Digital Constitutionalism - Rights are only as good as their enforcers

As our lives become increasingly intertwined with the digital realm, the question of how to ensure rights to privacy, association, and property becomes bound up in questions of protocol design. Information about nearly every corner of our lives can be assembled by those with intent ranging from the commercial to the adversarial to the downright malicious. More and more of our economic and financial livelihood is facilitated via fully digital networks, with our ability to buy food, pay rent, or save for retirement defined by a string of zeros and ones maintained by a given platform intermediary. These are just a few of the concerns that make the direct governance of digital services an increasingly salient question to consumers and regulators alike. Yet such a perspective misses part of the problem, which is to say that the affordances and guarantees of a given digital process are only as credible and trustworthy as the governance of the network facilitating such a process. This makes questions in distributed network governance of greater relevance than their existing coordinative purposes surrounding the issuance and exchange of cryptocurrencies and their derivative algorithmic contractual instruments. Put most directly, increased human activity on digital networks means these networks' significance for human activities and the rights we expect to be protected in so doing is similarly increasing. Blockchain networks provide a governance model that is more akin to constitutionally constrained exercise of governance authority than any digital governance model to date.

In this seminar, Dr Alston will survey publications and applied projects to introduce audience members to the importance of digital constitutionalism for far more than cryptocurrency issuance and exchange.

Dr Eric Alston is a Scholar in Residence in the Finance Division at University of Colorado Boulder. Eric’s research applies methodologies and concepts from institutional & organizational analysis and law & economics to studies of constitutions, economic rights on frontiers, and digital governance. Eric is also currently engaged in governance design for several distributed network projects.