Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende's Chile

by Eden Medina

In Cybernetic Revolutionaries, Eden Medina tells the history of two intersecting utopian visions, one political and one technological. The first was Chile's experiment with peaceful socialist change under Salvador Allende; the second was the simultaneous attempt to build a computer system that would manage Chile's economy. Neither vision was fully realized--Allende's government ended with a violent military coup; the system, known as Project Cybersyn, was never completely implemented--but they hold lessons for today about the relationship between technology and politics. Drawing on extensive archival material and interviews, Medina examines the cybernetic system envisioned by the Chilean government--which was to feature holistic system design, decentralized management, human-computer interaction, a national telex network, near real-time control of the growing industrial sector, and modeling the behavior of dynamic systems. She also describes, and documents with photographs, the network's Star Trek-like operations room, which featured swivel chairs with armrest control panels, a wall of screens displaying data, and flashing red lights to indicate economic emergencies. Studying project Cybersyn today helps us understand not only the technological ambitions of a government in the midst of political change but also the limitations of the Chilean revolution. This history further shows how human attempts to combine the political and the technological with the goal of creating a more just society can open new technological, intellectual, and political possibilities. Technologies, Medina writes, are historical texts; when we read them we are reading history.

Genres: History, Politics, Nonfiction, Economics, Technology, Academic, Science

326 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2011

About the author

Eden Medina is Associate Professor of Science, Technology, and Society at MIT and Associate Professor of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University, Bloomington. Her research uses technology as a means to understand historical processes and she combines history, science and technology studies, and Latin American studies in her writings.

Reviews

[George Kaslov · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found out about project Cybersyn from the 99% invisible podcast and thankfully they recommended this book at the end of the episode.

OK, now what was Cybersyn (Cybernetics - Synergy)? Put simply it was an attempt of Allende's government to manage newly nationalized factories using Cybernetics (computers, teletype machines, mathematics and new management techniques). I have to compliment the author for the thoroughness and quality of research on this topic. She managed to beautifully cover the people, technology and politics that surrounded this project (she did repeat herself quite a bit, but I managed).

You have to be fascinated by the cold war period, the simultaneous joy and hope for the future and absolute terror of disaster made people try everything and anything. Just imagine the present if it worked long enough (it did reach something of an alpha version). What would really happen to the workers, would it accomplish it's goals and create a worker's paradise on Earth or would it have become the same brutal and efficient overseer of today (be kind to your Uber driver, his manager is literally an AI), we will never know, but it is interesting to speculate.

[Gautam Bhatia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Eden Medina's Cybernetic Revolutionaries is a wonderful social and political history of one of the most ambitious efforts to embed democracy and democratic decision-making into technological design: Chile's Project Cybersyn. Medina shows how the project's architect - the British cybernetician Stafford Beer - attempted to locate Project Cybersyn within Salvador Allende's philosophy of democratic socialism, eschewing top-down control and technocracy for decentralised and relatively autonomous uses of technology, at the shop-floor level; and she also shows how the political and social conditions prevailing in Chile at the time ultimately made the project borderline utopian and - in its fullest scope - unimplementable, before it was aborted in the violent coup that overthrew Allende.

The book presents fascinating insights about the relationships between technology, politics and society, the limits to which democracy can be "coded" as part of technological design, and of course, about Chile during the Allende years - most notably, the extent to which the USA tried to have Allende overthrown by engaging in economic warfare. A particularly enraging section was a description of an article written in the Observer newspaper in the UK, that grossly mischaracterised Project Cybersyn, and turned international public opinion against it - a familiar story.

Through the book, Stafford Beer emerges as an absolutely fascinating character - complex, visionary, and flawed - and it's a mystery to me why he doesn't feature more prominently in intellectual histories of the 20th century.

Thoroughly recommended.

[Malini Sridharan · Rating 3 out of 5]

The story and research here is fascinating and right up my alley-- cybernetics, management, mainframe computers!!! Flowcharts!!! I am very glad that I read this book.

