Do not accept terms and conditions

The world should just follow the Dutch and stop pretending like explicit consent occurs or matters for standard terms and conditions:

http://www.dutchcivillaw.com/civilcodebook066.htm

As long as you had the opportunity to read them, you and the company are bound by them even if it is clear you never read them. Surprising terms and conditions are always voidable. There is a whole large list of voidable stipulations. I prefer Canadian law (this differs by province) where voidable stipulations invalidate the contract to a standard contract on the other hand.

Why not go further?

There should be a master book of civil contracts that can be filled out in a "Mad Libs" sort of way, but nothing else is legally enforcable. Every sales contract or employment term is the same with only narrow, permitted variations.

This could streamline the legal system because it turns potentially infinite contract designs into a much more constrained problem space. You'd quickly build enough precedent that even lay people could understand the mechanism.

Trying to add a new term would require revising the master book, which would be a very public and political process that would likely shame the instigator (just why are you so desperate to force arbitration?)

The whole "contracts are a voluntary, negotiated, meeting of the minds" perspective feels quaint and 1700s, from an era before billion-dollar companies, and even before formal law schools. Negotiations are rarely between equal parties on a level footing these days.

I too often idealize that.

The problem as I see it, when people start offering novel services it is hard to have a ready made contract for that. Hence the idea of reasonability and voidability that so many people have forgotten. If the term is clearly unbalanced in favor of the controlling party (ability to terminate the contract at any time without penalty while the contractee faces a penalty for early termination) without some specific consideration for this imbalance. These general reasonability notions need to be enforced more agressively. Instead, too many people think that anything goes once you signed the contract, but at the extreme end of this, slavery is clearly illegal. So there is clearly a line where you cannot agree to unreasonable things, but people forget that.

So I think these reasonability clauses were our attempt to capture novel contracts, but they have lost their teeth in the minds of people and in our legal systems. Then I start to entertain the enumerated contracts approach again...