From Baby-selling to Boilerplate: Reflections on the Limits of the Infrastructures of the Market
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Market-inalienability has a central place in developed societies that embrace private law institutions and a traditional understanding of the role of the polity in underwriting, managing, and preserving those institutions. Market-inalienability is a form of non-commodification. Taking up the issue of what things or relationships can be treated as commodities, I first critique a mode of inquiry—a traditional view of law and economics—that finds no problem with commodification of anything whatsoever. Counter to this mode of reasoning, I review two points of view that consider some kinds of commodification wrongful. Finding neither of these anti-commodification theories satisfactory, I review in some detail the example of baby-selling to show the dilemmas of commodification and the complexity of arguments about it. I then turn to the practice of standardized fine-print contracts (“boilerplate”) that routinely waive the background legal rights of those who receive them. This practice of using contract to escape basic rights commodifies some rights that ought to be market-inalienable. Such rights should remain permanently in the care of the polity and should not be treated as objects of trade.
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.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 it