The uncontract substitutes automated compulsion for millennia of contractual social work.

Evidence

The uncontract is not a space of contractual relations but rather a unilateral execution that makes those relations unnecessary. The uncontract desocializes the contract, manufacturing certainty through the substitution of automated procedures for promises, dialogue, shared meaning, problem solving, dispute resolution, and trust: the expressions of solidarity and human agency that have been gradually institutionalized in the notion of “contract” over the course of millennia. The uncontract bypasses all that social work in favor of compulsion, and it does so for the sake of more-lucrative prediction products that approximate observation and therefore guarantee outcomes. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 687

Categorization

• DEFINE: Explains how the uncontract desocializes the contract by replacing trust and dialogue with automated procedures.
• DEEPTHINKING: A dense framing: contract as accumulated social work versus automated compulsion for prediction products — a paradigm-level reconception of what digital contracts actually are.
• XREF: connects to: The uncontract replaces social indeterminacy with programmed machine determinism. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 686; Automation requires active human work to organize the relinquishing of subjectivity — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 650; Algorithmic management strips workers of any human authority to contest discipline — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 119 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• The uncontract replaces social indeterminacy with programmed machine determinism. #corroborates (0.92) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 686
• Contracts are collaborative social processes for confronting an unknowable future, not fixed plans. #complicates (0.85) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1051
• Economies of action get institutionalized into automated algorithms that modify behavior #expands (0.85) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 939
• Automation requires active human work to organize the relinquishing of subjectivity #expands (0.82) — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 650
• Contracting, not trust, brings the future into the present #corroborates (0.80)
• Algorithmic management strips workers of any human authority to contest discipline #expands (0.78) — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 119