Interview with a person who reads the terms and conditions

Subject: withheld by request, which he made in writing, citing a clause Location: a coffee shop of his choosing, chosen — he said — for its posted policies Duration: scheduled for one hour; see below

#The search

The claim reached us the way these claims do: secondhand, at a party, presented as mythology. A friend of a friend reads them. All of them. The whole agreement. We have chased thinner leads — we once spent an entire investigation failing to identify a man in a pink ski mask — so we committed. Eleven weeks. We interviewed four pretenders: two skimmers, one man who reads only the section headings aloud in a lawyer voice, and one woman who reads the privacy policy, which is adjacent but, as she told us herself with real sadness, "not the same church."

Week eleven produced the subject. He was verified by a witness who watched him decline a software update at a moment of genuine inconvenience, on the grounds that the new terms "changed the arbitration language." The witness said the room went quiet. We booked the interview.

#The interview

He arrived early, read the release we'd brought, and made two amendments in the margin. We agreed to them. We want it noted that we agreed to amendments on our own paperwork within ninety seconds of meeting him.

Asked when it started, he named a specific afternoon in 2011 — an update to a music service's agreement, 54 pages. "I was going to click through. Everyone clicks through. And I had this thought I've never gotten rid of: everyone clicks through. Somewhere in the world there has to be one person who actually reads it. And I looked around the room, and I realized nobody else was going to be that person."

He read all 54 pages. It took most of a weekend. "Was anything in there?" we asked. "No," he said, with the calm of a man who has made peace. "There almost never is. That's not why you read it."

We asked why you read it. He looked at us the way you look at someone who has asked what the point of a lighthouse is when almost no ships crash. "So that it's read," he said. "A contract nobody reads isn't an agreement. It's a dare. I un-dare them."

#What he has found

In fourteen years: one clause granting a flashlight app the right to his contacts, declined; one loyalty program that reserved the right to rename itself "at any time, for any reason, including reasons of whimsy," which he accepted, approvingly, and printed; and one clause — he would not name the company — that he describes only as "a sentence that should not be possible in a document reviewed by counsel." He keeps it in a drawer. He would not open the drawer. This publication has a documented weakness for men with organized secrets, and we accept that he may have been performing for us, and we accept that we loved it.

#Where the interview got away

At minute forty he asked about our terms. We told him, with some pride, that the arcade has none — no accounts, scores stay in the browser, nothing to agree to.

This was the wrong thing to be proud of. What followed was a twenty-minute reversal in which he interviewed us, gently, about what "no terms" means, whether silence is a policy, and who our visitors think they're trusting when they trust nobody. We have notes. The notes are mostly questions. The interview was scheduled for one hour and ran two and a half, and the second half was ours to answer for.

#Findings

We went looking for a curiosity — a man with an unusual hobby, good for eight hundred words. We found instead the last participant in a ritual the rest of us abandoned: the reading of the thing before the signing of the thing. Every unread agreement on earth is a room where one party stopped listening, and he is a man who goes from room to room, listening, on behalf of nobody, for free.

He has never once needed it. He does not expect to. Lighthouses, again.

Status of subject: unverified, at his own request, pending our compliance with amendment two.

Related: peer review: your grandmother's lasagna — the other document in this publication's files that exactly one living person can truly read. And if you'd like to feel what agreeing-without-reading actually is, wheel of torture will spin you through four rounds of terms it never showed you, odds manipulated, all sales final.