Not the AI Era. The Contract Era.
The most valuable thing you can offer in an AI economy is proof that something cost you.
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Beneath all of the noise and chaos of culture right now, there is the same violation showing up over and over again. It’s a trespass that bridges both our social anger and our technological anxieties: every contract is breaking at once.
The reason someone’s incensed that your entire blog post is written in AI-first person is because there was a contract - they give you their attention, you give them the interiority of your mind. Even if AI helps you do that better for your audience, it’s not what the reader agreed to.
Getting displaced by AI, either in your job or in your marriage when your spouse starts confiding in a chatbot more than you, is the same implicit contract being broken. People agreed to a partnership of mutual sacrifice and growth, not efficiency.
When a manager gives you feedback that is blatant copy + paste from chatgpt, it’s not about the feedback itself. It’s the contract that you were in partnership with one another, and that they would engage in the mutual labor of thinking, not bypass it. But they opt out of that contract with a single slack message.
And what makes it messy is that different people have different invisible contracts. I might not mind it if a creative uses AI because my contract is about getting good work fast. I may see AI as another tool like Figma or Adobe. But to others, the contract is about getting something human-crafted directly from the creator, and that’s why more and more clients are putting no-AI clauses in their agreements.
Some will say these are norms, not contracts. But norms are just descriptions of what people do. Contracts carry obligation, and breach carries grievance. The reason this moment hurts the way it does is that everyone's reaching for the language of betrayal, not the language of changing fashions. That's how you know it was a contract.
AI is revealing all of the implicit social contracts we hold dear, and the pain we feel when they’re violated. And now suddenly we can see broken contracts everywhere.
These are not artificial agreements. They are deep promises we make to each other from the moment we enter relationship with society. They are contracts born of instinct and formed from childhood.
And that’s all I could see when a friend recently slacked this message about her 12-year old child, their friend group, and how even our kids are navigating the broken social norms presented in the AI age:
Even the kids can feel something fundamental is being broken.
We’re losing our ability to intuitively trust what we’re receiving. We don’t believe the feedback was legit, the blog post was honest, or that the apology was real because AI separates the symbol of care from the labor of care.
So much of our interpersonal exchanges are actually parts of a very sophisticated gift economy. As my internet friend and digital anthropologist Giles Crouch says, “Our knowledge transfer amongst us has been about gifting. Not only does using AI break the social contract, it messes around with how we see knowledge as a gift exchange.”
In all of these examples, the question is, “Do you really care?” Are you giving the gift of intention coupled with labor?
AI is making us renegotiate our implicit agreements at scale, but it’s only one ripple in a wave of forces that has been building for the past decade. If we want to understand where this trail of broken contracts is taking us in the future, we need to first see it in the larger context of a society rewriting all of its contracts, big and small.
The implicit scripts of dating, marriage, and parenting are breaking apart into a series of negotiations that used to happen by default. Couples are drafting relationship agreements, friends are signing platonic co-parenting contracts, and prenups, once the domain of the wealthy, have become a millennial default. When your relationship doesn't fit a neat script, you have to write it yourself. Our relationships are evolving in very new and exciting ways, but all the assumptions culture used to preload now show up as terms that have to be hammered out by hand.
Reality itself is being renegotiated. After the White House Correspondents' Dinner shooting, conspiracy theories and "STAGED" trended almost immediately. After years of touting fake news, Trump finally lost control of his most powerful weapon of disinformation. Nobody believed what they saw because the implicit contract that there's a shared reality we all have access to no longer holds.
A bettor in Paris used a hairdryer on an airport weather sensor to rig and win a climate bet on Polymarket. A US Special Forces soldier was arrested for making a winning bet on Maduro’s capture. The implicit promise that reality is something we collectively observe is being replaced by forces incentivized to manipulate it.
The capital S, capital C “Social Contract”, our deepest implicit agreement of all, is also being renegotiated. Americans are moving out of the US. Both political parties are fracturing into more extreme factions, with the left in particular proposing redesigns of the social contract. Sam Altman has published a policy paper calling for a new social contract to handle superintelligence. The terms of living together, which used to be taken as given, are now explicitly up for grabs, and everyone from voters to expats to tech CEOs feels licensed to draft a new version.
We need to start addressing the size of what’s happening here. Every layer of agreement that culture used to hold for us - how to love, how to work, how to share a country, how to know what’s real - is being pulled into the open at the same time, and we are being asked to author new terms for all of it, without much help. The norms that used to absorb the risk and ambiguity for us are gone. There’s no shared script left to fall back on.
Nobody really knows how to rewrite all of these contracts, both the minuscule and the grand, and yet it has become our single most important (and invisible) job.