However, the analysis was not particularly interesting. Rather than either letting events speak for themselves (which they easily could have done) or going deep into the ideas around the project, the author makes statements that, to be honest, reminded me of everything that is wrong with grade school research essays-- statements that just summarized what the data had already made clear without adding any value whatsoever. For example, she talks about how Beer told different people different things about the project and then ends the section with something like, 'this shows that he presented the project differently to different audiences.' This happens over and over. It is like there is a list of ways technology can be interpreted or interacted with and she is just rolling down the list.

There were many missed opportunities to go deeper into the philosophy and culture behind the project-- I would have loved to see a deeper reading of cybernetics vs. allende style socialism at the beginning, for instance.

[JC · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book. Read it for comps. It’s a very unexpected angle on Chilean socialism and the Allende administration as well as about how a British outsider and cyberneticist (Stafford Beer) was politically transformed after working on Project Cybersyn (a computer network intended to monitor and control a planned economy in a decentralized but nationally coordinated way).

One important question this book attempts to answer was how Chilean engineers became interested in cybernetics in the first place. The first chapter in some sense traces this out:

"Within the university Flores studied operations research with Arnoldo Hax, the director of the school of engineering at the Catholic University (1963–1964) who later accepted a professorship at MIT’s Sloan School of Management. Because Flores was trained in operations research, SIGMA hired him to work on the contract for Chilean railways. It was then that he discovered Cybernetics and Management, a book he describes as “visionary.” Flores graduated in 1968 with a degree in industrial engineering. After graduation he visited Hax in the United States, and someone serendipitously passed him a copy of Beer’s second book, Decision and Control. “I found this book to be better than the others”"

The first chapter also describes how this young engineer named Fernando Flores came to be a leading figure in the Allende nationalization project and eventually collaborate with the British cybernetic consultant Stafford Beer. They did not share political convictions but their commonalities were conceptual in nature such that they believed cybernetic management was compatible with Chilean socialism, and for Beer it was a chance to test out his ideas in practice with a government that was willing to take a chance on these untested principles.

The battle for production was one of the main problems the Allende administration was attempting to tackle with cybernetic management. How could they effectively operate state-run enterprises, reduce bureaucracy, and increase production. Flores, with significant resistance from his colleagues, believed turning the economy of Chile into an adaptive organism through cybernetic management was the solution, and efforts were made to bring in expensive new computer technologies to establish channels for communication and the sharing of data:

“Pursuing a technological solution for the problem of economic management conformed to the ideas of economic progress found in dependency theory, but only to a point. Through its novelty, such a computer system would help Chile assert its technological autonomy, even if it was built on a mainframe imported from a U.S. multi-national under the watchful eye of a British consultant.”

This is a tangential excerpt on how Beer’s form of cybernetics drew on the analogies of biological organisms:

“In his writings Beer switches freely among metaphors drawn from organizations, organisms, and machines when describing each of the system’s five levels. These different metaphors helped him to communicate his ideas to his reader, emphasize the ideas’ scientific origin, and stress that biological, social, and mechanical systems shared similar characteristics. Beer first described the model in its biological form... Beer referred to System One of the Viable System Model as the sensory level. It consisted of the limbs and bodily organs (such as the lungs, heart, or kidneys). Because members of System One are in contact with their environment, they are able to respond to local conditions and behave in an “essentially autonomous” manner, although they are regulated to behave in ways that ensure the stability of the entire body.”

The network was designed in a way that attempted to synthesize Chilean forms of democratic socialism, where top-down management co-existed with factory autonomy and bottom-up participatory mechanisms:

“His cybernetic approach to management would empower the Chilean people and put the power of science at their disposal: “I know that I am making the maximum effort towards the devolution of power. The government made their revolution about it; I find it good cybernetics.” Beer stressed that the tools he was developing in Chile were the “people’s tools” and that his systems were designed for and in consultation with Chilean workers.”

