Are You There Satan?

On contracts, bargains, and pleas

I’d like to be a machine. Wouldn’t you?

~ Andy Warhol

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Culture says to fear the contract. Faust’s soul is condemned to Hell. Ariel nearly loses her own to Ursula’s garden. We call that which entraps us, which fucks us over, “the fine print.” In seeking what we want, the story goes — in accepting help from a powerful stranger — we tend to agree to a price we can never pay.

I don’t know about you, but I’m living the kind of life Satan must hear knocking at his iron door. With every flick of his forked tongue, mine’s the soul he can taste on the air, overripe and juicy. If he appeared to me tomorrow, I’d sell it all if it meant a chance at something else. This desperation has me starving for a bargain, ready to sign whatever’s put in front of me if there are dollar signs and guarantees. The sheer imbalances of contemporary life — how it’s easier than ever to see the beauty and the pleasures of this world, yet hopeless to believe we’ll ever reach them (or that they’ll even exist for much longer) — has put more souls up for sale than ever before. And why save it? Whenever some voice says “Don’t trust this person who wants to help you,” it’s clear there’s some paternalistic protestantism afoot. The fear of Satan, in this metaphor, is little more than a jealous shepherd afraid of losing another piece of meat.

It’s easy to talk about American politics in this register because no other country took the personal, priest-less relationship with God to such a civic level. But what I’m actually trying to write about here is contracts — a concept I didn’t realize until now that protestant culture, American culture, says to fear. This isn’t because our country avoids contracts, but because American contracts tend to be almost exclusively unilateral.¹ Odds are, you’ve agreed to one today — some new privacy policy or user agreement, some app update — and offered no amendments of your own. While it’s in the nature of the contract for both parties to amend and consent, very few of us actually propose these amendments. To put it simply, we don’t negotiate, and there’s no avenue toward negotiation.

In many cases, the product or service we agree to use changes over time — sometimes on a daily basis — and becomes something we never would’ve agreed to use in the first place. Twitter is perhaps the best example of this, a service that became unrecognizable and unusable as its new owner made daily “upgrades” to the platform. Another is Duolingo, an app that works a little differently every time you practice. When I began using it² several years ago, there were no “hearts” that penalized you for mistakes; you could simply practice and practice and practice — for hours if you wanted. Now, with a “French score” of 122, I seem stuck on learning the same seven words,³ all while sitting through ad after ad for Duolingo Max, a paid service that promises “AI” conversations with a cartoon character — “just like in real life.” The only thing that keeps me showing up every day is a relentless stubbornness. The same stubbornness, I guess, that makes me think I’ll write another book.

These alterations lead to what HR managers call “change fatigue,” but they are also, in their own way, contract violations. Obviously the terms of service for Twitter or Duolingo state the right of the corporation to tweak the way the service works at any time, without renewed consent from the user. The corporation is not literally violating the user agreement. But figuratively, having to relearn how something works every time you access it is a violation of a larger, more abstract contract — that the things, places, and people in our lives are in any way reliable. It seems absurd to say it, but a handful of coders making incremental changes to the way a little green owl teaches you a foreign language sends a subtle, underlying signal: that Duo isn’t here for you.

My interest in contracts is professional. As a writer, I’m one of the few who does negotiate a contract, who can push back on its terms. This is largely why writers have agents. But before that, I worked in corporate purchasing, where contracts determined and supported my relationships with suppliers. Working in procurement taught me that self-interest and altruism are not mutually exclusive, but dialectical. This is what the contract is for: to strengthen a relationship by benefitting both parties — by ensuring both, in some way, come out ahead. This is why I sought out suppliers of a similar or relative size to our own company, as relationships with larger companies tended to be more unilateral, with fewer mutual benefits. Purchasing is an adversarial position and it was easy for me to love the game of it, as long as I kept it as a game — a friendly sparring over lunch.

