Hi all,

I have a new book out, SimPolitics: America’s Quest to Solve Politics with Computers is out from MIT Press in Sandra Braman’s Information Policy Series (great scholar and series IMHO).

You can read more about the book here at MIT Press.

For folks in the United States, you can still pre-order the book, with a discount at RMH

READMIT20 for 20% off.

The book is open access too, making it easier to assign and students to access.

Details are below, but if you are interested I am happy to give a virtual or in-person talk or discussion later this Fall.

If you know someone who might be interested in writing a scholarly review or even a review on Amazon, please let me know and I can arrange a digital reviewer copy of the book.

Thanks all!

Be good,

Fenwick

How computer models became fundamental to political practice—from winning elections to global affairs—and how we imagine political futures as a computing problem.

For more than six decades, the public has been promised that computers will revolutionize politics, both nationally and internationally.

In SimPolitics, Fenwick McKelvey traces the entwined history of politics and computers from the 1960s to the late 1980s. He shows how programmers, consultants, academics, political scientists, and peace activists all worked—sometimes in tandem, sometimes not—to build simulations to win campaigns, predict coups, forecast the future, and render politics as legible as a spreadsheet.

Drawing on novel archival and historical research, McKelvey recounts the history of efforts to simulate politics by building models of elections, voters, and international relations. Comparing attempts in the United States to simulate domestic electoral politics and international affairs, he reveals the unexamined connections and conflicts between the two projects. His book provides a helpful guide to taking stock of exaggerated claims that AI and technology will fix politics, while presenting the long history of such promised technological fixes.

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 modelling 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 modelling 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, Lancaster University