COMMONSIM: Developing a Commons-Based Utopia with Agent-Based Simulation

The formulation of utopias is usually restricted to the use of scientific prose or fiction, rendering the assessment of related uncertainties difficult. For that very reason, utopia development is a rare practice in academic work, even if the demands are high, given the presence of multiple global crises. Nevertheless, what if imaginary conceptions of society, culture, economy and the politics could be experimentally tested? How could one develop such an experiment? Truly, there are obvious and manifold reasons why grand scale radical social experiments should not be tried out in real societies. However, there is no reason why we should not run such experiments in artificial societies, simulated in computational sandboxes. Computational power has increased tremendously in the last decades, to such extents that we are able to run multi-agent simulations at very high scales and substantiate the understanding of imaginary conceptions of societies without experiments in real societies.

In the project COMMONSIM we are exploring such a novel approach for the collective development of concrete utopias via large-scale in-silico experiments, operated through computational social simulations, in particular agent-based simulations. Theoretically, the utopian perspective investigated is aligned with the radical commons discourse (Ruivenkamp & Hilton 2017) and in particular with the conception of “commonism” (Sutterlütti & Meretz 2018, 2023). This commons-based utopia highlights the complex relations between micro (the individual), meso (the commons) and macro (the society). It is, to our knowledge, the first approach developing a thorough micro foundation, i.e. critical psychology (Holzkamp, 1983), a clear meso conception of what a commons is and its constituent practice of commoning (de Angelis 2017) as well as a discussion of political economic processes and structures crystallizing the societal level of commons. The evolving micro-meso-macro relations and their emergent structures are the central object of investigation in our research.

References

de Angelis, M. (2017), Omnia Sunt Communia. On the Commons and the Transformation to Postcapitalism. Bloomsbury.

Holzkamp, K. (1983). Grundlegung der Psychologie. Campus.

Ruivenkamp, G., & Hilton, A. (eds.). (2017). Perspectives on Commoning: Autonomist Principles and Practices. Bloomsbury.

Sutterlütti, S., & Meretz, S. (2018). Kapitalismus aufheben. Eine Einladung, über Utopie und Transformation neu nachzudenken. VSA.

Sutterlütti, S., & Meretz, S. (2023). Make Capitalism History: A Practical Framework for Utopia and the Transformation of Society. Palgrave. (Forthcoming)

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