However, this worker participation did not always happen in practice:

“My interviews of Cybersyn engineers, interventors, and workers yielded little evidence that workers were involved in shaping the modeling process. Kohn described the process of modeling a factory as “a fairly technocratic approach,” one that was “top down” and did not involve “speaking to the guy who was actually working on the mill or the spinning machine or whatever.” Eugenio Balmaceda, another engineer from the State Technology Institute who modeled enterprises within the forestry and construction sector, also reported working exclusively with the directors of the firm, not the workers.”

Technology was meant to assist human decision making and not replace it, nor were there intentions to increase production through automation. A team of British engineers worked with Chilean technology teams to implement this management system that was supposed to be participatory, decentralized and anti-bureaucratic. But the project quickly came up against limitations, both in the project’s ability to modify and engineer changes in existing social relations, which is an important aspect of one of Medina’s primary arguments, it’s actually quite difficult to embed social controls within technology:

“For example, Beer wanted to change shop floor power dynamics by altering the relationship between workers and technologists. He wanted to institutionalize a decentralized approach to control by changing how hierarchies of command functioned within an organization. And he wanted to change decision-making practices by giving managers access to real-time information, recognizing that the collection and transmission of this information depended mostly on human labor. Altering any of these social and organizational relations would result in a very different sociotechnical system from the one Beer proposed. Thus reconfigured, the system could support different configurations of power and different political goals.”

“The British Society for Social Responsibility in Science linked its understanding of the technology to the social and political configurations of Stalinism—and thus questioned the ethical implications of the system. Chilean industrial managers saw a partially finished set of tools that they could either incorporate in their existing practices or ignore. This separation of the social from the technical allowed historical actors to associate Project Cybersyn with many different political values, including those that ran counter to Chilean socialism.”

“...the history of Project Cybersyn shows that it is very difficult to make technologies that are capable of creating and enforcing desired configurations of power and authority, especially if those configurations are radically different from those that preceded them.”

In summary:

“This history is a case study for better understanding the multifaceted relationship of technology and politics. In particular, I have used this history to address (1) how governments have envisioned using computer and communications technologies to bring about structural change in society; (2) the ways technologists have tried to embed political values in the design of technical systems; (3) the challenges associated with such efforts; and (4) how studying the relationship of technology and politics can reveal the important but often hidden role of technology in history and enhance our understanding of historical processes.”

The Cybersyn also ran into issues of political conflict and economic decline. Part of this economic decline was related to the aggressive economic blockade that the U.S. spearheaded against socialist Chile. The U.S. government was also actively funnelling resources into Chile’s political opposition forces, and rumours of a military coup were circulating as Cybersyn was struggling to complete before being snuffed out by regime change.

Then the October Strike hit, that is a strike from above. The bourgeoisie retracted its resources in an attempt to bring the Chilean economy to a grinding halt and create the conditions necessary for a successful coup. However, interestingly the Cybersyn system enabled the Allende government, with a surprising degree of success, to continue distributing goods nationally, and exchange messages between production centres to soften production shortfalls. With the cybernetic system, the Allende government could continually map updated national economic activity and make surprisingly informed decisions in this moment of crisis.

Even with this limited success, the military coup arrived, and those working on the Cybersyn project had to flee together with as many project documents they could gather, in an attempt to keep them out of the hands of the incoming military dictatorship. Cybersyn did not end up outliving Chilean socialism, and the coup government destroyed remaining artefacts left from the Allende project. Though Cybersyn was never fully realized it offers an interesting account of a technological project that failed to reach completion as well as the interesting work of innovation that can occur in transnational contexts.

I will just conclude with numerous excerpts on Beer’s engagement with Marxist theory, which at times can be amusing and occasionally somewhat interesting:

“Unlike Allende, Beer was not a Marxist. However, he did describe himself as a socialist on multiple occasions and reported voting for the British Labor Party. Although Beer did not specify where he positioned himself on the spectrum of British socialism, his position was closer to Fabian socialism, a British intellectual movement that favored a peaceful reformist approach to socialism (instead of revolutionary armed conflict) and that had influenced the formation of the Labor Party.97 Beer thus would have been sympathetic to the aims of Chilean democratic socialism, even if he was not centrally concerned with Marxist ideas such as class struggle and even though he made a comfortable living as an international management consultant. Such sympathies may have further increased Beer’s willingness to assist the Allende government. However, there is nothing in Beer’s early writings to suggest that his approach to adaptive control was shaped by any political ideology. While Beer did believe that cybernetics and cyberneticians had the power to create a better world through the regulation of complexity, and had a social responsibility to do so, he was not a socialist revolutionary.”

