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

TL;DR

This paper introduces the concept of digital social contracts, formalizing voluntary, code-based agreements in the digital realm to promote egalitarian and just digital societies, with applications in community, economy, and governance.

Contribution

It provides a formal definition, design outline, and programming examples for digital social contracts, demonstrating their potential in various social and economic applications.

Findings

Formal definition of digital social contracts as crypto-speech agents

Design outline for a social contracts programming language

Examples showing applications in community, economy, and governance

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.