacity to decide, interpret, and respond. We are left with execution, but less agency; with procedures, but less involvement; with more control, but less living judgment.
Rosa also insisted that rules themselves can weaken emotion. This was one of the most interesting parts of the lecture. If emotions are what energize our agency, then a world increasingly governed by protocols, regulations, and preformatted responses can also dampen our affective relation to action. We still do things, but we do them with less investment, less interpretation, less sense that our response matters. The connection between emotion and action is weakened, and with it our social energy.
At that point Rosa made a funny and telling detour through Niklas Luhmann, one of his intellectual opponents. He joked that under any other circumstances he would not quote him, and the audience burst out laughing. Then he paraphrased an idea to the effect that if you want to kill an organization, you only need everyone to follow all the rules. The joke landed, but the point was serious. No institution can really live by rules alone. Every organization depends, at some level, on people who interpret situations, make exceptions, read contexts, and exercise judgment. When that disappears, something vital disappears with it.
And once you start thinking in those terms, the pattern appears everywhere. The concierge who used to overlook a minor issue but now cannot. The badly completed form that once someone might have helped you correct, but now is simply rejected. The abstract submitted one day late that in another setting might have met with understanding, but now receives an automatic refusal. In all these cases, what vanishes is not only flexibility. What vanishes is the possibility that someone might exercise judgment in a concrete situation.
From there, Rosa’s political observation also became interesting. He suggested that part of the appeal of figures like Trump may lie in precisely this exhausted social landscape of rules, procedures, and mediated authority. Trump presents himself as someone who breaks rules, disregards limits, and does not care about international law or institutional codes. Whether one sees that as monstrous or seductive, it clearly registers affectively. In a world saturated with procedures, the figure who acts without asking permission can appear, to some, as the return of agency. That is part of what makes the phenomenon so disturbing: the atrophy of judgment and the weakening of meaningful action do not only produce exhaustion; they can also produce rage, resentment, and a desire for transgressive power. The public description of Rosa’s Copenhagen lecture explicitly linked these questions of agency to burnout, loneliness, and the rise of right-wing populism.
There was also one perfect comic moment. At one point, the PowerPoint slides began advancing uncontrollably, rushing forward at absurd speed and making no sense at all. Rosa paused, looked at the screen, and said dryly: “It’s accelerating.” The whole room burst into laughter. It was one of those rare moments when the medium itself suddenly performs the theory.
I left feeling genuinely fortunate to have attended a lecture that seemed destined to leave a mark. But what moved me was not only the content. It was also the experience of being in a packed room filled with people gathered by a shared intellectual curiosity, a shared horizon of concern, a shared language of thought. There was something deeply encouraging in that collective attention—in seeing so many people listening, thinking, and laughing together.
That too felt important.