“Archived source materials do not permit a complete reconstruction of what Beer learned during this initial visit. However, his surviving notes from these meetings are quite detailed and devoid of political slogans, although they do contain discussions of Marxist theory. They also list the achievements and shortcomings of the Popular Unity economic policies, presenting a remarkably balanced view, given the polemics and the ideologically polarized state of Chilean politics.”

“In his April report Beer pushed those involved in the project to view Cybersyn as “an instrument of revolution,” a point he emphasized with reference to Marx. “‘The Way of Production’ is still a necessary feature of the Chilean revolution,” Beer argued, but “‘the Way of Regulation’ is an extra requirement of a complex world not experienced by Marx or Lenin.” Bringing about this type of organizational and regulatory revolution required profound changes in the organization of the government, including institutions such as CORFO, and this was a Herculean task. Beer wondered, “Does it take more courage to be a cybernetician than to be a gunman?” For Beer, revolution was not only about the nationalization of industry or increasing the public welfare; it was also about changing the very organization of society, beginning with the government institutions themselves. Cybernetics, the science of effective organization, could therefore be as powerful as a gun in effecting revolutionary change.”

“While thinking through these problems, Beer spent a substantial portion of his time in Las Cruces trying to map his cybernetic approach onto Marx’s critique of capital. He expressed his ideas on cybernetics and Marxism in his 1973 essay “Status Quo,” written in Las Cruces and never published but nonetheless included in his personal bibliography. Although he does not describe the essay in Brain of the Firm, his account of the Cybersyn Project, he did reference the essay years later in his 1994 book Beyond Dispute. There, Beer says that he continued throughout the 1970s and 1980s to tinker with the ideas presented in the essay.”

“Beer was not a Marxist, and though he claimed he read “all the Marxist literature” in preparation for his first Chile trip in 1971, he had not devoted the same level of attention to reading and discussing Marx as some of his Chilean colleagues. “Status Quo” is only about fifty handwritten pages and offers a rather simple presentation of Marxist philosophy that many would find lacking.

Nor was Beer the first person to relate cybernetics to Marxism. For example, in 1961 the Soviet mathematician and philosopher Ernest Kolman used passages from Marx to show that Marx had anticipated the arrival of cybernetics and electronic computers and approved of such developments.100 In fact, Kolman’s project bore some similarity to Beer’s: both men wanted to update Marx’s philosophy to include recent technological developments. But unlike Kolman, Beer tried to translate ideas from Marx’s philosophy into the language of his cybernetics.
“Status Quo” shows how ideas from biology and electronics shaped Beer’s understanding of social and economic systems and how the Chilean revolution advanced Beer’s cybernetic thinking.”

“In the preface to “Status Quo,” Beer writes, “Marx taught us to face facts, and to use scientific analysis rather than ideologies to investigate them. Here I use the science of cybernetics, which was not available to Marx.” Beer even compliments Marx for his cybernetic intuition; his selection of the title “Status Quo” also paid homage to Marx. Beer writes, “For Marx, capital was evil and the enemy. For us, capital remains evil, but the enemy is STATUS QUO. . . . I consider that if Marx were alive today, he would have found the new enemy that I recognize in my title.” In “Status Quo” Beer used cybernetics to explore some of Marx’s more famous ideas and to update them for the modern world, taking into account new technological advances in communication and computing. According to Beer, the class struggle described by Marx was out of date and “represent[ed] the situation generated by the industrial revolution itself, and [was] ‘100 years old.’” Beer felt that capitalism had since created new forms of work and new exploitative relations.”

