Future Fossils

Membership | Donations | Spotify | YouTube | Apple PodcastsWe live in simulated worlds of our own making, detecting patterns in the chaos and complexity of raw experience and boiling them down into operable categories and generalizations. Sometimes we do this well, and sometimes…This week’s guest, computer scientist and game designer Chaim Gingold, wrote what I consider the best book available on the history and sociality of simulations: Building Sim City: How to Put the World in a Machine (MIT Press) takes readers from the prehistory of modern computing through the post-war development of cybernetics and systems thinking and into the entangled relationship of video games, military info-tech, civil engineering, software-based education, and complexity science that forms today’s “invisible environment.” Sim City is more than a legendary video game. It is case study in how the digital revolution reshaped the ways we think, teach, design, and govern…and how what simulation as a mode of discourse can hide and rev