arXiv subjects

James Golike

Publications and source records attributed to James Golike.

2 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Formalising Grassroots Social Contracts: From Legal Text to Grassroots Platforms

Two centuries ago Pierre-Joseph Proudhon envisioned a social contract that is (1) an agreement of man with man; (2) reciprocal; (3) imposing no obligation upon the parties except that which results from their personal promise; (4) subject to no external authority; (5) freely accepted and signed by all the participants; (6) of the nature of a contract of exchange. He also envisioned a property of social contracts, analogous to a property of digital platforms we term grassroots: that one could "make a contract with all, as ... with some"; digitally, that a grassroots platform can have multiple instances, which may coalesce by mutual consent. We define grassroots social contracts as social contracts meeting these conditions and that (7) people are free to deal with each other; and (8) there is no external register of people. We 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. Act schemas are a formal language for the acts the contract describes, each naming the parties' roles, which of them must will the act, and its precondition and effect at each role. Any contract written in this language meets the eight conditions, provided it is syntactically grassroots, satisfying three decidable conditions, Introduction, Provenance and Volition. We prove that the protocol realising a syntactically grassroots contract is grassroots, and volitionally so. Clauses of a grassroots social contract are of three legal types: a breach of an enforced clause is impossible with a correct implementation; a breach of an attested or undertaken clause can be taken to court, with signed evidence for an attested clause. We illustrate them with a grassroots social graph and grassroots currencies.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2026

Digital Speech Acts Retain Control of Copyright with People, Not Platforms

Legal precedents protect computer code as copyrightable expression. They have enabled centralized digital platforms -- operating from corporate servers that hold all user data -- to construct private governance regimes through the interaction of copyright, contract, and technical architecture: people who create virtually all platform value must surrender effective copyright control through Terms of Service agreements as a condition of participation. In contrast, grassroots platforms consist of cryptographically-identified people operating their networked smartphones independently of any server or global resource; each person holds their own data on their own device, with no third party in possession or intermediation. Here, we define the notion of a digital speech act -- a deliberate volitional act by a person of cryptographically signing personal content with the person's private key, carried out on the person's own device -- through which the person simultaneously establishes attribution, accountability, and authorship over the signed content. We contend that (i) digital speech acts qualify for copyright protection under existing U.S. precedent: Burrow-Giles locates authorship in volitional creative choices despite mechanical or algorithmic processes, Feist supplies the minimal-creativity threshold, and persistent device storage satisfies the Copyright Act's fixation requirement; (ii) the digital social contract underlying grassroots platforms preserves this copyright by design -- signed content cannot be unbundled from its signature, and the full provenance chain accumulates as content is forwarded -- so that copyright ownership and physical possession of authenticated digital expressions coalesce in the person; and (iii) this coalescence of legal ownership and physical possession provides the foundations for digital sovereignty and democratic self-governance.

cs.SI↗