Money, Poetry, Proletariat

Social Simulation, 2018

Money, Poetry, Proletariat is an abstract capitalist production simulation created with an Agent Based Model. Agents in this complex system are stratified into three different classes - Capitalist, Worker, and Miner - according to their productivity and income level. Agents of each class have their exclusive class behaviors, such as mining, collecting, job hunting, producing, trading, and profiting, and they have to, during most of their life time, commit themselves to those behaviors in order to earn capitals while surviving in this system. At the same time, all of the agents are programmed with internal desires, changing moods, and basic level of personality such as patience and sociability, that can indirectly affect their productivity and income.

High-Level Object

Above the autonomous nature of individual agents, a Market System functioning as an “invisible hand” is designed to monitor the overall ecosystem of these agents. It calculates the statistics of different aspects of the society, such as population ratio, poverty rate, resource scarcity, and correspondingly make monetary adjustments in real-time on price, tax, and welfare. However, unlike a real-world capitalist scenario, agents are “evaluated” by two non-exchangeable currencies, Money ($) and Poetry (#). Money is the common capital reserve that practically decides the lifespan of the agents, while Poetry disrupts the production routines of agents and generates irregular behaviors outside social “norms”. Both of the two capitals can influence the living status of agents, while they are designed not to be exchangeable, which potentially dematerializes the whole consumption-based social reality into a more complex non-reality.