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 — a DSC is a program in a social contracts programming language, which specifies the digital actions parties may take. Parties are identified via public keys, and the one type of action is a “digital speech act” — signing an utterance with a private key and sending it to the other parties.
Relevant to self-governance, networked technologies, and the constitutional frameworks of Network Nations.
Link: CEUR-WS