“Our political systems evolved in an era when information was much harder to come by. What challenges does our current reality of information overload pose for democracy? How do we even start thinking about these questions? Political scientist Henry Farrell proposes key books for building a curriculum on ‘the politics of information,’ starting with a beautifully written novel.”
Interview:
Sophie Roell: When I first got in touch, I asked you to choose books about your field, political science, but you felt that was too broad. Instead, we’re focusing on information systems. Before we get to the books, could you explain how this topic fits into political science and why you chose it? I get the sense that you feel it’s particularly important right now.
Henry Farrell: I should make it clear that information systems are not a standard political science topic. They’re something that I study as a political scientist, but as you can see from the list of books, there are a wide variety of different ways that you can approach them: from the point of view of novels, memoirs, or by thinking about them in a more abstract way.
The idea behind my choice is as follows: If we are to understand how politics and markets work at the moment, we need to pay attention to how algorithms work, and how the economy is being remade from the ground up by these new forms of information processing. We don’t know nearly as much as we ought to about the workings of these processes of information gathering, of information analysis, of information use, which leads to a very important new set of questions.
My starting point is an article by Ludwig Siegele, who is the Economist’s information technology editor. In the last Christmas issue of the Economist, he looked at various debates around these questions and asked a version of the following question: ‘We’ve got a bunch of people thinking about this in economics, in political science, in computational sciences, in statistical physics: how do we pull this together?’
What I have tried to do in pulling together this list is to provide a practical follow up to Ludwig’s essay. My starting point was ‘Okay, if we started thinking about the core of a curriculum for a course on this topic, what could we include?’ These would be the core books you would want as part of the discussion.