The Intention Economy

4

Lopsided Law

The law will never make men free. It is men that have got to make the law free.

—Henry David Thoreau¹

THE ARGUMENT

We’ve lived so long without freedom of contract that we’ve forgotten what it is and why it’s good for everybody. Our heads are now so accustomed to shrink wrap, click wrap, and other one-sided “agreements” that we can hardly imagine anything else in the networked world.

On January 8, 2011, Deepa Praveen was adding tags to photos on her Flickr account when a digital trap door opened and she found herself dropped onto a page with a strangely existential message: “User no longer exists.”² Everything she had created at Flickr, including her own identity there, was gone. So she sent an e-mail to Flickr’s help desk. ...