This dissertation explores the reciprocal relationship between international politics and digital computation since the 1960s by examining the first attempts to use computer simulation to credibly forecast our planet’s economic and environmental future on a global scale. In particular, this project offers the first sustained historical analysis of the origins and consequences of the 1972 publication, The Limits to Growth, a book which sold over 12 million copies worldwide and prompted an international debate about a looming civilizational collapse. Decades before climate change became the overriding concern of the environmental movement, an international community of global modelers worked to demonstrate how long-term trends in pollution, resource depletion, technological change, and population and economic growth were leading humanity toward a secular apocalypse. The result my narrative is a new account of how concepts like “sustainability” became global. This dissertation is also a history—an intellectual biography—of a piece of software, the World3 model which stood at the center of the Limits to Growth report. In a 2008 article, the late historian of computing Michael S. Mahoney sought to answer the question “what makes the history of software hard?” “The history of software,” he wrote, is telling the story “of how various communities of practitioners have put their portion of the world into the computer.” Programmers create software, but they do not make it as they please. For Mahoney, the process of constructing a computer model is one replete with choices: it involves deciding how to translate a group’s understanding of the world into running code and it means deciding what facets of experience can (and should) be computed. In essence, writing a biography of a software artifact also means writing a prosopography of the groups that commissioned and constructed it.

Creator

• Baker, Kevin Thomas

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-jeke-q578

Subject

• History

Language

• en

Alternate Identifier

• etdadmin_upload_679558
• http://dissertations.umi.com/northwestern:14768

Date created

• 2019-01-01

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright