How do we imagine politics like computers? The question forces us to question how computers and computational thinking became so normal, or as I start the book, so routine. That really should be a much stranger as politics, in almost every other way, has been regarded as something distinctly human, but the book traces the many breakdowns where the lines between a computer system and a political system became blurred. The basic premise -- that we see a lot today -- is that we are going to try to predict how someone will vote or what this world leader is going to react to a move from the United States.

The book focuses on the United States to try and situate its own approaches to computing amidst global efforts to reform and rethink computers. In my mind, there has been a lot of work thinking about international experiments with using computers in politics -- Soviet cybernetics or Chile's CyberSym -- or how fields like Economics or research turned to computers but nothing that did exactly what I wanted SimPolitics to do, to try and offer a longer history of efforts to solve political problems with computers, injecting some humility into some of the grand claims.

The book looks at these links in two ways, intentionally even though it makes the book a lot longer. First, the book traces how American voters and the efforts to better present voters in computer systems, through computer systems, and as computer systems. Second, the book traces efforts to model world systems. Folks might vaguely remember someone like Buckminster Fuller describing a World Game, that is one example though he never built the game in quite that way. Or Jay Forrester's World 3 that the Club of Rome used to warn about overpopulation. How did parallel efforts try and scale computers from the depths of the American voters mind to the globe itself.

The history reveals a lot of conflicts and contradictions with what I call the computational imaginary of American politics. Computers could go granular or scale, creating a problem of how a computer systems related or addressed its world. At the same time, computers move at different times, for different speeds then humans, creating these problems around agency. The overall goal has been to inject some politics back into this smooth space of computers and politics.

Ongoing thread. More from Fenwick McKelvey to follow.