[eBook] Terms may apply: a handbook about the systems we quietly agree to
- Sérgio Tavares, ph.D.
- Apr 4
- 3 min read
Updated: Apr 7
You can read or download the full book here:
📕 The first Red Zone Manual is out now! It’s called The 100 Worst Terms and Conditions You’ve Already Accepted, and it began with a simple question: What exactly are we agreeing to when we click “I agree”?
What I found wasn’t just buried clauses or clever legal workarounds. It was a design culture. A system. A quietly structured way of removing agency—legal, social, and psychological—while still offering the appearance of choice.
This book is not about getting users to read the fine print. It’s about showing how the fine print became unreadable on purpose.
Why it matters
The digital interface has replaced the courtroom as the site of decision-making, and we hardly noticed..
We often think of Terms & Conditions as a legal genre—dry, forgettable, irrelevant. But that assumption is part of the design. In reality, these agreements are where key decisions about user rights are made: whether you can sue a company, whether your data is sold, and whether your content becomes part of someone else’s machine learning model.
Over time, I came to see them not just as documents, but as interfaces of power. A subtle, systemic choreography between platform design, regulatory loopholes, and corporate governance.
What surprised me most wasn’t the content of these contracts, but the consistency of what they leave out.
The book explores this condition as a kind of design system in itself—held together by three forces:
• Opacity –
• Regulatory lag – slow-moving oversight unable to keep pace with product cycles
• Performativity – how agreements become rituals without meaning
Together, these forces create a landscape where “consent” is less about understanding and more about automation. The checkbox becomes a performance of participation in systems we can’t meaningfully contest.
Key takeaways
Opacity accelerates and normalizes these practices
Vague terms, visual misdirection, unreadable legal language.
Regulatory is outpaced
A direct result of persistent opacity is that regulatory bodies are outpaced, and often cannot regulate effectively.
Consent is often symbolic
“Agreeing” is rarely based on understanding, but a pesky requirement to get to the service.
Users are not to blame
A common fallacy is blaming the end user for accepting without reading. This should not be the case.
It's a systems book
The book features real clauses in egregious contracts, and even a rank of the top offenders. But this is is not a book of outrage. I started out of curiosity and it turned out — as my projects often do — transforming my approach to the theme as I went through the rabbit hole. It’s not a takedown, nor a magnifying glass to discover things we didn't know. Sure, there are some curiosities (I didn't know that all Uber will do if a cab driver chops me to pieces is to send $500 to my family), but it’s an attempt to make a system visible, a system that deliberately acts to slow down the default speed of acceptance. And maybe, in that pause, offer some agency back.
So it is not a legal guide. It’s a systems guide to understand how design, law, language, and policy converge into a user experience that often feels frictionless, but that is an extractive experience.
HCI, foresight, Byung-Chul Han and a theory of rituals
The content (structured and researched with Deep Research from OpenAI) draws on system design, foresight, HCI, and digital philosophy. Philosophically, I lean on the works of Byung-Chul Han, whose reflections on psychopolitics and the erosion of ritual seemed like a perfect fit. His writing helped give shape to a feeling I couldn’t initially articulate: that something has been hollowed out—not just in how we use digital services, but in what participation in society now means.
The book structure is intentionally sharp and accessible. Visually, I looked into old propaganda manuals, combative activist pamphlets and retrofuture imagery (MidJourney helped with that).
For whom?
It’s written for designers, researchers, educators, policymakers, and anyone working or thinking of digital life.
There are no silver bullets. It's meant to make you think
Deliberately, I removed the chapter "things we can do about this". There aren't many. They are sort of obvious: read the key points, opt-out, walk away. But this isn't the point. I don't have fixes for the issue. I am raising awareness of the underlying system that brought us here. I'm aiming at that quiet discomfort while clicking “I agree”. This book is about that feeling.
