Building SimCity: How to Put the World in a Machine


Book by Chaim Gingold: “…explores the history of computer simulation by chronicling one of the most influential simulation games ever made: SimCity. As author Chaim Gingold explains, Will Wright, the visionary designer behind the urban planning game, created SimCity in part to learn about cities, thinking about the world as a complex system and appropriating ideas from traditions in which computers are used for modeling. As such, SimCity is a microcosm of the histories and cultures of computer simulation that engages with questions, themes, and representational techniques that reach back to the earliest computer simulations.

Gingold uses SimCity to explore a web of interrelated topics in the history of technology, software, and simulation, taking us far and wide—from the dawn of programmable computers to miniature cities made of construction paper and role-play. An unprecedented history of Maxis, the company founded to bring SimCity to market, the book reveals Maxis’s complex relations with venture capitalists, Nintendo, and the Santa Fe Institute, which shaped the evolution of Will Wright’s career; Maxis’s failure to back The Sims to completion; and the company’s sale to Electronic Arts.

A lavishly visual book, Building SimCity boasts a treasure trove of visual matter to help bring its wide-ranging subjects to life, including painstakingly crafted diagrams that explain SimCity‘s operation, the Kodachrome photographs taken by Charles Eames of schoolchildren making model cities, and Nintendo’s manga-style “Dr. Wright” character design, just to name a few…(More)”.

In the Land of the Unreal


Book by Lisa Messeri: “In the mid-2010s, a passionate community of Los Angeles-based storytellers, media artists, and tech innovators formed around virtual reality (VR), believing that it could remedy society’s ills. Lisa Messeri offers an ethnographic exploration of this community, which conceptualized VR as an “empathy machine” that could provide glimpses into diverse social realities. She outlines how, in the aftermath of #MeToo, the backlash against Silicon Valley, and the turmoil of the Trump administration, it was imagined that VR—if led by women and other marginalized voices—could bring about a better world. Messeri delves into the fantasies that allowed this vision to flourish, exposing the paradox of attempting to use a singular VR experience to mend a fractured reality full of multiple, conflicting social truths. She theorizes this dynamic as unreal, noting how dreams of empathy collide with reality’s irreducibility to a “common” good. With In the Land of the Unreal, Messeri navigates the intersection of place, technology, and social change to show that technology alone cannot upend systemic forces attached to gender and race…(More)”.

Little Communes Everywhere


Review by Jay Caspian Kang: “…I was thinking about all this while I read “The Commune Form: The Transformation of Everyday Life,” a forthcoming book by the comparative-literature professor Kristin Ross. Ross—who has previously written about the Paris Commune of 1871 and France’s student uprising of May, 1968—focusses particularly on the ZAD de Notre-Dame-des-Landes, a thousand-acre commune created by French farmers and their allies in the late two-thousands, in an effort to block the construction of a new airport, which would have kicked many people off their own land. (The French government had designated the land a zone d’aménagement différé, or a “deferred development area”; the farmers kept the acronym but used it to mean zone à défendre, or “zone to defend.”) For a commune to work, Ross argues, one must have both a physical space to defend against an antagonist and an articulated vision for an alternative organization of human relationships and economy. The “commune form,” as she defines it, is a “political movement that is also the collective elaboration of a desired way of life—the means becoming the end.” Theory, in other words, needs to be put into practice, in an intimate and earnest setting, so that people can test out their ideas about living within the context of an actual place among actual people.

Ross identifies one of the motivating forces behind the creation of the ZAD as alienation, which was “less the loss of some human essence than it was the loss of possibilities: the sense of blockages and impasses brought on by the destruction and fragmentation of the social tissue by capitalism.” Drawing upon the work of the French philosopher Henri Lefebvre, Ross refers to “the colonization of everyday life,” each part of our day becoming dominated by economic reasoning. This, she writes, dispossesses us of “our dignity, our social life, our time, the sense of mastery over our lives, the beauty and health of our lived environment, and of the very possibility of working together to invent our future collectively.” Under such conditions, the commune becomes the only alternative…

Physical spaces, whether pools or parks, can be reclaimed through collective action, in much the way that admissions policies at exclusive magnet schools can be protected by a small group of dedicated parents. Small, everyday victories are the only real cure for alienation. What else would work?…(More)”

Making Sense of Wicked Problems


Review by Andrew J. Hoffman: “While reading Oxford University professor Thomas Hale’s Long Problems: Climate Change and the Challenge of Governing Across Time, I kept thinking of evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould’s observation that “we have become, by the power of a glorious evolutionary accident called intelligence, the stewards of life’s continuity on Earth. We did not ask for this role, but we cannot abjure it. We may not be suited to such responsibility, but here we are.”

Countless scientists have referred to climate change as part of a class of issues called “wicked problems,” a term used to describe issues that do not neatly fit the conventional models of analysis. While we may not be suited to solve the wicked problem of climate change and may despair that we will never be, Hale offers an analysis of how we might better understand and therefore address it.

Hale predicates Long Problems on the general observation that some political issues span not only national borders but also time horizons. His central claim is that climate change is a “long problem,” a challenge that “spans more than one human lifetime.” He acknowledges that while “length is not the only meaningful way to understand climate change, … a focus on this one characteristic can fundamentally reshape our understanding of politics” by challenging us to establish policies on longer time horizons and to account for the future in ways we have not previously done. Reenvisioning policy is important because long problems are becoming more prevalent, he argues, for three reasons: our growing technological ability to bump against limits within the environment, our growing understanding of those distant effects, and our increasing willingness to address the needs of the future in the present.

