ThoughtInfection, Feb. 22, 2014

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a post with 10 things that amazed me about bitcoin (here). I just can’t stop thinking about the idea that I brought up in the final point of that post, specifically that bitcoin could enable the development of self-enforcing contracts. It is just such a huge game changer that a program could hold wealth in a way that is inaccessible to anyone, and then distribute said wealth based on defined and agreed mathematical rules.

One example I have been thinking about is that I could create a contract to support this blog, whereby readers could donate their support to the contract but I would only get paid out a certain amount (or perhaps a percentage of the total pool) for every post I make. In this way, donors would be able to give their support but also would have some form of assurances that they would continue to receive content for their donation. Additional complexity could also be used to enhance the effectiveness of such contracts; things like such as word requirements, per reader bonuses, cost recovery clauses, an expiry dates when unused money should to be returned to a donor etc.

While applying this to a blog is a rather mundane example, I can imagine this could be exactly how donation driven projects will be run in the future (such as charities, scientific foundations, maybe even governments). 

All of this got me thinking that this kind of programmatic wealth distribution is exactly what contracts already do. A lawyer draws up a piece of paper that says I am going to do A, so you will pay me B. What self-enforcing contracts change is that we no longer necessarily need a court system to arbitrate contract law, instead the contract will be mathematically predetermined and enforced by the commons of the cryptocurrency network. While I imagine that larger contracts would likely be built with some sort of failsafe mechanism for arbitration, there is no need for such a thing to exist. Would such a system be subject to gaming by the parties involved? Yes of course, but I still feel it would be an improvement on current generation contracts and would certainly leave the door open to expanding complexity necessary to close loopholes.

The twin technologies of cryptocurrencies and cryptocontracts are going to turn contract law into a programming language. 

Essentially what we are talking about is a real democratization of contractual agreements. Whereas today contracts are restricted to deals with enough value to justify a lawyers time (mortgages, business deals, land transfer etc…), in the future there is no limit to what could be codified into simple contracts. You could imagine forming a self-enforcing contract around something as simple as sharing a lawnmower with your neighbor, hiring a babysitter, or forming a gourmet coffee club at work. Where this could really revolutionize things is in developing nations, where the ability to exchange small-scale microloans with self-enforcing contractual agreements that come at little or no cost would be a quantum leap forward.

For more exotic examples, I was thinking of what could come if such contracts were combined with the ubiquity of data tracking today. In my example above, you could set up a contract with my blog to transfer a micropayment to support the blog every time you refer to an idea you found on my blog. Similar payment contracts could be set up for knowledge archives like wikipedia where you might agree to submit a micropayment every time you use or reference information from the site.

If we combine self-enforcing contracts with the idea of biological data tracking then things could get really wild. Imagine that you are carrying a cell phone which measures your emotional state. You then enter a contract with an entertainment company to pay them a certain amount based on the intensity of emotion which you experience during the movie or video game you are using. Suddenly you would be no longer only figuratively buying an emotional experience when you purchase something, but you are directly incentivizing emotional payout based on a self-enforcing contract. 

At every level our lives are built around spoken and unspoken agreements, yet the codification of a contractual agreement has been relegated to only the most important and expensive transactions. The emergence of cheap and plentiful self-enforcing contracts means that we can codify simple transactions and agreements. We will be able to reprogram our lives based on self-enforcing cryptocontracts. 

The coming boom in cryptocontracts comes with its own risks as well. In a world where self enforced contracts will be an everyday occurrence, we must be much more careful clicking on those terms of service agreements which nobody reads. We are going to need to be well aware of what it is we are giving away. Similarly, we must each decide what we want to codify in our own lives. Although it may be possible, it may not be wise to establish contractual arrangements around romantic or family relationships.

Ultimately, cryptocontracts will offer us a revolutionary new way to rebuild and reorganize our lives and our societies from the bottom up.

Edit: For those interested in the technology discussed here, I encourage you to check out the Ethereum project, which is working on developing a computing language to run these types of contracts on a cryptocurrency backbone. 

Edit2: I have been reading some of the comments on sites linking this article and I want to clear up one common confusion. The key difference between a cryptocontract and a standard contract is that the contract can itself hold wealth in the form of crytocurrency. All contracting parties can see the format of the contract and agree on its content, but the use of cryptography means nobody has access to the funds until the program moves it in accordance with the guidelines agreed. Another point is that these contracts could easily implement a clause for exception handling in the form of some form of court or other 3rd party mediation.