Beer ended up living his last years in Toronto and the Epilogue is a great little section on Medina visiting his Toronto home.

postscript (in line with a Marxist theory of leisure and enjoying a nice drink):

"Beer gave the design team general instructions about the type of control environment he wanted to create. He asked Bonsiepe to create a relaxing environment, akin to a British gentlemen’s club. The designers drew up plans for a “relax room” that used indirect lighting to simulate a “saloon” atmosphere.54 The plans included space for a bar where room occupants could make pisco sours, a popular Chilean cocktail. The design also represented the future of Chilean socialism."

I've never had a pisco sour, but I want to try one now!
out: champagne socialism, in: pisco sour socialism

[Sicofonia · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a compelling read this one was.

Cybernetic Revolutionaries tells the story of the development of the first large scale effort to manage the national industry of a country by using cybernetics. Back in the early 1970s, Chile was undergoing a rapid process of nationalization of its industry. Such pace meant that managing the set of plants and interdependent sectors started to become much more difficult. A young engineer by the name of Fernando Flores was executive director of the Chilean organization for development (CORFO) at the time. He was tasked with helping increase the production of the network of nationalized companies.

Having been influenced after reading Stafford Beer's Decision Control, he decides to send a letter to Beer asking for help.
To Beer this was like mana sent from heaven. An active and early cybernetician, he had published a number of books on management cybernetics; that is how to apply cybernetics principles of communication and control to manage businesses more effectively. Even though he was having a successful career as business consultant; he saw in Flores' letter the opportunity to put to practice his most recent invention: the Viable System Model. It also appealed to him the scale of the project.

The Cybersyn Project, as it was called, would consist of a network to interconnect factories, a simple simulator of the Chilean economy using system dynamics (called CHECO), an advanced piece of software that would compute economic indicators in order to forecast problems such as shortages of materials (called Cyberstride) and a control room where reports based on real time data could be visualized.

What followed next was a rollercoaster of events. Development of the cybernetic system would be impeded by the covert blockade of US to Chilean economy, which prevented the country from acquiring the computers and equipment necessary to develop a state-of-the-art real-time communications system. They would have to make do with existing telex machines and a mainframe computer to build their network. Development of the simulator exposed the shortcomings of system dynamics, and finally, Cyberstride being too costly to build, had to be initially a simplified version.

Intertwined to this story of the development of the system is the political upheaval in Chile at the time. As the pace of nationalization increased, so did the resistance of a sector of the population to these reforms. There were more and more strikes, and civil conflict was becoming more violent. It got to the point that even participants of this story could sense a coup happening at any time.

11th of September 1973 would mark indeed the end of Project Cybersyn. With the end of the socialist government, the main benefactor of the project, came the end of this cybernetic dream.

Eden Medina set herself the task of exploring how politics can shape and inform the development of technology or sociotechnical systems with this book. Masterfully looking at the development of Cybersyn with a critic eye and exposing the contradictions of it. For example, Cybersyn was originally envisioned as a mean to control national economy. In its beginnings, the emphasis was put on the technical aspect of it so its adoption by people not sympathetic to the Allende's government would be easier. However, as development progressed, tension raised between its participants. Beer started to talk about Cybersyn in terms of reducing bureaucracy and centralization to enhance worker participation by decentralizing the decision making process. Though no shop floor worker was ever involved in its development, being the case of a select few technocrats who developed it.

Even though I came across quite a few typos in my digital copy of this book, I could only give this a deserved 5 stars for being so well researched and written. Readers interested in Stafford Beer's life and work will find it a perfect match. Also, readers involved in change management can definitely extract some conclusions out of this. Beyond the cybernetic and sociotechnical aspect of the story, this is also a change management story that showcase the pitfalls of change adoption.

[Palash Srivastava · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a treat to read. Project Cybersyn was perhaps on of the most ambitious projects of its time which does not get its due credit.
What is most fascinating about this account is that Medina does not try to present a rosy image of the Project even though the political inclination of the author is clear. The violent end of Chilean experiment with socialism, may have completely destroyed the possibilities which Project Cybersyn presented, but Medina makes it clear that the Project itself had complications and contradictions. Towards the end one is left truly excited by what could be achieved if the current scale of technologies if we manage to free them from the clutches of capital.
Ultimately, as I read the downfall of this Project, I read the limits of Social Democratic politics. The relationships which exist under capitalism cannot be transformed by sociotechnical systems along with electoral politics- which I do think was Medina's subtle point.

