Over a decade ago, journalist Eric Felten claimed that “most of us make more legal agreements in a year than our grandparents made in a lifetime.” The same statement—if we equate “legal agreements” with “written contracts”—would be true today only if you changed “in a year” to “every day or two.”

So entwined are written contracts in our lives that unwinding them all may seem hopeless. That’s why even though just about everyone agrees that the voluminous, proliferating phenomenon of online terms and conditions presents a problem of growing scope, generations of scholars and activists have made almost no headway in coming up with a practical solution.