MITT ROMNEY, the defeated American presidential candidate, once declared while campaigning that “corporations are people”. Developments in artificial intelligence (AI) and distributed computing mean that Mr Romney’s statement may soon be literally true. Decentralised Autonomous Corporations–also called Distributed Autonomous Corporations, or DACs—are in the works, and bring new meaning to the term “artificial person”.

Imagine a corporation that engages in economic activity without guidance or direction from humans. Programmed with a mission statement—maximize profit for shareholders from the sale of widgets, for example—the corporation could own capital, enter contracts, and employ robots. People could even be hired for more creative tasks. Such an entity would live on the Internet, distributed across thousands or millions of nodes (stakeholders who host the DAC on their computer).

DACs hold the potential to reduce friction in many markets, allowing for instantaneous, trust-less business transactions across the globe. Near-term applications of the DACs concept include peer-to-peer bond and stock trading, verifiable-yet-anonymous voting, and decentralised currency exchange. A DAC also wouldn’t have to employ a board of directors, and a CEO’s hefty pay cheque could be returned to shareholders in the form of dividends.

Programmed with an incorruptible set of publicly-available business rules (open source code), a DAC would be more trustworthy than a human-run corporation. You could, of course, develop firms with more dodgy practices in mind, but, as Dan Larimer of Invictus Innovations explains: “although DACs can still be designed to have a robotically inviolable intention to rob you blind, to enter the open source arena they must be honest about their plans to do so.”

The concept of a DAC first appeared on a Bitcoin forum in 2011, and interest in them has increased over the past year. In fact, Bitcoin’s blockchain model—a cryptographically-secure open ledger of all transactions distributed to every node—was the critical innovation that opened the door to DAC research.

Some even go so far as to call Bitcoin a DAC. As Mr Larimer puts it,”Bitcoin is a shareholder-owned, employee-run, not-for-profit crypto-corporation.” In some ways, he’s right. Bitcoin is an autonomous system that engineers a rational incentive for people to do things—host nodes, build infrastructure, write code and promote the crypto-currency.

Others disagree. “Lots of people will throw the term [DACs] around without really understanding it,” says Mike Hearn, a Google engineer and Bitcoin developer. He prefers the term “autonomous agent” as a more useful metaphor. For such agents to exist, he says, “you need trusted computing to work well and it never has. So it’d require new hardware to be deployed.”

In Mr Hearn’s view, no true DAC currently exists. He speculates that the first will be some form of decentralised online storage, a kind of “distributed DropBox“.

In the long term artificial persons may one day be your employers, trading partners, or business associates. But computers are not known for their intuition or creativity. While DACs and other robots could eventually replace labourers with repetitive tasks, the very innovation required to make DACs a reality suggests computers will always need humans.

I think it’s wrong to tell people how to live their lives.

Beyond what is necessary to ensure the safety and security of those within a society, the state should not impinge on the liberty of individuals to live their lives as they see fit. There may have been a time when the need for social cohesiveness in a brutish world trumped the rights of the individual, a time when moralistic laws against certain lifestyles were justified, but that time is behind us.

Although the tension between social cohesiveness and individual freedoms is eternal and inescapable, I always find it encouraging that the ethic of the modern world seems to have slid so consistently towards liberty; advancing in the intensive bursts of societal change seen during the enlightenment, the American Revolution, and the civil rights movement, among others. 

More recently, we have seen momentous shifts in the ethics of female empowerment and sexual freedoms. While societal progress often seems a frustratingly slow process, the past has shown us that change can crystallize around a strong moral argument. An idea who’s time has come can transition from ridiculous to obvious with surprising quickness.

I think we might be currently standing on the doorstep of a great new revolution in personal freedom; one in which will reexamine our ethic of work. I have already written extensively about the problems inherent in a highly automated society which also relies on the “job” for as a means of providing basic sustenance for people. The plain fact of technological job displacement provides ample argument that basic income will be a pragmatic necessity to avoid mass poverty following mass automation, but here I would like to make an argument that is equally important as such practical considerations. 

Freedom in the 21st century should mean freedom from having to engage in productive work simply to meet your basic needs for comfort and dignity. 

