Conference item
Digital social contracts: a foundation for an egalitarian and just digital society
- 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 digital social contract (DSC) 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 DSC is 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 DSC may take is a “digital speech act” - signing an utterance with her private key and sending it to the other parties to the contract. We present a formal definition of a DSC as agents that communicate asynchronously via digital 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 hint on their applicability to social networks, sharing-economy, egalitarian currency networks, and democratic community governance.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
Actions
Access Document
- Files:
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(Preview, Version of record, pdf, 476.5KB, Terms of use)
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- Publication website:
- https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2781/paper5.pdf
Authors
Contributors
+ Feletig, P
- Role:
- Editor
+ Loreggia, A
- Role:
- Editor
+ Resca, A
- Role:
- Editor
+ Quintarelli, S
- Role:
- Editor
- Publisher:
- CEUR Workshop Proceedings
- Host title:
- Proceedings of the First International Forum on Digital and Democracy. Towards A Sustainable Evolution 2020
- Volume:
- 2781
- Pages:
- 51-60
- Series:
- CEUR Workshop Proceedings
- Place of publication:
- Aachen, Germany
- Publication date:
- 2020-12-18
- Acceptance date:
- 2020-12-14
- Event title:
- International Forum on Digital and Democracy. Towards A Sustainable Evolution 2020
- Event series:
- International Forum on Digital and Democracy
- Event location:
- Venice, Italy
- Event website:
- https://ifdad.org/edition-2020/
- Event start date:
- 2020-12-10
- Event end date:
- 2020-12-11
- ISSN:
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1613-0073
- Language:
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English
- Keywords:
- Pubs id:
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1105599
- Local pid:
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pubs:1105599
- Deposit date:
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2021-05-11
- ARK identifier:
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Cardelli et al.
- Copyright date:
- 2020
- Rights statement:
- © 2020 by the authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
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