Nobody Reads the Terms and That's Fine

1 point · October 2026 · 3 comments

There is a genre of complaint that goes: nobody reads the terms and conditions, and this is a scandal, and if only people read what they agreed to, the world would be better. I want to say that not reading them is correct, and that the scandal is elsewhere.

Reading the terms is a bad use of a life. They are long, they are written to be unreadable, and they change without notice, so the reading would have to be repeated. If you actually read every agreement you clicked, you would have no time to do the thing you clicked to do. The people who wrote the terms know this. That is why the terms are the length they are.

The scandal is not that you did not read them. The scandal is that they were written to be unread, and that the writing of them is treated as consent. A document nobody reads is not an agreement. It is a notice, at best, and a trap, at worst, and the fact that a court will call it an agreement tells you something about courts.

So do not read them. Do the thing you came to do. And when someone says but you agreed to, say: no, I clicked. Those are different verbs, and the whole business depends on pretending they are not.