I read this a while ago (https://stephencagle.dev/posts-output/2012-08-18-accelerando...) and I remember enjoying it a little less with every section. With that said:

This is a book of ideas!

Aside: That was my favorite section of the book as well. Just the notion that a person could have had so much of "themselves" embedded in their agents that when disconnected from them they are basically in shock.

I remember at the time I was noticing how all my friends were completely loosing the ability to use paper maps. And there was a big discussion among us about whether needing to physically rotate the map in order to make sense of it was an example of us loosing spatial reasoning. It reminded me of how little I understood the actual space (landmarks, distance, etc) from A to B until I started driving myself at 16. Previous to that, your parents drove you, and it just seem like two places were magically connected by a wormhole. Anyway, we thought it was interesting that we might be the last generation to have used actual written maps to navigate to places. We had learned to do so, but we would also loose the ability with time.

Sure enough, these days, I have a hard time imagining using a map compared to just having maps route the path on my phone. The skill has atrophied from disuse. I imagine this is what "loosing your agents" felt like to that character.