SimPolitics

ENDORSEMENTS

“SimPolitics is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how computers have shaped our political imagination—and our democracy. “
—Fred Turner, Stanford University; author of From Counterculture to Cyberculture

“McKelvey artfully demonstrates that the histories of modeling and simulating politics still hold the potential to produce more diverse, more equitable, and more democratic alternatives to what we have now.”
—Orit Halpern, Dresden University of Technology; author of The Smartness Mandate

“With rich detail, Fenwick McKelvey’s brilliant SimPolitics urgently reminds us that we should spend less time worrying about perfecting simulations and more time thinking about their politics.”
—Daniel Kreiss, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; author of Platforms, Power, and Politics

“This incisive analysis of the promise and danger of computerizing human worlds is a must-read for anyone interested in the past, present, and future of simulation and human-machine relations.”
—Joy Rohde, University of Michigan; author of Armed with Expertise

“SimPolitics combines cultural analysis and historical scholarship to trace the rise of computer modeling as a technology that renders political problems computationally tractable. Developed in relation to democratic political participation, McKelvey’s argument has wider relevance for the use of computer modeling and simulation in other sites of algorithmically based prediction. He follows these lines of connection out from domestic to geopolitical domains, looping back in the end to the figurations of agency that inform simulated worlds.”
—Lucy Suchman, Professor Emerita, Lancaster University, UK; author of Human-Machine Reconfigurations