At one time, the ready availability of jobs amply filled the need for a basic access to a comfortable and dignified life, but precipitous technological and economic changes erode this dynamic further each day. The function of the economy has never been to provide gainful employment to people, but simply to provide material goods. As the economy manages to produce more with less human labor, we must create new mechanisms aimed specifically that maintaining and raising the minimum level of comfort and dignity to everyone in a society. 

The first step, as for any change, will be to admit that we were wrong. The establishment of a basic income will require every inch of personal and societal soul searching we went through in previous epochs of tectonic social change.  Social progress has too often been retarded by our inability to deal with our own fallibility. The abolishment of slavery and the establishment of civil rights was an agonizingly slow process because those in power were unwilling to deal with their own sins.

Similarly, even as wealthy years of technological and productivity gains have eroded the justification for the job-driven society, we remain unwilling to admit that we were wrong; it is ok that we let people starve because we have no choice, right? We maintain a facade of work ethic aimed at convincing ourselves that our draconian social constructions to compel people into productive work are necessary and morally just. 

If we test this facade of work ethic, we can easily see that there is little real rationale for maintaining our current view of work. We can afford to have everything that the dramatically less productive economies of the 50′s, 60′s, and 70′s had; things like healthcare and education are not too expensive, and it is not acceptable to let people whither in poverty.

Worse than just being immoral, the desperate poverty of the lower classes is both immoral and useless. It is not a lack of money that compels the great successes of the modern age, but rather the availability of opportunities. It is because healthy, well-fed people were able to get a good education that allowed us to realize the great miracles of the modern age (eg, the internet, smart phones, Google, etc…). 

We must rebalance the right of society to compel people into productive work with the obligation of society to support its citizens. It should be noted that basic income is not aimed at the unrealisitic and undesirable goal of unfettered access for all to every luxury of the world. Freedom from work does not mean the right to luxury; it simply sets a baseline below which no person should fall. Basic income seeks to strike a fair balance between allowing the benefit of work to coexist with a system aimed at delivering dignity and opportunity for all in a society.

Beyond just better enabling access to opportunities, basic income will also allow people the freedom to live as they choose; to explore unpaid work in the form of volunteering, participating in creative projects, or starting new business ventures. Some argue that there would be less incentive for people to start businesses and be productive, but it could just as easily be argued that it would remove the disincentive from the high-risk, high-reward ventures that are so valuable to modern society.

One exciting example might be the number of small startup companies which could be realized if people had the time and support to work on their interests without worrying about their basic needs or being accountable to investors. In my opinion, basic income opens much more opportunity in this way than what it closes by disincentivizing work. It would also provide a firmer platform for those bargaining with employers looking to fill unfulfilling, dangerous or otherwise undesirable jobs.

Requiring people to live so much of their life working simply to earn a basic income is a waste of human potential and bad for progress. By eliminating the obligation to work just for simple survival, basic income would allow a new dynamic expansion of human freedom and human potential.

A society compelled to perfect cohesion and homogeneity lacks the dynamism to compete in the modern world. New ideas can only come into being at the chaotic interface between contrasting worldviews and lifestyles. In a world where progress is completely reliant on our ability to innovate and create new ideas, we should be seeking to maximize the spectrum of lifestyles which can be expressed within the society. By removing the need to work just to live, we will let people explore their true potential, and we will realize the untold benefits of a new dynamism.  

And this brings us to the real reason that I think basic income will happen soon, not only because it is morally the right thing to do (which it is), but because it makes good sense economically. Just as slavery ended when factories made the economic model of slavery obsolete, we will move towards basic income because it makes good economic sense for the modern innovation economy.

Dynamic, creative and competitive economies of today must seek to stretch the social fabric to its limits. Basic income will serve to reinforce this fabric and enable the risky ventures that will power us forward in the 21st century. 

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If you are interested in learning more about basic income, here is a link to the wikipedia article on the subject, or you can head over to http://www.reddit.com/r/BasicIncome for some more in depth discussion about why and how we could really make basic income happen.

Here is a link to a great info graphic on some of the merits of basic income

by Francesco Salvini – Sumak Maksana, November 12, 2013

A spectre is haunting Latin America, moving among social movements and programmatic constitutions. It is the spectre of sumak kawsay, the principle of reciprocity amongst living things, with and within the nature and deep-rooted in indigenous cultures. Called buen vivir in Ecuador, the use of this phrase refers to a political conception of a social living in relation, not only to nature, but also to a broader dimension of living together, in common, the fulfilment of life; in other words, as defined in the Costitución de Ecuador of 2008:

 Art.14. It is recognized the right of the people to live in a healthy and ecologically balanced environment, guaranteeing sustainability and buen vivir, sumak kawsay.

