Consumers First, Digital Citizenry Second: Through the Gateway of Standard-form Contracts
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The digital and global economy has fundamentally changed the very concept of a consumer, the consumer’s place in society, and the relationship between the consumer and other actors, such as governments. By buying goods and using services, consumers still play the role of passive actors in the market economy. However, in today’s society, with the increased digitization of goods and services, not only does traditional consumption behaviour make us consumers, but virtually all aspects of our daily lives and social interactions are made possible by, and conditional on, being consumers first. Indeed, citizens must consume digital products in order to fulfill other social, economic, and cultural roles. Before we acquire a digital good or service that enables us to be producers, farmers, creators, learners, critical thinkers, or citizens, we must click on or sign lengthy terms and conditions—standard-form contracts—imposing the provider’s terms of service. Standard-form contracts lead to increased private ordering in the digital context—that is, service providers building their own rules and enforcement mechanisms in lieu of, or parallel to, state’s rules and enforcement mechanisms. Standard-form contracts have now become the dominant regulatory mechanism of consumer relationships. Migrated from the commercial space, those standard-form contracts have also become important regulatory mechanisms of digital civic participation, as governments are now using such contracts for service delivery. This chapter frames the relationship between consumers and citizens within the context of our growing dependency on standard-form contracts that effectively make us consumers first. It identifies the ineffectiveness in the current legal rules governing standard-form contracts and provides a related policy research agenda needed to limit the expansive private ordering of standard-form contracts.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.024 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.020 | 0.029 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.019 | 0.004 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".