The Update

Every software update promises to improve your experience.

This is technically true in the sense that “improve” is a word and “experience” is a word, and the sentence is grammatically complete. What it means in practice is that something you did with three clicks will now require four, but the fourth click will be a button that didn’t exist before, which counts as new.

The phrase “improve your experience” is doing a lot of work here. It is carrying the weight of an entire industry’s relationship with honesty.

I updated my phone last week. It asked me to agree to new terms of service before I could use it. I agreed. I always agree. Everyone agrees. Nobody reads it. This is a mutual fiction we maintain so that the company can say “the user consented” and the user can say “I had a meeting in ten minutes.”

The terms of service for my phone are 47 pages long. I know this because someone told me. I believe them. I am not going to read 47 pages to find out if they’re right.

Whatever I agreed to, I agreed to it in good faith, which I believe is legally meaningless but personally comforting.