Art.275. Buen vivir requires that people, communities, populations and nationalities effectively enjoy their rights and to accomplish their responsibilities in the frame of an intercultural, diverse and natural harmonic coexistence.

However, kawsay is a verb and, in the Anglo-Saxon world, the translation to live well is used instead of good living, to avoid subjectivising kawsay and, therefore, to maintain the active force of the verbal form (in agreement, anyhow, with the Constitución Política del Estado de Bolivia of 2009 where sumak qamaña is translated as vivir bien).  Furthermore, it is not so easy to shrink sumak, at a semantic level, in a single translation, as it refers to different meanings such as: good, well, or beautiful.

Translating in itself opens therefore a political space, rather than a linguistic line between two significants. And, maybe, this open space among sumak kawsay, sumak qamaña, la buona vita, el buen vivir, the beauty of living, la vida en plenitud give us a propitious political territory to work in, where many of the words we use to imagine an alter-capitalist social life can find a space to speak and listen ones to each others: sumak kawsay, convivium, commons, sumak qamaña, commonfare, comune.

Sumak kawsay, as we propose in the research team of the Democracias en Revolución y Revoluciones en Democracia Program, in the National Institute of Advanced Studies, allows us to inhabit this debate on the making (or the crafting) of the commons, or on how to live well and together. Moreover, it allows us to do this by assuming political heterogeneity as a constituent ground for a collective practice, in which concepts and ways of doing are composed without preconceived hierarchies.

In this sense, the role of this article is to define the flexible margins for a space of debate around and about the sumak kawsay, with the idea that a series of suggestions and problematics rising in the contemporary Latin America can be useful to think about political action in the European context of the crisis, and that the desire of good living can help us to discover a new complexity of practices and concepts to build a – materialistically – happy elsewhere.

For this reason, the blog of the Fundación de los comunes as well as the web pages of eipcp.net and Euronomade, together with the Democracias en Revolución blog, will become polymorphic spaces for a heterogeneous debate, that we will try to make permeable.

 Sumak kawsay as elsewhere

At stake in this project there is the relationship between desire and political imagination, not following the paradigm of utopia, but according to the dimension of the elsewhere, and therefore involving a continuous displacement of and from the determinism of the Real.

Sumak kawsay means to build an otherness of space through one’s own living:  an elsewhere in relation to the structured composition of the everyday but also an elsewhere to inhabit right now. Elsewhere as a territory to produce, not as a land for “discoverong” which is too many times just a synonymous of conquering.

Uttered at the same time from Quito and in Europe (god bless technologies!), sumak kawsay is, first of all, an elsewhere in the current crisis of Europe. Sumak kawsay, as a constituent practice beyond the dialectic between public and private in Latin America , is both the affirmation of an anti-neoliberal project, inscribed in the macro-regional framework of the last twenty years, and a critical force in relation to the Modern and social democratic tradition of the Euro-Atlantic Keynesian Welfare, where commonwealth has always been subjected to the rational authority of the State.

In this direction, it is useful to mention the recent history of Latin America, that led to affirm this concept as constitutional principle both in Ecuador and in Bolivia. Rising from the indigenous cultures before the Conquista, sumak kawsay y sumak qamaña have found new lymph in the resurgence of Latin American movements starting with the marches of the Quinto Centenario de la Conquista in 1992, the Mexican indigenous uprising of 1994, the 1999 rebellion of Quito, the wars on gas and water in Bolivia between 2000 and 2003, as well as the electoral victories of the democratic and popular forces since 1997 all aroudn the continent, and yet all those movements that are configuring the political space of Latin America as an open and conflictive, as well as living and democratic, space.

This living, open and democratic elsewhere, however does not dwell in utopia, but rather it roots in the constant tension between the present as it is and as it could be, hic at nunc. There is a red thread that joins the various experiences and it is, we believe, a continuously prefigurative and performative dimension of the radical Latin American political process: this is visible both in the instituting forces – from the “piqueteros” in 2001 to the revolts during the Brazilian Confederations Cup of the last summer, or the juntas Zapatistas de buen, the Argentinean takes of factories or the protagonist role of the popular “barrios” in the new geography of power in Venezuela – and in the constituent dynamics – the new constitutional charters in Ecuador and Bolivia, the Good Living National Plan in Ecuador (2009-2013), or the laws for democratic information and the democratic management of natural resources throughout the continent.

