Un brillante articolo da Kevin T. Baker, storico: https://logicmag.io/06-model-metropolis/ Ai miei occhi, pone questioni interessantissime. Di straordinaria attualità nel momento in cui vecchi giocatori di SimCity (come me) ragionano, discutono, votano o decidono sulle "Smart City". E di straordinario interesse non solo storico politico, ma informatico. Mostra come l'informatica e la programmazione siano mezzi di espressione capaci di diffondere un sistema di credenze e valori complesso (150 equazioni e 200 variabili) SENZA comunicazione verbale. Diffondendo veri e propri pregiudizi senza una singola rete neurale a nascondere / giustificare i bias. Giacomo ____ Almost as soon as SimCity came out, journalists, academics, and other critics began to speculate on the effects that the game might have on real-world planning and politics. Within a few years of its release, instructors at universities across the country began to integrate SimCity into their urban planning and political science curriculums. Commentators like the sociologist Paul Starr worried that the game’s underlying code was an “unreachable black box” which could “seduce” players into accepting its assumptions, like the fact that low taxes promoted growth in this virtual world. “I became a total Republican playing this game,” one SimCity fan told the Los Angeles Times in 1992. “All I wanted was for my city to grow, grow, grow.” Despite all this attention, few writers looked closely at the work which sparked Wright’s interest in urban simulation in the first place. Largely forgotten now, Jay Forrester’s Urban Dynamics put forth the controversial claim that the overwhelming majority of American urban policy was not only misguided but that these policies aggravated the very problems that they were intended to solve. In place of Great Society-style welfare programs, Forrester argued that cities should take a less interventionist approach to the problems of urban poverty and blight, and instead encourage revitalization indirectly through incentives for businesses and for the professional class. Forrester’s message proved popular among conservative and libertarian writers, Nixon Administration officials, and other critics of the Great Society for its hands-off approach to urban policy. This outlook, supposedly backed up by computer models, remains highly influential among establishment pundits and policymakers today. [...] When we consider the social effects of computers in political and social life, we usually think in terms of expanded power and new possibilities. This perspective on computation permeates even our critical visions of technology. But we should also be attentive to the power that computers and the accompanying language of “systems” and “complexity” have to narrow our conception of the politically possible. [...] Forrester argued that for most of human history, people have only needed to understand basic cause-and-effect relationships, but that our social systems are governed by complex processes that unfold over long periods of time. [...] In essence, anything we do to try to improve society will backfire and make things even worse. [...] Expert knowledge, of course, has an important place in democratic deliberation, but it can also cut people out of the policy process, dampen the urgency of moral claims, and program a sense of powerlessness into our public discourse. Appeals to a social system’s “complexity” and the potential for “perverse outcomes” can be enough to sink transformative social programs that are still on the drawing board.