Jaya Klara Br
ekke & Elias Haase:
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eaking Chains and Busting Blocks: Commentary on the Satoshi (Hi
ppocratic) Oath for Blockchain Developers
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92 In the fall of 2016, Elias Haase at the blockchain training
company B9Lab commissioned Jaya Klara Brekke to write a Hippocratic oath for blockchain developers. Their mutual wariness of an emerging blockchain-fundamentalism and its uncritical alliances with old enemies in the monopolistic tech- financial complex inspired this attempt to articulate a different culture for blockchain development: one that encourages a conscious, ‘woke’, engagement with making, creating, coding and developing. Here we reprint the Oath, originally published on the IPFS blockchain,1followed by a commentary by Haase
and Brekke.
Computer scientists and tech developers have been placed in an ex- tremely powerful position where they have a massive influence over how we relate. Your social life, work, your car, your fridge, your TV, the hospital in your town, the intimate messages you send to your part- ner, your memories, your sense of direction – more and more things and relationships are being automated or administered through digital technology, and coder-developers have become both the hidden mas- ters and the interpreters of your life. If something stops working you have to hope that one of them cares enough to solve your problem. Computer scientists and tech developers are the new priest caste. But unlike priests of times past, there is very little awareness of the position of power and influence and very little willingness to accept the respon- sibilities that come with such a position of power: ‘I am just solving this problem. I am just building this tool. I can’t control how it is being used.’ The Oath is an attempt to start a conversation between developers and everyone else. To articulate better this new position that developers hold. To encourage a more conscious consideration of the encoding of ethics in the blockchain: How should a protocol interact with ongoing human decision-making processes? Who is able to take part in such de- cisions? And what forms of accountability are there in these processes? The result is hopefully a form of conceptual toolbox for developers to think through the effects of their apps on relations that extend beyond the immediate technical architectures and business cases.
The Oath itself is structured around three concepts associated with blockchain technology: immutability, decentralization and neutral- ity. These concepts are peculiar because on the one hand they are considered actual features: the blockchain is an immutable record of events (for example transactions), that are verified and stored in a
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Jaya Klara Br
ekke & Elias Haase:
Br
eaking Chains and Busting Blocks: Commentary on the Satoshi (Hi
ppocratic) Oath for Blockchain Developers
decentralized manner so that no single actor can manipulate the re- cords, thereby ensuring a neutral network (of communication / trans- actions / data-storage / code execution / verification etc.); while on the other hand, they tend to operate as major ethical principles in the community that drive the design and development. This ambiguity between core features and ideological positions in blockchain tech tends to be overlooked. Technology and infrastructures, once they are widely adopted, are all too often understood as something that simply evolves, solving problems in the most efficient manner. But the defini- tion of what is a problem in the first place, the priorities of problems to be solved, and the methods for solving them are shaped and come from our social, political and economic conditions and desires. Initially, the people we were targeting with the Oath hated it.2 That’s what we expected. The developer community believes in hard-coding any code of conduct into the protocol, so ‘soft’ frameworks like the oath are seen as unnecessary and ineffective moralistic regulation. In parts of the blockchain community there is a mistrust of anything that gives scope for human interpretation, anything not hardcoded into the protocol and cryptographically secured. The source of this mistrust comes in part from real experiences of the unequal application of the law, as experienced for example by the file-sharing and anti-copyright community. In addition, this mistrust of legal and political institutions have become mainstream in the aftermath of the financial crisis, whose consequences were very visibly redistributed to the poorest parts of society through austerity, with very little legal consequences for powerful actors in the financial industry. In contrast, the idea of code-as-law, that executes indiscriminately as it is written, became hugely attractive as an alternative to the corruption of legal and political institutions that are seen as simply too easy to game. The implied ideal is that humans will not have to trust each other but rather encode every interaction and make the conditions self executing. Blockchain technology is seen by many as a way to replace social contracts with ‘smart’ automation. So the blockchain community is driven by a deep mistrust of social contracts. They forget that most events in the world are indeed ambiguous and complex requiring interpretation and mediation.
Events like the Bitcoin scaling conflict, centralization of mining, and the Ethereum DAO hack in the summer of 2016, have since made it clear that decentralization, neutrality and immutability are not simply features guaranteed by the protocol alone. Decentralization had not solved the problem of power, immutability was not as immutable as assumed, code and cryptography did not amount to a neutral space.
Jaya Klara Br
ekke & Elias Haase:
Br
eaking Chains and Busting Blocks: Commentary on the Satoshi (Hi
ppocratic) Oath for Blockchain Developers
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94 Rather than features, such ideas might be better described as operat-
ing principles (technical, ethical and political). In this way, the ongo- ing consideration, maintenance and implementation that necessarily go into such systems can be made visible and their ethical and politi- cal effects deliberately though through. After all, the blockchain has its roots in hacker ethics, cypherpunk and a hugely politicized history of blockchain as a technology for circumventing geo-political control of global financial flows, and cannot be separated from these heady beginnings. The Oath puts the emphasis on the developer as someone who must engender trust in the society they serve. In a way, the ini- tial resistance to the Oath by blockchain developers is both evidence that it is required and a potent reminder of the direction blockchain development is heading.