In other words, this red thread helps us imagine the future since it is always in tension: between the new (prefigurative) practices of political emancipation – opposed to the technocracy authority of development – and a (performative) will that programmatically and pragmatically affirms new principles for organising social life.

This tension between instituent insurrections and constituent attempts is the fundamental base for maintaining the possibility of an open plural and productive debate on what the sumak kawsay is, (even when multiple points of crisis emerge as it is the case, for example, here in Ecuador, around crucial questions such as reproductive freedom – abortion – and extractivism of natural resources – the oil of Yasuní ITT). Sumak kawsay indeed constitutes a space for discussion where no Power can presume any position of authority for defining what truthfully means to live well.

A space for plural debate is crucial to continue having confidence  – believing – that the Latin American laboratories are giving life to radically democratic social infrastructures, capable of contributing to the affirmation of a new way of organizing life, or better saidliving, in common.

Sumak kawsay, in other terms, permits us to define a conceptual elsewhere in relation to the history of the European political thought and to imagine emancipation and rights in an open and multiple space, capable of escaping the limits of a modern and anthropocentric history of the Old Country in crisis.  In this sense, the Latin American ecological as well as post- and de-colonial perspectives affirm themselves in an extremely declarative manner in the debate around the sumak kawsay.

The rights of the sumak kawsay, indeed, are not based on the individual dimension of a civil and European Right. They thrive, actually, from the affirmation that rights are not solely and exclusively the rights of “man” and humanity. And, contrary to the Western tradition, they affirm the possibility of a seeking a balance between human life and the living of the world beyond individual lives.  This point of commence is based on a juridical hybridism between the Western culture of Rights and the Andean definition of nature (pachamama, as a carrier of rights) and it is useful to think about harmony as something more than just a naïf (and neoliberal) category – through which the relationship between singularity and nature is individualized and social life is reduced to a mere subgroup in a purely objectual relationship with nature. Harmony can be a political and always social practice that affirms reciprocity, participation and responsibility towards the common as roots for any possible good living.

Finally, this elsewhere is not outside of the capitalist world. On the contrary, to discuss and to build this good living in the everyday of the European crisis, as well as in the complex and contradictory debate in Latin America, means to determine in real terms a possible hold upon the functioning of capitalism.  An hold that makes evident a structural incompatibility, or constitutive antagonism, between sumak kawsay, as production and reproduction of an elsewhere, and the extended reproduction, typical of capital.  It is a matter of, firstly, understanding that the relationship between the living and the capital is a relationship of production; and therefore, of exploitation. The breaking of this relationship, and therefore the re-appropriation of the mechanisms of social reproduction is always, and from within, a relationship of insubordination and conflict.  Here is where we situate ourselves to start this blog and debate:

Now, if it is true that post-Fordist production appropriates life, that is the collection of specifically human faculties, it is obvious that insubordination emerges on the same matter of fact.  Life included in the flexible production is contrasted by an instance for a buona vita. And, the search of a buona vita is, actually, the matter of Ethic. (Virno)

Looking for a resolution in the relationship between production and life, sumak kawsay points out an important element: putting not only life, but living, as social behaviour beyond individuals and humanity, at the centre of the matter. At stake there is, perhaps, the possibility of rethinking (our own) life as a singular expression of an harmonic living, of imagining a way of living together and well. In other words, to produce a beauty of living together.

At stake there is, in the end, the possibility of escaping the homolingual address of capital, and of understanding, as proposed by Gareth Brown, the crucial importance of the struggle against the enclosure of imagination, against those processes that are fencing words and projects in identitarian frames, to guarantee a safe distance between all those words that actually help us imagining happiness.

Sumak kawsay,  to live joyfully.  Let’s try to translate it in this way.  With the aim of filling this space of debate with voices and words, as well as stories and practices that can allow us to explore this conceptual territory.

To know joyfully. Sumak yachay.

* Francesco Salvini is a Prometeo/SENESCYT researcher at the Instituto de Altos Estudios Nacionales.