Contracts are collaborative social processes for confronting an unknowable future, not fixed plans.
Evidence
Like builders, people in contractual agreements undertake this kind of collaboration. It’s not simply finding the way through a maze to an already agreed-upon end point, but rather the continuous refinement and clarification of ends and means in the face of unanticipated obstacles. This sociality of contract may entail conflict, frustration, oppression, or anger, but it can also produce trust, cooperation, cohesion, and adaptation as the means through which human beings confront an unknowable future. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1051
Categorization
- XREF: This account of contract-as-social-process echoes the trust literature (Shapiro, Milgrom) earlier curated — contracts as relationship-bonds rather than complete specifications. — connects to: The uncontract substitutes automated compulsion for millennia of contractual social work. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 687; Contract originates in shared wills and promises toward an uncertain future — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1045; Contracting, not trust, brings the future into the present (+4 more)
Broader Connections
- Legitimate politics is cooperative interdependence among agents with unknowable futures
#expands(0.80) — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 1186 - Deliberately incomplete contracts force ongoing negotiation that courts cannot provide
#exemplifies(0.78) — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 2526 - Contracting, not trust, brings the future into the present
#qualifies(0.75) - Freedom to will requires tolerating uncertainty through shared promises
#exemplifies(0.75) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1061 - Agreements require backward calculation from the other’s future perspective, not forward prediction.
#complicates(0.72) — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 788