The Terms of Service Update
The terms of service have been updated and your continued use
Constitutes acceptance — there is no refuse
Button on the interface, the binary of the modern pact:
Accept or lose your photos, lose your inbox, lose the fact
Of fourteen years of digital existence in the cloud —
The terms of service update is the quietly allowed
Rewriting of the contract you initially agreed
To in a different era — the original seed
Of the sign-up and the checkbox was eleven pages then.
It’s forty-seven pages now. The lawyers in the pen
Of the legal department have been building since the start —
Each scandal adding language, each congressional hearing’s art
Of the performance of the concerned producing three new clauses
Of indemnification that the ordinary user pauses
On for half a second before clicking the accept —
Forty-seven pages and the user’s intercept
Of the content is the first line: We’ve updated our terms.
It’s the terms of service update and the nation of the worms
Inside the document that nobody has read —
The terms of service update and you might as well be wed
To the platform for the access that the terms provide —
The terms of service update and the sliding hide
Of the rights you thought you had dissolving in the legalese —
The terms of service update and the expertise
Of the lawyer writing clauses that the court will later find
Enforceable against you — the terms of service bind
The user to the product like the product owns the user’s mind.
Section 7, subsection f: We reserve the right
To modify, repurpose, license, sell, or use in any flight
Of commercial enterprise the content that you share —
Which means the photos of your children and the care-
Fully written messages and the medical concerns
You searched at 2 a.m. — the platform earns
Its revenue from what you thought was private, kept, and yours —
The terms of service told you, in the forty-seventh floors
Of the document you didn’t read, you gave it all away.
The genius of the terms of service is the display
Of the transparency that functions as a wall —
It’s not hidden, it’s right there, the forty-seven pages tall
Of the everything they’re doing printed in the font
Of the readable, available, the legal want
Of disclosure met in full — they told you what they’d do
And you agreed by clicking and the residue
Of your consent is in the database, time-stamped and clean —
The terms of service update, the machine
Of the legal shield built openly in front of you, the con
That isn’t a con because the terms were always on
The table — you just never read them, and the court
Will note your click, your timestamp, and the short
Summary: you agreed. The terms were clear. You clicked. You’re bound.
The terms of service update — the most honest sound
In corporate life — they told you everything and you said fine.
They told you everything. You clicked the line.