Signal Formalising Grassroots Social Contracts: From Legal Text to Grassroots Platforms

Summary

The paper revisits Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's two-centuries-old vision of a social contract that is reciprocal, imposes obligation only through personal promise, is subject to no external authority, and is freely accepted and signed by all participants, of the nature of a contract of exchange. It combines this with a 'grassroots' property of digital platforms—that one could make a contract with all as with some, and that multiple platform instances may coalesce by mutual consent—to define grassroots social contracts, adding two further conditions: people are free to deal with each other, and there is no external register of people. The authors show that a grassroots social contract can be transformed into a working grassroots platform through an abstraction cascade, from the contract text to formal act schemas, verified syntactically to be grassroots, and then to volition-guarded multiagent atomic transactions. Any contract meeting three decidable conditions—Introduction, Provenance, and Volition—is proven to be syntactically grassroots. They prove the protocol realizing such a contract is grassroots and volitionally so, and classify clauses into three legal types—enforced, attested, and undertaken—illustrated with a grassroots social graph and grassroots currencies.