Long problems, Hale asserts, challenge us to “govern across time,” rather than in the short terms of election cycles and quarterly returns. He warns that such challenges become more difficult to address the longer we ignore long-term governance. Indeed, as long problems become more urgent, we become more immediate and short term in our political orientation. Put differently, when we are drowning, we are less concerned with fixing the cause of the flood than we are with surviving. Hale calls this a paradox that “is another of the various cruel ironies of climate change [because] it threatens precisely the political support for longer term governance functions that can best address it.”…(More)”.

Behavioral Decision Analysis


Book edited by Florian M. Federspiel, Gilberto Montibeller, and Matthias Seifert: “This book lays out a foundation and taxonomy for Behavioral Decision Analysis, featuring representative work across various domains. Traditional research in the domain of Decision Analysis has focused on the design and application of logically consistent tools to support decision makers during the process of structuring problem complexity, modeling uncertainty, generating predictions, eliciting preferences, and, ultimately, making better decisions. Two commonly held assumptions are that the decision maker’s cognitive belief system is fully accessible and that this system can be understood and formalized by trained analysts. However, in past years, an active line of research has emerged studying instances in which such assumptions may not hold. This book unites this community under the common theme of Behavioral Decision Analysis. The taxonomy used in this book categorizes research based on task focus (prediction or decision) and behavioral level (individual or group). Two theoretical lenses that lie at the interface between (1) normative and descriptive research, and (2) normative and prescriptive research are introduced. The book then proceeds to highlight representative works across the two lenses focused on individual and group-level decision making. Featuring various methodologies and applications, the book serves as a reference for researchers, students, and professionals across different disciplines with a common interest in Behavioral Decision Analysis…(More)”.

Collective Intelligence in Open Policymaking


Book by Rafał Olszowski: “This book examines the nexus of collective intelligence (CI), a feature of online projects in which various types of communities solve problems intelligently, and open policymaking, as a trend of large groups of people shaping public policies.

While doing so, it presents the current state of theoretical knowledge for these concepts, many practical examples of successful and unsuccessful projects, as well as additional research and laboratory experiments. The book develops an analytical framework based on qualitative research, which is applied to the analysis of different projects in selected case studies, such as Decide Madrid; Better Reykjavik; Loomio; Deliberatorium; Civic Budget of the City of Kraków.

The book is structured into four chapters, addressing essential questions in the field: (1) Opening Policymaking; (2) Beyond the Individual: Understanding the Evolution of Collective Intelligence; (3) A Review of the Projects Using Collective Intelligence in Policymaking; (4) Online Public Debate. How Can We Make it More Intelligent?…(More)”.

Digital Media and Grassroots Anti-Corruption


Open access book edited by Alice Mattoni: “Delving into a burgeoning field of research, this enlightening book utilises case studies from across the globe to explore how digital media is used at the grassroots level to combat corruption. Bringing together an impressive range of experts, Alice Mattoni deftly assesses the design, creation and use of a wide range of anti-corruption technologies…(More)”.

Digitalization in Practice


Book edited by Jessamy Perriam and Katrine Meldgaard Kjær: “..shows that as welfare is increasingly digitalized, an investigation of the social implications of this digitalization becomes increasingly pertinent. The book offers chapters on how the state operates, from the day-to-day practices of governance to keeping registers of businesses, from overarching and sometimes contradictory policies to considering how to best include citizens in digitalized processes. Moreover, the book takes a citizen perspective on key issues of access, identification and social harm to consider the social implications of digitalization in the everyday. The diversity of topics in Digitalization in Practice reflects how digitalization as an ongoing process and practice fundamentally impacts and often reshapes the relationship between states and citizens.

  • Provides much needed critical perspectives on digital states in practice.
  • Opens up provocative questions for further studies and research topics in digital states.
  • Showcases empirical studies of situations where digital states are enacted…(More)”.

Middle Tech: Software Work and the Culture of Good Enough


Book by Paula Bialski: “Contrary to much of the popular discourse, not all technology is seamless and awesome; some of it is simply “good enough.” In Middle Tech, Paula Bialski offers an ethnographic study of software developers at a non-flashy, non-start-up corporate tech company. Their stories reveal why software isn’t perfect and how developers communicate, care, and compromise to make software work—or at least work until the next update. Exploring the culture of good enoughness at a technology firm she calls “MiddleTech,” Bialski shows how doing good-enough work is a collectively negotiated resistance to the organizational ideology found in corporate software settings.

The truth, Bialski reminds us, is that technology breaks due to human-related issues: staff cutbacks cause media platforms to crash, in-car GPS systems cause catastrophic incidents, and chatbots can be weird. Developers must often labor to patch and repair legacy systems rather than dream up killer apps. Bialski presents a less sensationalist, more empirical portrait of technology work than the frequently told Silicon Valley narratives of disruption and innovation. She finds that software engineers at MiddleTech regard technology as an ephemeral object that only needs to be good enough to function until its next iteration. As a result, they don’t feel much pressure to make it perfect. Through the deeply personal stories of people and their practices at MiddleTech, Bialski traces the ways that workers create and sustain a complex culture of good enoughness…(More)”

Multiple Streams and Policy Ambiguity


Book by Rob A. DeLeo, Reimut Zohlnhöfer and Nikolaos Zahariadis: “The last decade has seen a proliferation of research bolstering the theoretical and methodological rigor of the Multiple Streams Framework (MSF), one of the most prolific theories of agenda-setting and policy change. This Element sets out to address some of the most prominent criticisms of the theory, including the lack of empirical research and the inconsistent operationalization of key concepts, by developing the first comprehensive guide for conducting MSF research. It begins by introducing the MSF, including key theoretical constructs and hypotheses. It then presents the most important theoretical extensions of the framework and articulates a series of best practices for operationalizing, measuring, and analyzing MSF concepts. It closes by exploring existing gaps in MSF research and articulating fruitful areas of future research…(More)”.