New York Times headline: “An Artist Helps iTunes’ User Agreement Go Down Easy.”
“What do Moby-Dick, Crime and Punishment and the iTunes terms and conditions agreement all have in common?” asks Joe Coscarelli at The Times. “Each is epically long, and despite a nagging feeling that you should have read it, you probably haven’t.”
That’s where artist Robert Sikoryak comes in. For his new graphic novel, Terms and Conditions, Sikoryak gave himself an especially big challenge: He took the complete text of Apple’s impossibly long, legalese-filled agreement, and mashed it up with a century’s worth of comic book characters and cartoons, including The Simpsons.
Most people sign away their rights and their privacy every time they click “I agree.” But that’s the only way you can live in the digital world in 2017. Alexis C. Madrigal, former tech editor at The Atlantic, did the numbers. If you actually read every word of every user agreement you encountered in a typical year, it would take you 76 work days to read everything. For those brave enough to try, help is now on the way in the form of Homer Simpson.