Ninth law of worker entropy

The anal paradox is a theory of negotiation. It proposes that as the number of people involved in negotiating a contract increases the contract’s brevity, and comprehensibility and utility decreases. The anal paradox predicts that the longer a negotiation continues, the more complicated the agreement will become, even though its meaningful content will stay constant or, more likely, decline.

Briefly stated, however anal it may be to add qualifications, clarifications, for the avoidance of doubts, without limitations and other forensic celery and flannel, once these additions have been added, it is even more anal to request their removal again, seeing as, Q.E.D., it would make no difference to the legal or economic substance of the agreement if you did. So, inevitably, one doesn’t die in a ditch about it, however appealing by comparison that might, to a prose stylist, seem.

There is a threshold (the “Schwarzschild radius of document comprehension”) beyond which the contract passes irreversibly into a kind of heat death of ennui and unintelligibility. An Earth-bound lawyer crossing that threshold passes a point of no return: she will be unable to resist the fascination of trying to understand the contract, will hold out hope of rescuing it from semantic oblivion, and will eventually be consumed by the colossal forces of gravitational tedium, eventually being regurgitated into a parallel universe as an exchange-traded derivatives specialist.

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