"Government architectures and policies have not evolved and there is
a fiscal crisis and threats to the Industrial Age social safety-net loom
everywhere. Data, a new asset class, has been captured by powerful
forces—one result is the continual erosion of personal privacy and
prosperity as a small handful of companies capture the largess
of the Digital Age, asymmetrically. Climate change is threatening
our biosphere with huge displacement and other disruptions just
beginning to be felt.
Now, within the Fourth Industrial Revolution, one centered on
machine learning, robotics, the Internet of Things (IoT), blockchain,
and even biotechnology, many core functions of knowledge work
are in jeopardy.1 Meanwhile, Industrial Age institutions for solving
global problems—those based on the Bretton Woods model of global
institutions—have stalled. The upshot is that the social contract—the
agreements, laws, and appropriate behaviors that people, companies,
civil society, and their governments adhere to by consensus—no
longer serve us well.
In Blockchain Revolution, we called for nothing less than a new social
contract, which we called a “Declaration of Interdependence”—a
phrase aptly coined during the Great Depression—because of the
need for new multistakeholder approaches, whereby governments,
the private sector, civil society, and individuals could forge and agree
on new understandings and new action plans."
Don Tapscott, “A Declaration of Interdependence: Toward a New Social Contract for the Digital Economy,” Blockchain Research Institute, 29 Jan. 2018
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