Some of this is exhilarating. New markets, new families, new political imaginations all become possible because the old defaults stopped doing their work, and power gets redistributed.
But some of it is genuinely heavy, and the resentment people feel right now at having to spell out what used to go without saying, is real and worth taking seriously. We are doing, all at once, the work that culture used to do on our behalf. That is the era we’re actually in. Not the AI era. The contract era.
Everything has become a contract that needs to be rewritten.
That is a monumental and exhausting task. We’re just starting to see what this moment demands of us, and we are going to become fatigued. Building new paradigms is tiring work, and in the process of rewriting every tiny contract to every huge one, we will reinvent the world around us. On some intuitive level, everyone understands that, and the promise of a new world rising from the ashes of the old one is the drive beneath all of this. Of course every contract would need to get rewritten.
But after that we’re going to see something else.
What we’re going to see emerge is a hard cultural lean into the emotional labor that all of our new technologies and systems cannot replicate. More embodied experiences. More extreme commitments. More costly signals. More gestures that carry consequence because they cannot be undone. Showing up in person when a text would do. Saying something difficult to someone’s face. Creating products and experiences that take real time to make. Putting real money, real time, real reputation, real bodies on the line. Making the kind of move you can’t take back.
Anything reversible that could have been typed into a prompt is already discounted on arrival. Anything that costs the giver something real is appreciating.
And that goes way beyond the “human-made”. Proof of care doesn’t mean something was made without machines. It means it was made with intention and a hard emotional cost. It was created for connection, whether that be in work, in love, in business or in art. It was produced through someone’s sacrifice.
It is a gift. This is the rebirth of the gifting economy.
Symbols of care can be generated infinitely and for free in our new reality, and now the only thing that holds value is verifiable cost - proof that something scarce was spent on you. Presence. Time. Reputation. Body. Risk. lt’s real when it carries consequence.
Builders, leaders, brands and creators will be sorted against a new question: “What did this actually cost you to make, and can I tell?” It’s the question your customers are already asking, your kids are already asking, your partner is already asking. The ones who can answer it are about to become very, very valuable.
That’s your new contract, and you won’t need to rewrite it.
Rebuild Yourself
You can make a million bucks building something small but meaningful for your community with AI. There are plenty of VC funded founders that built great companies and still walked away with pennies. Even after giving it the best years of their life.
We’re done with the mythology that success means a billion dollar market cap with no profitability. Or that the winners are not the creators themselves. Or that small problems don't deserve solutions.
In this new equation, the only remaining differentiating factor is not who or what you have access to. There’s no technical skills gap or funding amount that can stand in your way.
The only difference now is who you are as a person. You have to start by building yourself.
It's the willingness to change the work and also let the work change you. That's why for last month’s Exposure Therapy theme of How To Build, I really wanted to give our members the perspective + fire they need to fulfill their potential.
I balled my eyes out last week in an Exposure Therapy workshop with Victoria Song where she helped us understand how to ‘bend reality’. Literally reorganizing the terrain within yourself so that it rearranges the reality of your outside world. This is the real work now.
But I’ve always brought in programming about AI, creativity, and growth that members can’t get anywhere else - and almost definitely NOT through their work. We've had experts and thinkers come and do sessions on designing your brain/ AI interface, the lego model of building, methodologies for strategy + AI, how AI changing the entire value chain… as well as a whole raft of guides, therapists, neuroscientists and artists take us through the equally important work of creating ourselves into the kinds of founders that these breakthroughs demand.
There is a lush undergrowth of opportunity that awaits us in the coming decades, and the fact is that building anything will always come down to you - who you are and how willing you are to move. And that’s about to be more rewarding, and potentially more profitable, than ever.
I know that AI and the consolidation of power have huge risks right now, I take that very seriously, but the future is never just one thing. It’s many things happening at once, and power takes many forms.
Don’t let anyone take it from you, especially when it has never been easier to seize. Find the people and ideas and communities that enable you to see the world, and most importantly yourself, differently.
And if you want to join our Exposure Therapy community, I’m holding our next info session this Thursday, May 7th. Come and I’ll tell you all about it.
One Last Thought
The Botox backlash isn't the revolution you think it is. We didn't suddenly develop new morals around the beauty industry and aging. We just starting feeling a bad economy and loss of safety in the world.
Yours,
Hi, I’m Jasmine Bina. I’m a brand strategist and cultural futurist.
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Very refreshing perspective and insightful post. Thank you.
Invisible contracts is a sharp way to bring this into awareness, Jasmine. The insight hit me in the truest possible way--the thing that was hiding in plain sight, a structural pattern emerging across different domains simultaneously. I'll be sharing this widely. Such a useful framing.