SSC CPO 2025 PYQ — Question 177

In the given passage, some words have been deleted. Read the passage intently and choose the most appropriate option to fill in each blank:

In the contemporary epoch of algorithmic governance and hyper-networked economies, the discourse of agency has undergone a paradigmatic mutation. No longer anchored in traditional notions of volition or deliberation, subjectivity is increasingly (1)___ by ambient infrastructures that anticipate, nudge, and pre-empt decision-making before cognition consolidates intention. In such a regime, autonomy becomes retroactive—a post-facto narrative stitched together by feedback loops of personalization, predictive modeling, and biometric calibration. The liberal ideal of the rational actor, so central to modern jurisprudence and economic theory, finds itself (2)___ under the weight of distributed cognition, machinic interpellation, and environmental scripting. Agency, in this schema, is not exercised but programmed; it is neither given nor seized but orchestrated through micro-environmental cues and algorithmic affordances. The individual becomes less a sovereign self than a (3)___ node in a probabilistic matrix of behavioral speculation. Within this ontological reconfiguration, resistance too undergoes a semiotic shift. Acts of refusal no longer manifest through overt defiance but through obfuscation, misalignment, and withdrawal from legibility. Yet even these gestures risk being (4)___ by the very systems they attempt to subvert—recuperated as marketable deviance, branded subcultures, or managed dissent. If every deviation is eventually re-circulated as novelty, then the terrain of the political itself becomes (5)___—evacuated of antagonism and steeped in simulation.

What should come in the place of blank number (5)?