The Oath is consciously designed so that it does not set out a fixed doctrine – the pledger promises only to ask themselves a list of ques- tions. The questions are designed to cover those aspects that, if not thought about carefully, could do most damage. In this way, the ethi- cal questions posed by the concepts of decentralization, immutability and neutrality might be kept alive in the minds of developers as they create new blockchain projects. It is to prevent the three concepts from sliding into uncritical dogma where they lose their meaning – where for example decentralization is no longer thought about carefully in terms of decentralization of power and authority, instead becoming a strategy for some actors to evade accountability; where, for example immutability is not thought through in terms of how records that can not be erased might be undesirable under authoritarian rule for exam- ple; and where neutrality is assumed to be the nature of markets and technology, systems that tend to be controlled by major monopolies. The act of pledging is symbolic but the intention is for a developer to use the Oath as a checklist to make sure that they are not overlooking any fundamental problems. And it is also envisioned as a way that if a developer makes a decision that is detrimental to their user, like lock- ing in their data, they will have to do so consciously.
The second desired effect would be a gradual formation of a social contract between blockchain developers whereby everyone knows who has pledged. Under these circumstances a culture could develop that favours careful consideration of impact and the discussion of im- plementation decisions on a socio-cultural level.
The emerging cultural identity of the blockchain community is de- fined by an almost pathological contradiction. Active members of the community often strive to encode strong ethical and political
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eaking Chains and Busting Blocks: Commentary on the Satoshi (Hi
ppocratic) Oath for Blockchain Developers
principles while at the same time subscribing to a blind technological determinism in which blockchain is seen as an inevitable step as part of a larger technological acceleration.
The fundamentalist religious nature of this evolutionary determinism shuts down active, critical engagement with the work of scientists and technologists. It also forces a reactionary response by other parts of society whereby technology, as a whole, is seen as pitted against us (as workers, as biological humans).
The culture of blind belief in technological determinism and inevita- ble acceleration creates deeply political divisions and even existential divisions between ‘humans’ and ‘technology’. The culture of blind belief in technological determinism and inevitable acceleration cre- ates deeply political divisions. It dissuades a wider and more curi- ous engagement with technology and makes the business-agendas of mega-tech companies seem part of an evolutionary trajectory that is inevitable. Technology is not external, but has always been a part of how we do things. What is at stake in our future is not the question of ‘human’ vs ‘technology’. It is instead a question of whether we follow a blind determinism driven by big business interests or engage in an intelligent exploration of what is possible driven by mature decision- making around what we find to be collectively desirable. Our hope is that the Satoshi Oath can be the beginning of such a conversation, taking full responsibility for our developments rather than shirking it.
Notes & References
1 http://ipfs.b9lab.com:8080/ipfs/qmxysweaexxqqyzhtgpecvksnabksewhdghm7vneh xue2g
2 See for example the Reddit discussion: http://reddit.com/r/ethereumcomments/ 53sau2/proposing_the_satoshi_oath_for_developers
Satoshi Oath on the blockchain: http://ipfs.b9lab.com:8080/ipfs/qmxysweaexxqqyzhtg pecvksnabksewhdghm7vnehxue2g
Satoshi Oath code: http://etherscan.io/address/0x49311a711ea4aff7fea3e0c32066e732fe 4652ba#code
Reddit discussion: http://reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/53sau2/proposing_the_ satoshi_oath_for_developers
Jaya Klara Br
ekke & Elias Haase:
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eaking Chains and Busting Blocks: Commentary on the Satoshi (Hi
ppocratic) Oath for Blockchain Developers
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Jaya Klara Br
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eaking Chains and Busting Blocks: Commentary on the Satoshi (Hi
Jaya Klara Br
ekke & Elias Haase:
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eaking Chains and Busting Blocks: Commentary on the Satoshi (Hi
ppocratic) Oath for Blockchain Developers
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Kimberley ter Heer
dt & Nikki Loef:
01.01.20
Kimberley ter Heerdt & Nikki Loef
01.01.20
Our current web has the world united into a global information pro- tocol. A controlled, standardized structure for how we (can) navigate through the web. A structure which has a limiting effect on all of the many possibilities. By changing the way we are able to distribute our information with these structures, smart contracts could possibly provide us a radical change concerning our current online culture. A Smart contract refers to a contract that is able to independently carry out or enforce behavior.
What kind of scenarios or agreements may arise if we can add our own contract and have influence on the behavior of our files? How can we re-architect the fellowship / sharing behavior of our current web? Arising from these questions came this speculative short film that shows, questions and tries to visualize the capabilities of smart contracts in the near future. In the film are contracts based on: Geo- location, origin, DNA and income (from future user and owner) presented.
http://kimberleyterheerdt.com http://nikkiloef.com
Kimberley ter Heer
dt & Nikki Loef:
01.01.20
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101 / Pablo Velasco: Role Play Y our W
ay to Budgetary Blockchain Bliss
Pablo Velasco