Did you really agree?
A contract is supposed to be a meeting of the minds. So here's what the law actually says about the one in your pocket — cited, so you can check it — and then the curator's labeled position that, for consumer tech, "consent" has quietly become a toll instead of an agreement. The facts are facts; the position is opinion; the counterargument stays in, because this house debates, it doesn't dunk.
What the law actually says (cited)
Tapping "I Agree" (a clickwrap agreement) generally forms a binding contract. The landmark case held that even pay-first, terms-later licenses are enforceable "unless their terms are objectionable on grounds applicable to contracts in general — for example, if they violate a rule of positive law, or if they are unconscionable."
Source: ProCD, Inc. v. Zeidenberg, 86 F.3d 1447 (7th Cir. 1996).
Under the old duty to read doctrine, signing (or clicking) generally binds you to terms even if you never read them, so long as you had notice and a chance to. Not reading is not, by itself, a defense.
General contract doctrine; applied to clickwrap in the line of cases following ProCD.
It's a contract of adhesion — take-it-or-leave-it, no negotiation. Decline and the phone, the account, the feature you paid for is bricked. Courts say adhesion contracts aren't automatically void — but the only realistic "no" is to not use the thing you bought.
General; adhesion contracts are enforceable absent unconscionability.
In the study nicknamed "The Biggest Lie on the Internet," 543 people were asked to join a fake network ("NameDrop"). 74% used "quick join," skipping the privacy policy entirely; the few who opened it spent about 73 seconds on a policy that takes far longer to read. Near-everyone "agreed" — 97% to the privacy policy, 93% to the terms.
Source: Obar & Oeldorf-Hirsch, "The Biggest Lie on the Internet" (Information, Communication & Society).
Unconscionability can void terms that are both procedurally unfair (hidden, no real choice) and substantively unfair (shockingly one-sided). It's a real doctrine — and a narrow one; most boilerplate survives it.
General doctrine (UCC §2-302 & common law); plus consumer-protection statutes that vary by state.
The position (opinion — the curator's, clearly labeled)
⚑ Policy position · the curator's, not the house's fact
The curator's blunt title for it: "Contract Law Is a Lie — the Smartphone Edition." The house states it cooler, but the fire is his, on the record:
For consumer tech, "consent" has become a toll, not a meeting of the minds. A real agreement needs two minds that meet. But the phone contract is take-it-or-leave-it, written so densely a judge can barely parse it, changeable by the company whenever it likes, and unreadable in the seconds anyone actually spends — and you can't use the thousand-dollar device you already bought unless you tap "I Agree." That's not assent. That's a tollbooth wearing a contract's clothes.
And the trick is the timing. You're happy opening the box — and while you're grinning at the new thing, the trade closes: your data, your attention, your defaults. You feel the cost only after. You like the product; you never agreed to the contract — but they're welded together so you can't take one without the other.
The inverse is the correct one. Flip it: a company should have to earn your yes in plain words you can actually read, not extract it as the price of admission to what you own. (That inverse is literally how this site runs — no contract, no tracking, on-device, blanks left for your own hand. The machine measures; only a human can truly consent.)
The honest other side (because we don't dunk)
The strongest version of the other side, stated fairly: standardized terms are what make a mass market possible — a company can't hand-negotiate with a billion users, and without enforceable boilerplate, prices rise and products vanish. "Meeting of the minds" was always part legal fiction; the law's honest fix isn't to torch contracts but to police the worst of them — unconscionability, consumer-protection statutes, plain-language and data-rights laws (the EU and some states go further). The problem the curator names is real and narrower than "contract law is a lie": consumer adhesion contracts have outrun the consent theory, and the repair is to update the theory and tighten the guardrails — not to declare the whole field a fraud.
Two real sides, no cheap dunk. That's what makes it a resolution worth debating, not a slogan. Put it to the room.
What would actually fix it
If a term can't be stated so a normal person — or a judge — can understand it in the time they'll actually spend, it shouldn't bind them. Readability as a requirement, not a courtesy.
You should be able to use what you bought without surrendering your data. Separate the product from the data-grab; make the invasive parts genuinely opt-in.
Treat it like the card game: the company is the Corp advancing a face-down agenda behind dense "ice." Widen the board, read the whole table, and aim at the contract — the law that lets it — not just the gadget.
That's the quiet insult buried in it — an assault on your intelligence that counts on your intelligence being too busy to look. So the antidote isn't only a lawsuit; it's a habit. Read the thing. Read more than the machine does. The study's whole finding is that almost nobody reads — which means the person who actually does is already ahead of the room, and ahead of an AI that just pattern-matched the summary. The machine can scan a contract in a millisecond and feel nothing it costs you; a human reads it and knows. Only humans can score — and the ones who read score highest.
Read the sources:
· ProCD, Inc. v. Zeidenberg (clickwrap/shrinkwrap enforceability)
· Obar & Oeldorf-Hirsch — "The Biggest Lie on the Internet"
· Unconscionability (Cornell Legal Information Institute)