The pact of compliance

Last update: Feb 6 2023, 4 - 5 minutes read

I have watched a video where at 2:30 there is a process of setting up a new phone. It takes a whole minute of really quick clicking in order to go through all the agreements, licenses, skipping of account creation etc. Is this what we deserve?

The agreement of selling your soul to Mephistopheles is a necessary part in acquiring any modern device. We don’t sign by blood, we sign by pressing “Accept”. We hope that the agreement is common sense as it is too long to be fully read and understood. We feel frightened, the fear of wasting your time on reading illegible legal nonsense.

The things they make us do. They know we don’t read it. The more they prey on our weakness of inevitability. What are you going to do? What choice do you have anyway, probably buy some expensive phone that “values your privacy” and hope that this one is good enough.¹ But probably not. The humiliation of pressing the “Accept” button is almost invisible, it is not worth alone to make you go through all the trouble of acquiring a new phone that would not do that to you. You press the button, you accept your defeat, the company celebrates its another victory of a submitted soul ready for data harvest.

Are you different? Maybe you are, I’m certainly not. Sometimes I think I should learn from you, other times I have enough of other things in my life. Being free is hard when you don’t have many things to sacrifice.

Many-faced legal entities (Gods)

You are an employee, the employee at heart, that seeks a job. You can’t imagine your life as an entrepreneur, you are pretty comfortable working for someone. You obviously need to find a company to work for. Startups – maybe that is your jazz, but it is unreliable, you can’t really afford it if you have obligations such as family. A small comfy company – maybe this is what you are looking for, well, do they pay well? Your skills must cost more than that. A tech giant company – finally, a stable job with good income, and everything seems so good, but there’s just this little thing with the contract that leaves you a bit uneasy. What if you are a game developer and you want to make a game in you free time? Do you agree to forfeit all your rights for the game? Or only use the company’s infrastructure?² How about working overtime: 10, 12 hours a day, maybe more?³ How comfortable are you signing a perpetual agreement to not ever disclose any information, to not ever hire anyone working with you at the time or any future employees of the company, to not ever work for a competitor of the current company?⁴ You must be in luck if they have an expiration date in the contract.

And what happens when you try to point out the inconsistencies you see in the contract or the points you are not comfortable with, that you deem unethical? It is different of course. But a general rule is “we pay you a big sum of money for your compliance” – everyone implicitly understands that and the implicitness of this agreement makes it ever much so easier to overlook or pretend to not notice.

I don’t judge. You must have a reason to agree to such conditions. Maybe you are in a hard financial situation that you need to get out of. Maybe it is your childhood dream to be in a big company and make a lot of money. Maybe this is the only way you see to make your parents proud. Reasons are plenty. The important thing is to stop deceiving yourself and be truthful with yourself. By explicitly acknowledging the situation you are in, you will get out of this pit.

Companies have priorities, usually it is to make the most profit with the least amount of resources. You should have priorities too. Write them down or at least think about them – it doesn’t take much to practice your free will. The moment you surrender your obligation to think carefully to someone else, you are in a perfect position to be manipulated and used, you are a perfect employee.

The way out

There are other examples, many people have voiced their opinions about how bad the situation is. Honestly, I read them as a replacement for fiction stories, sometimes I listen to a video on the background before I go to sleep. It soothes my mind, someone else does something somewhere far away so I don’t need to worry about it, and this is so horrifying and so on. A perfect story – it reaches out to our feelings of freedom, justice and I can feel smart that I understand it now or just feel calm because I have confirmed my bias⁵ one more time.

So what do we do to finally stop this nonsense? I don’t know. Maybe it is not about reacting to this environment, it is more about creating something new, just about anything. The sin in this case is about laziness to see clearly. Try to be free as much as you can, create new things the way you are capable of, be honest and don’t deliberately overlook things. If you are not capable of any of that right now – be free to not fixate on that, your time will come. Just wait and try not to do anything too stupid.

There’re projects such as GrapheneOS, LineageOS, CalyxOS and others, you can install custom Android system if your phone has very specific hardware. It should be a cheaper option than fully trusted hardware. I haven’t used them and can’t recommend them.↩︎︎
In 2018 Amazon offered a questionable contract regarding development of personal games, tweet and a 8:27 video.↩︎︎
Meta (formerly Facebook) has a working culture where only roughly 50% of employees work 8 hours a day or less. 2022 article, current days.↩︎︎
It is general knowledge at this point about such conditions, I believe many people are used to this and consider this normal. Here is an article giving a short overview of such clauses and their downsides.↩︎︎
Confirmation bias is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms or supports one’s prior beliefs or values. Wikipedia source.↩︎︎