---
name: A Social Contract
slug: a-social-contract
type: agreement
status: unstable
version: 4.2.1
released: "~10000 BCE"
maintainer: society (no single point of contact)
dependencies:
  - shared-fear
  - collective-memory
  - the-illusion-of-fairness
  - language
license: Public Domain (disputed)
tags:
  - governance
  - philosophy
  - infrastructure
  - load-bearing-fiction
---

A Social Contract

What it actually is

An unwritten agreement you never signed, enforced by everyone, renegotiated constantly, and blamed on Rousseau whenever it breaks.

How it works

At runtime, each participant implicitly agrees to surrender a portion of personal freedom in exchange for reduced likelihood of being robbed, killed, or left to die alone in a field. The exchange rate fluctuates. Nobody audited the original terms. The system runs anyway.

The contract is not stored anywhere. It exists in the aggregate behavior of people who believe it exists. This is considered acceptable architecture.

"I didn't agree to any of this." — every participant, eventually

Features

Mutual restraint: Users agree not to do certain things, mostly because others agreed not to do them first
Delegated violence: the state handles enforcement so individuals do not have to, theoretically
Norm propagation: Expectations replicate peer-to-peer without central broadcast
Legitimacy layer: Makes power feel like consent, which reduces overhead
Grief absorption: Distributes the cost of tragedy across the whole install base

Known bugs

ID	Description	Status
BUG-001	Contract terms applied unevenly across user classes	Won't fix (legacy behavior)
BUG-002	No formal grievance process; users route around this with revolution	Intermittent
BUG-003	Free rider problem never resolved, only managed	Open since v1.0
BUG-004	"Society" has no mailing address	By design
BUG-005	System assumes good faith; good faith not guaranteed	Known limitation

Configuration

# /etc/society/contract.yml
enforce_via: norms, laws, [shame](/shame)
consent_model: implied
opt_out: not supported
renegotiation_interval: generational (approx.)
violence_monopoly: state (default)
fallback_if_state_fails: hobbes_mode  # do not enable

Warning: Setting hobbes_mode: true is technically possible. Recovery is expensive and historically messy.

Edge cases

Stateless zones: Contract runs in degraded mode. Most features unavailable. See failed states.
Very high inequality: Legitimacy layer begins to fail. Users notice the terms are not symmetric. Expect instability.
Pandemic, famine, or major shock: Contract is stress-tested. Outputs vary. Some societies patch quickly. Others do not.
Children: Enrolled without consent. Contract argues this is fine because they will later have the option to leave. Leaving is technically possible. Practically complex.

Changelog

v4.x: Rights formalized, welfare provisions added, ongoing debate about scope
v3.x: Democratic experiments. Mixed results. Highly recommended over v2.x.
v2.x: Feudal implementation. Explicit class hierarchy. Deprecated but still running in several forks.
v1.0: Tribal configuration. High trust, low scale. Performant but does not generalize.
v0.1: Pre-linguistic. Enforced entirely through proximity and fear. No documentation survives.

FAQ

Q: Can I opt out? A: You can move to a different instance. Each instance has its own contract. There is no server without one.

Q: Who decides when the contract is broken? A: Whoever has enough consensus to say so credibly. This is circular by design.

Q: Is it fair? A: It is load-bearing. Whether it is fair is a separate thread, still open.

drafting spec…