Garage Against The Machine

Garage Against the Machine is a game in which people emergently coordinate both economics and urban planning as a Self-Provisioning Autonomous Commons Entity (SPACE) on the site of an old garage cooperative in Ukraine. Think agent-centric Sim City, but not. SPACE demonstrates a viable alternative to the prevailing top-down economic and urban planning machine. The simulated urban space is a living proving ground which enables us to test economic paradigms from capitalism, pseudo-commons, commons, and communism against one another in a simulated urban environment.

Players join, steward and grow a commons by way of a tech stack and UI which combines Unity, MUD, Metamask and EIP6551 Token-Bound Accounts. TBAs are used to represent both Tenancies (empty allocations for people to join the commons) and Garages (autonomous agents which aggregate, map and respond to the needs and resources of players who have taken up the tenancies).

By expressing their needs and the capabilities they provide, players (now commoners) drive the activity in the commons towards the fulfilment of the common pool needs, and necessarily, the regeneration of the resources required to fulfil them. Garages respond to their needs by aggregating information from the commons and suggesting functional changes to improve the network activity of the commons e.g. by broadcasting resources that they have available; and by mapping possibly improved spatial allocations of tenancy arrangements.

The commons could thrive or decay based on player actions and the guidance of a stripped down macroeconomic and spatial harmonisation protocol embedded into the agents' logic and communications systems. By design, the protocol (since it lives on-chain) can be used to emergently self-provision a commons in the real world, given some additional features. All of the agents communicate via agent-centric or membrane-computing paradigms, enabling the system to exhibit multi-scalar coherence, which is essential for a commons to function at all scales from the local to the global.

The implications of a Self-Provisioning Autonomous Commons Entity are vast - solving problems and facilitating emergent, agent-centric and regenerative approaches in fields such as urban planning, housing affordability, regenerative economics, macroeconomics, and the management of any commons or complex adaptive system which deals with real-world economic activity in general. Please see the PDF in the Github Repo for details.

The tech stack for a SPACE combines Unity, MUD, Metamask and EIP6551 Token-Bound Accounts. Unity acts as a client interface which represents and simulates the commons as a virtual world, reflecting player input and updating world state to the chain and back again via MUD.

EIP6551 is key in this project, since it provides affordances which enable both account abstraction and autonomous agents. Players join the commons after being delegated control of EIP6551 Token-Bound Accounts (TBAs) which grant them agency to steward the commons. Player agency is enacted via their use of these TBAs to interact with the world. Together with autonomous garage agents (implemented as EIP6551's), the players and garages negotiate the evolving state of the Commons by enacting economic and spatial choices occurring in the emergent sandbox of the world.

Every action which triggers a change in the world state updates the state on-chain via MUD. Every action which triggers a change in player state or the state of an agent updates their state on-chain via the EIP6551's.