Ulysses pact

A Ulysses pact is a freely made decision designed to bind oneself in the future, and the article describes it as a concept used in medicine, technology and public policy. In medicine it is most often discussed regarding advance directives, where controversy exists over whether a decision made in one state of health should bind a person in a markedly worse state. The article notes that in the technology context, Apple's decision to engineer the iPhone so it could not read its own data during the FBI–Apple encryption dispute has been described as "a digital Ulysses pact," and Cory Doctorow calls binary transparency a "much stronger, more effective Ulysses pact."