TheGuardian April 24 2014
We live in a time of terms and conditions. Never before have we signed or agreed so many. But one thing hasn’t changed: we still rarely read them.
According to a Fairer Finance survey, small print for some companies now runs to more than 30,000 words (the length of a short novel) and, unsurprisingly, 73% of people admit to not reading all the fine print. Of those who do, only 17% say they understand it.
For a few years I was one of the 27% ploughing through the turgid fine print. Researching a book about a lawyer, I became obsessed with contracts. Then one day, after reading reams of legal gobbledygook, I experienced something similar to the moment when Neo sees the cascading Matrix code: I saw that below our day-to-day lives runs a confluence of tiny rules shaping our reality. This underworld only bursts to the surface when things go wrong. Like when you crash your scooter in Bali and realise that your travel insurance doesn’t cover scooter accidents. Or in my case, when I misread (ignored) the fine print of my New Zealand residency and was almost deported.