The uncontract replaces contract risk with private firms’ machine-built plans for guaranteed outcomes.

Evidence

Were “contract utopia” to exist, Williamson says, it would best be described as a “plan” that, like other “utopian modes,” requires “deep commitment to collective purposes” and “personal subordination.” Subordination to what? To the plan. Contract in this context of perfect rationality is what Williamson describes as “a world of planning.” Such planning was the basic institution of socialist economics, where the “new man” was idealized as possessing “a high level of cognitive competence” and therefore, it was espoused, could design highly effective plans. Varian deftly swaps out socialism’s “new man” and installs instead a market defined by surveillance capitalism’s economic imperatives, expressed through a ubiquitous computational architecture, the machine intelligence capabilities to which data are continuously supplied, the analytics that discern patterns, and the algorithms that convert them into rules. This is the essence of the uncontract, which transforms the human, legal, and economic risks of contracts into plans constructed, monitored, and maintained by private firms for the sake of guaranteed outcomes: less contract utopia than uncontract dystopia. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1052

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the ‘uncontract’ as the conceptual core of this chapter, pairing it against contract utopia and socialist planning.
• ADDENDUM: Connects to the ‘Grafting & Growth’ article’s interest in engineered systems replacing organic relationships — here, algorithmic plans replace human contractual discretion.