This dialectical approach to contractual agreements, I realized, fit neatly into my general framework for thinking about social and civic constructs — that our arrangements for living are constructed and maintained via mutual agreements. To propose a public in any form, that public must agree on its values, or at least on how to address them. This framework also determines, in the Foucauldian sense, what kind of individuals are “produced” from these relationships: An amended civil contract that benefits both signatories produces a citizen; a unilateral one produces a subject.⁴

No, Duo isn’t here for you. Neither is Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos. Target isn’t your friend for selling rainbow towels, and Taylor Swift has more in common with Donald Trump than she does with you. From parasocial relationships to social media platforms to an autocrat⁵ in the White House, this widespread deployment of unilateral contracts, whether figurative or literal, is what makes the transformation from citizen into subject psychologically possible.

Agreements, these kinds of contracts teach us, are meaningless. Protections mean nothing. Justice is arbitrary. And if these contracts that surround us, that we click yes on every day, grow pointless — if those in power can violate them at will with no consequence⁶ beyond a finger-wag from some “ethicist” getting six figures to write about “civility” for a newspaper — they color the more legitimate, balanced contracts as, if not equally pointless, at least untrustworthy or outdated.

Don’t trust this person who wants to help you: our plethora of violated agreements ensures that this is the voice of modern American life. And among this paranoia, the proposal of a public — not to mention the construction of the social — becomes impossible.

This preclusion of relationships is, partly, what Arendt was getting at when she identified totalitarianism’s goal of making individuals “superfluous.” Isolated from one another and afraid to form bonds, individuals are not ruled or controlled by a system: they are the system. What makes neoliberalism, or the American flavor of totalitarianism, so successful and unique is that very little terror, might, or pomp is required to transform citizens first into subjects, then into objects. In his first novel, Americana, DeLillo calls this objectified American the “third person, the man we all want to be.” Created by television commercials, this man is the fuel that keeps America burning, and he happily throws himself into the flames: “Advertising is the suggestion that the dream of entering the third person singular might possibly be fulfilled.” The celebrity, the influencer, the item, the genius: this willingness, in American life — indeed, the fervor — to become an image is merely the fantasy of renouncing all contracts and flourishing because of it, all without the consciousness that one can only arrive here by violating all contracts you’ve made with others.

I know this is always where I end up, harping on the importance of constructing the social as a cooperative, dialectical activity, but it seems to me a crucial story to keep telling, as the other stories — the dream story, the image story, the individual story — seem played out and discredited. None of this is to say that individuals don’t exist; it’s the task of the individual, after all, to win other individuals to their side, and we do this with various forms of rhetoric — including the rhetoric, I guess, of kindness, of fairness, and (if it isn’t too embarrassing to say) of honor. These are contractual ethics. None of it’s “real” in the platonic sense — there’s nothing “eternal” or a priori about society — but it’s real in the sense that you and I, in agreeing that it’s real, make it real.

This construction of reality is something fascists have always understood, and it’s why they’ve seized or come close to power in one nation after another. But they don’t accomplish this through consensus; they do it through force, shock, fervor, and confusion, all of which are powerless in the face of mutual agreement. “That’s a lie” only loses its traction among people who agree on the truth when “the truth” is naïvely placed outside our purview — when liberalism, for example, starts talking about “human nature” or “eternal truths,” or when the truth itself is elevated to some divine stature. This distinction may seem minor but ultimately it’s the fork in the path of action: Either one defends and insists upon the truth, or one sits around smugly proclaiming that everyone, someday, will magically figure out which god is false and which is real.

1. One easy way to determine if a contract is unilateral is by violating it and seeing what happens. A unilateral contract is just a contract that one party (but only one) can violate at any time without consequence.

2. As of this morning, I have a “streak” of 2,260 days. If I were in Paris tomorrow, I’d be unable to order lunch.

3. “Good deal,” “cartoon,” “destroy,” “replaceable,” “unsatisfactory,” “clientele,” and “hideous”; I’m genuinely amiss at how I ended up at the bottom of this particular well.

4. It occurred to me while writing this that the contemporary corporate mandate, in most user agreements, that all disputes be resolved through “arbitration” as a way to ward off a threat of “class action” is so Marxist you can only stroke your beard and laugh.

5. As far as contracts go, don’t forget a certain businessman who made his name by refusing to pay people he agreed to pay.

6. What catapulted Luigi Mangione to instant civic sainthood was his proof that it’s still possible for those in power to face consequences for violating a social contract, and this is precisely why liberal columnists condemned him.