Digital Social Contracts: A Foundation for an Egalitarian and Just Digital Society

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2005.06261v6
• Date: Thu, 17 Sep 2020 08:39:43 GMT
• Title: Digital Social Contracts: A Foundation for an Egalitarian and Just Digital Society
• Abstract summary: A digital social contract is a voluntary agreement between people that is specified, undertaken, and fulfilled in the digital realm. It embodies the notion of "code-is-law" in its purest form. We present a formal definition of a digital social contract as agents that communicate asynchronously via crypto-speech acts.
• Score: 21.09021899088913
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
• Abstract: Almost two centuries ago Pierre-Joseph Proudhon proposed social contracts -- voluntary agreements among free people -- as a foundation from which an egalitarian and just society can emerge. A \emph{digital social contract} is the novel incarnation of this concept for the digital age: a voluntary agreement between people that is specified, undertaken, and fulfilled in the digital realm. It embodies the notion of "code-is-law" in its purest form, in that a digital social contract is in fact a program -- code in a social contracts programming language, which specifies the digital actions parties to the social contract may take; and the parties to the contract are entrusted, equally, with the task of ensuring that each party abides by the contract. Parties to a social contract are identified via their public keys, and the one and only type of action a party to a digital social contract may take is a "digital speech act" -- signing an utterance with her private key and sending it to the other parties to the contract. Here, we present a formal definition of a digital social contract as agents that communicate asynchronously via crypto-speech acts, where the output of each agent is the input of all the other agents. We outline an abstract design for a social contracts programming language and show, via programming examples, that key application areas, including social community; simple sharing-economy applications; egalitarian currency networks; and democratic community governance, can all be expressed elegantly and efficiently as digital social contracts.

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