Friday, November 2, at the University of Michigan, game-theorist Brian Skyrms gave the Tanner Lecture on Human Values, and his topic was “The Evolution of the Social Contract.”
Saturday, November 3, there was a symposium to respond to and discuss his lecture. Invited speakers were Elinor Ostrom, Michael Smith, and Peyton Young.
Elinor Ostrom discussed how Nepalese farmers using small-scale cooperation are outperforming governmentally managed initiatives. Then she demonstrated a way to use biological metaphors and genetic algorithms to study the evolution of rules in general.
Michael Smith then suggested that rule systems (and social contracts) should influence us to do what we ought to do whether we are rational or not, that is, they should not depend on human rationality and/or self-interested desires, including the relationship between cooperation and justice. Questions about the social contract lead us to the issues of institutional design, and the realization that the presence of institutions shouldn’t destroy the positive behaviors they were designed to influence.
Peyton Young focused on evolution and fairness. He asked how isolated villages might arrive at different rules for the management of similar problems. Typically rules exhibit periods of stability punctuated by abrupt periods of crisis and change. His key conclusion was that experimentation results in heterogeneity, so instead of convergence, we would now see diversity between villages. Fairness is still present, but it is not absolutely dominant, rather, it is seen only by aggregating the differences present in a diverse range of solutions.
At the end, Brian Skyrms got a chance to respond. Among other things, he reiterated the key theme from his previous night’s lecture, namely that underrepresented game theory concepts (the stag hunt, the evolution of spite, etc.) and in particular correlations between participants, can lead us to new and interesting areas of research.
The take home question for those of us interested in smart mobs, panarchy, commons, and p2p culture, is this:
If we assume that rules and norms are still evolving (continuously evolving), then given all of the globally connected activity present in the world today, are we on the verge of the emergence of a new social contract? If so, who are the participants? Who is excluded from the initial bargaining? What are their barriers to inclusion? Does this new social contract, by its formation and articulation, then constitute a new body politic?
I know what I think. What do you think?
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Hi Paul,
as an aside, I’d like to re-introduce the three-fold forms of the peer economy.
The sharing economy, centered on individual expression, creating weaker links amongst the individuals involved, and therefore needing third party platforms, which seem to be proprietary. The particular social contract is ‘let me share, and I allow you to sell my attention, so the platform is sustainable.
The commons economy, centered around producing common projects, strong enough to create their own platforms, but creating an ecology of businesses around the commons. The underlying social contract seems to be: it is okay to profit, but not to appropriate, and in return, we expect some kind of benefit sharing (NOT revenue-sharing!!), i.e. you companies are expected to sustain the commons from which you profit.
Finally, the crowdsourcing mode, I’m still thinking about that one.
Paul asks “who are the participants” and Michel mentions the “crowd”.
Is it possible to envision the actual CONSUMERS or USERS as the authors of the contract and also as the investors and therefore owners of the hardware and direct controllers of the community?
If you look at the most important social contract for ‘virtual’ materials (software, genetics, mechanical design, audio, video, text, etc.) – the GNU GPL, you see it is built for the purpose of protecting USER Freedom.
Consumers are sometimes willing to invest. They are certainly willing to pay (in various forms, including putting up with advertising).
We could write a contract and then start a new business that agreed to use that contract as a kind of operational constitution. The contract would distribute control by insuring every user gains real, divisible ownership in the corporation when paying price above cost (what is usually profit) by treating that profit as that consumer’s investment in corporate shares – so that governance never need be representative because the users would always be in collective control. The consumers would be investing for product, not profit.
This seems to solve many issues at once, since we wouldn’t need to worry about many of the details we currently fret over if the farm/factory/servers were simply OWNED by the consumers that use them, because they would always act in their own self interests, but maybe I’m missing something…
Patrick, as you may already know, I agree with some of your insights above. I think user-owned, user-created, user-financed, user-governed is *the* emerging paradigm.
I have a little theory, and I don’t yet have aname for it. This theory is basically that solutions for yet-to-be human problems of existence tend to emerge among humans on smaller local scales prior to the widespread emergence of the problem(s) they will solve.
So, in the case of what we are talking about, we see that people on the fringe are already exploring these ideas, but it is not yet clear what widespread conditions will emerge, and when, to make them gain “critical mass” and ultimately reach a “tipping point”.
I can take a guess, and say that it will be a combination of basic global human systems (governance, economics, basic human sustainence) and ecosystem problems that will make it more and more apparent that current human systems are failing in certain ways. We can see right now for instance, the rising price of oil, and the extinction of more and more species, the breakdown in standards in global trade, potential diseases, water shortages, global warming, war, famine, etc. People who have been following this stuff for the past 50 years will not be surprised as each of these problems rears it’s head on a global scale, but many others who have not following will be surprised. People who anticipated these global scale breakdowns will already be working on potential plausible solutions, and the best of those will be implemented.
When will all of this happen? Futurist Colin Mason wrote the book “2030 spike” to basically project that all of the problems mentined above will come to a head at the same time then, if we don’t start doing something about them now. However, I beleive for some problems, right now, today, we are approaching the point where people can start to build the critical mass of networks of people with applicable solutions of the types we discuss here.