Contracts and Contagions

TL;DR

We can do better than contracts!

Forking @Kieran's Social Backup thread:

"2. Contract"

• Once sufficient responses have been returned, Alice collates all consenting parties and initializes a contract
• The UI asks Alice for her secret, she enters it and selects a quorum of cosigners.
• Can either be totally private (only she can see) or includes the recps so they know who each other are and the details of the agreement (e.g. how many required to reassemble the password).
• the secret is not recorded in the database

I am wondering if it is worth interrogating our conceptions around "Contracts". It has been on my list to deep dive into the neoliberal aspects of Contracts. I have been told that an excellent starting point is "Contract & Contagion" by Angela Mitropoulos

Here's a snippet from this blog: https://studywhattroublesyou.wordpress.com/2013/06/21/contract-and-contagion/

Angela Mitropoulos’ Contract and Contagion is a wide-reaching and ambitious book that makes important critical interventions on the role of contracts and debt in neo-liberal society with reference to a politics of the household (oikonomics) as the nexus of race, class, gender and sexuality.*

According to Mitropoulos –

Contract is the hyphen situated between politics and economics, which is to say, the emergence of political economy from moral economy, and the points of articulation between state and market.

Citing the US dollar as a global currency backed up by global military power as an example, Mitropoulos states that debts are ‘guaranteed by violence, whether implied or deployed.’ This observation appears hyperbolic but America does have all the guns and money. Mitropoulos analyses the racialised and gendered dimensions of surplus labour arguing that the construction of slavery as an attribute of blackness and unpaid domestic labour as a property of femininity are forms of ‘naturally constituted debt.’

Mitropoulos is at her most engaging on the subject of infrastructure. Pointing towards the occupations of Tahrir Square, Wall Street, and Oakland Mitropoulos describes how movement and relation are changed by the improvised nature of ‘infra-political’ interventions such as building toilets in homeless encampments, delivering healthcare to undocumented migrants and creating phone apps for evading police kettling. Here, according to Mitropoulos, activism creates new infrastructures for survival, ‘generating nomadic inventiveness rather than a royal expertise.’ – neat!

I’ll leave you with Mitropoulos’ words on why you should give a damn about oikonomics –

A politics of the household turns on that most materialist of propositions: we are how we live. **

cc: @pbx1-deleted @Kieran @mix @Alanna @Nikolai @peg

Here is a copy of the book.

contractandcontagion-web.pdf

If you're reading on an e-reader I suggest you read in landscape mode to save your eyes

The contract is capitalism’s most cherished
axiom. It is a projective geometry of obligation and its interiorised
calculus. Emerging simultaneous with capitalism, it has been crucial, among other things, to the organisation of private property and the
subjective dispositions of capitalist legal architecture. It is also, I would
suggest, the very sense of the performative. Briefly put: contracts are
preoccupied with the transformation of contingency into necessity
as a specifically capitalist problem.

pg 20

Still, one does not need to resort to Nietzsche’s heroic rendition of artistic creation to note that contract is the often-violent projection of a
genealogy and an infrastructure of obligation or – put in simultaneously
moral and economic terms – of indebtedness. ndeed, for social contract theorists such as Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
their origin-stories of the social contract were explicitly put forward as
fiction, albeit as they saw it, a necessary fiction.

p.g. 22

What new fictions can we weave which are not so implicitly entwined with a notion of indebtedness?

Love these provocations @Alanna.

To be specific, within the context of the social backup that @Kieran is currently building - that we have all be involved in researching, I am trying to understand what we mean by contract.

There are certain affordances which #ssb bearths (I think - this will need peer reviewing by @Dominic and others) - specifically

1. It is possible for people to be involved in being a 'holder-participant' without fear that if they lose their computer, they will lose the secret.

This affordance, in my mind, completely negates the need for a contract. I understand a contract as needed to navigate future risk and to mutually distribute the costs of a future "loss".

In the presence of a p2p social protocol the risk of loss of data is highly improbable.

What we're actually talking about is the following question:

"If I come and ask you for some help to put my shards back together, will you help me do it?"

Is a contract the best way to think about this? I feel it is not.

Am I making any sense?

Broke this out into the twittersphere also:

https://twitter.com/dan_mi_sun/status/991811586720284672

https://twitter.com/dan_mi_sun/status/991988360154501120

From Dyne.org twitter:

In @decodeproject we have explicitly avoided the term "smart contract" and substituted with "smart rule" which at least makes explicit there is coercion into the equation, while referring to rules on how private data can be processed.

Quick thought: underlying plumbing is "smart rules". Agreements between people can be thought of as "spells".

@Alanna

All the utopian futures I've imagined rely quite a lot on people making agreements and keeping promises with each other consensually (and often writing the down).

What did you feel about the absence of such mechanisms from #walkaway ?

@Alanna it worked in walkaway because of being in a post-scarcity environment, where if someone destroyed your house, machines would just rebuild it for you down the road. Also, there were quite a few examples of promises made in that reality, mostly emotional ones like "I will be there for you" and "Let's agree to have a child together".

