Some thoughts on contracts and agreements

The lack of legal structure in Second Life, while sometimes frustrating, is actually a great opportunity to get back to the essence of contracts. Having an authority to enforce contracts is a last resort, not the moral or ethical basis of a contract. Two people agreeing on something and keeping their word is the basis, and in SL that becomes visible again because it is all we have.

A small group here have been building a community in Chilbo, a fairly ordinary mainland refuge for regular people. We've written about a dozen plain language contracts with people, mostly along the lines of "buy this parcel from us but agree to sell it back if you leave". We have published community standards that people agree to respect. We have even done purchase options, where the buyers agree to pay the land fees, but delay the purchase price for several months.

I think these sorts of contracts offer people a refreshing alternative to the libertarian frontier culture that is the majority of SL. SL can be mechanical -- you can either push a button and get something to happen, or you can't. Like any other voluntary community, once you agree to some form of private contract with another resident, you've put your reputation up as collateral, and following through on the contract becomes personal. And that's why people come to a virtual world -- to put their personal values into play, and demonstrate them to others.

Our contracts don't make any major transformations to the culture or economy of SL. But collectively they are creating a civil space that is attracting an interesting and thoughtful group of people.

I can see a system of law emerging from this sort of grassroots level precedent, but I don't think that any authority can speed it along. People have to have an appetite for liberty and responsibility -- you can't just layer it on. And some innocent people would get hurt if, for instance, Linden Labs endorsed these sorts of contracts but didn't follow through with creating courts of appeal and so forth. The best medium-term outcome I can imagine is if these kinds of contracts were to become commonplace in the culture and etiquette of virtual worlds, the sort of thing newbies would ask about, get varying answers, and then go try out for themselves.

Joshua Fairfield has a nice post on Terra Nova that talks about the limits of contracts and the need for community law. One distinction that I'm pretty sure didn't come up in the discussion is this: community law has two aspects -- one is that it is an explicit statement of commonly held values, and the other is that it spells out what the state or authority may do as an enforcing body. The first is 'spiritual' in that it asks you to look inward and see if your values coincide with those of the group. The second is 'material' in that it could have real consequences, such as putting you in jail or taking your property.

Virtual worlds I think will always stay toward the 'spiritual' side of this divide. Although people have property and livelihoods in SL, what happens here will probably not make them hungry or homeless. There is a role for an enforcing authority, but I think emphasizing that will always miss the point -- people are here for the experience of exposing and testing their personal values. In Chilbo, we believe that a system of contracts with a light touch is an important part of the social dynamic, (not a power dynamic) that makes more nuanced interactions meaningful for people.

For me the real distinction is between community ethics as the basis for law, and the 'modern' idea of a social contract as the basis for law. The American system starts with some elements of ancient British law, but then 'pasteurizes' it all, and puts it into a social contract package (one of the best, I might add). Considered from a cultural perspective, rather than a legal one, the social contract paradigm falls short in creating a persuasive model of why we should conform to community values -- it fails to describe our ethical motivations for following the law. The gap can be filled by any number of fundamentalisms, but it is also a promising area for acts of imagination and renewal that reveal or restore our most basic sense of obligation to eachother. The same gap appears, vastly magnified, in the relatively safe space of virtual worlds. And the same creative opportunities for community-building are here as well.