True! I like the framing of "promise" over contract

Thinking about how same-as and user-invites will work, I started to realize they were also somewhat like "smart contracts" (I didn't delve too deeply into the possible meaning of that term, though). Declaring two feeds "same-as" essentially publishes an agreement that A and B mutually agree they represent the same entity. I also recently suggested the same idea could be used for human groups such as "companies". It's an agreement, but it doesn't really oblige anyone to do anything, but the idea is that other feeds react to it.

User-invites are also similar to this, by inviting someone, you permit them access to your community, and also reveal a visible link between you and them. Others may interpret this to also represent certain responsibilities - such as that the host has some responsiblity for the behaviour of the guest, but nothing is formally specified.

@alanna I'm not sure would agree that crypto constitutes "private property" - I consider private property mean property enforced by the state / 3rd party violence, but I think crypto is more like a bicycle lock: the locked bicycle is left in public, but the key (or lock combination, or private key) remains my personal property. I acknowledge this is somewhat ambigious because the security of bicycle "ownership" depends on the fact that you can't really just go around cutting through bicycle locks, at least not in broad daylight, but I'm not sure if this is primarily due to police or cultural mores.

TL;DR

Why don't we give people options! We could have an umbrella name such as Agreement and then under this we can have a less tight version and then we can have a contract version and let people decide amongst themselves!

@bobhaugen "In ValueFlows, we are using the word Agreement between agents. An Agreement is a bundle of Commitments, where you could substitute the word Promise for Commitment and it would mean the same.

This is useful in economic networks for planning what will happen in the near future. Like, what you have promised to do for others and what they have promised to do for you, and if any of those are reciprocal promises."

I really like this :) To me it feels like an umbrella notion under which "Contracts" could be a particular subset.

@Alanna "I think the difference in connotation between promise and contract might be about what happens if it's broken. A promise is between people personally, staked on social reputation and the strength/value of the relationship. A contract implies impersonal adjudication through legal means, based on laws/policies or a third party authority's decision."

Yeah, agreed. Over the weekend as I was hiking through juggle to the highest point in #fiji with @Kieran much of this stuff was swirling around in the back of my brain.

I was trying to imagine what issuing contracts amongst friends would look like in this particular case. I imagined it would be something like the following:

I send an invite out to my chosen crew mates I want to be involved with backup of my ssb key:

Along with this invite is a simple contract. It stipulates what the expectations/agreements are in as clear as possible legalese (perhaps with a common english translation so that it is super clear). It also lays out what penalties and recourse will happen if they fail to fulfill the contract. Presumably there would also be a timeframe within which they would need to satisfy their obligations. I guess it would also stipulate what would happen in the case of a failure to meet their obligation - it might define arbritrators, or it might define which courts/legal system is applicable in our case (if I am asking a friend in USA to back up for me and I am Fiji - we would need to decide which of those legal systems we fall back to. Or perhaps I would choose Australia or UK as I am a resident in those countries more permanently than Australia).

From my experience of working with friends in a more contractual and formal sense either through work or accomodation I have noticed there is a trend that those with legal connections or money may get their own legal advice about the contract. In the absence of this access (and even with it) it would be quite likely this would require face to face or voice to voice communication.

Ok - so, now that we have that loose template we can see that one of the underlying tools at our disposal is the "Contract". We'd need to get legal advice about how to manage this and design it. I guess we would need to figure out how flexibile it can be with regards to people being in different legal jurisdictions. Would it be possible to have a contract which is general enough for our desired use cases but clear enough that participant understand and robust enough that it can function effectively as a contract (i.e. if something goes wrong there is a clear path towards.... not sure).

This would all need time, resources, expertise and $$$.

I've never seen an example of this granularity of contracturalism between friends so I am not sure if it would work or not.

@bobhaugen

Do you have any links out as part of ValueFlows where you have had the "Agreements" discussion. I would be super interested to see how y'all arrived at that terminology and if "Contracts" came up within the discussions.

Thanks for the librarian / archivist work @bobhaugen.

This discussion about proliferating contracts makes me think of this research

Users actively access about 27 apps on their smartphones every month. Even though the number of used apps per month doesn’t increase very fast (from 23,2 apps in 2011 to 26,8 apps in 2013) the problem of not reading the Terms of Service and Privacy Policies persists as a common problem in the apps usage1. However, the average number of installed apps for android users is about 952. Analysis have shown that a Privacy Policy has an average length of 2.518 words and takes about 10 minutes to read, which means that a user needs to spend roughly 950 minutes (15,83 hours or 2 work days) in order to read the PP of the apps they have installed.

Worth keeping in mind. I know I don't read all the T&C's of various companies - I just assume they are not operating along the same lines of interests as my own and I actively make a Faustian Pact in using them (the apps/sites/services).

@bobhaugen

All the #valueflows issues I have read back through remain useful over the time they have been there. As we clarify our direction in #mmt I plan to spend some time creating an issue in the valueflows project through the vf lense.

Thanks as always for taking the time to filter, index and cross-link!

From Akseli Virtanen one of the founding team of both Robin Hood Coop and #ecsa

We are using gift and contingent claim (derivative) VS. money and contract. See Ben Lee: Derivative and the wealth of societies. Also self-organizing proposal VS. contract. This is the line of thinking we are working with Brian Massumi. See 99 Thesis on revaluating the value.

Ben Lee: Derivative and the wealth of societies