[Tian · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve read many précises of this book, only to find the narrative so brilliantly written. Stafford Beer and Fernando Flores are such interesting figures that it’s hard to do their life stories justice in just 250 pages. I only have very surface-level understanding of Chilean politics under Salvador Allende and the coup against him, but Medina explains the context very well.

A highlight in this book is Beer’s discussion of a “people’s science,” contrasted with most Marxian (and non-Marxian) analyses of technology as a force of worker deskilling and displacement. Branding technology as democratic and participatory no longer seems novel today, but I am curious about the intellectual lineages and changing perceptions over time.

[Nick Klagge]

https://www.klagge.net/post/my-januar...

[Stephen Thompson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this! It's a neat mix of history, applied mathematics, and leftist politics.

Allende, after running on a platform that called for a peaceful and constitutional transition to socialism, was elected president of Chile in 1970. In order to manage the newly nationalized sectors of the economy, the Allende government brought in Stafford Beer, the founder of “management cybernetics.” Cybernetics is a branch of applied math concerned with the control and regulation of complex systems, and is often associated with a top-down way of looking at things. But Stafford Beer was attempting to mix his anti-authoritarian political views with cybernetics in order to build decentralized systems of management. (Beer's work was influenced by biology, in which systems regulate themselves by means of feedback loops between networks of more-or-less autonomous parts, instead of being subject to any form of centralized control.) Working with a team of Chilean scientists and engineers, Beer designed a technological network and computer system (called Cybersyn) that was supposed to link together the different parts of the economy in a way that increased worker participation in management decisions, while steering the economy as a whole toward meeting social goals (like full employment).

Because of the coup in 1973, we will never know how Cybersyn would have worked in practice. And it should be emphasized that the powerful forces working to undermine the project from the outside were not the only reason it failed to get off the ground. The project had conflicting goals, and its designers seemed to be naive about certain things. Stafford Beer himself had some odd opinions (and there are a few cringe-inducing passages of the book describing Beer's ideas concerning Marx and social class). Given all this, I suspect that it would have taken many years of trial and error, as well as lots of fundamental changes, in order to get Cybersyn working effectively.

But I do think the project would have been a success if it had been allowed to continue. The transnational corporations which make up global capitalism today are themselves planned economies, which in some cases are bigger (both in terms of annual output and in terms of the geographic scope of their operations) than Chile's economy. Many of these corporations are run using cybernetic principles. (My advisor in grad school actually did work in that area, modeling production networks using control theory.) Also, some of these companies (e.g. in Germany) rely on substantial input from workers in order to make decisions. So I don't think the Cybersyn project was totally unrealistic, at least from a purely technical perspective. Somebody should write a book about the modern planning practices and cybernetic theory utilized by modern corporations, with an eye to how the concepts might be repurposed in order to build a more rational economic system.

[Y · Rating 5 out of 5]

No conozco otra libro ni otra historia como esta. No sólo es un relato impresionante, sino que también contiene testimonios de primera fuente de aquellos actores que idearon y desarrollaron Synco.

«Revolucionarios cibernéticos» no es sólo un libro interesante para quien quiere conocer del proyecto, sino que también ofrece una correcta interpretación del contexto político-económico del Chile de los años 60' y 90'. Además, para quienes tienen interés por temas relacionados a la gestión, la gerencia (pública y privada) y los sistemas organizativos, es un libro imprescindible.

Por interés personal, destaco que esta historia va más allá de lo que a veces se ha banalizado como "cuando Chile casi crea internet", sino que corresponde una experiencia concreta y bien documentada de cómo un Estado es capaz de generar innovación, incluso en un contexto de alta inestabilidad y cambio, desmintiendo aquella idea equívoca de que es el sector privado es el único llamado a generar ideas revolucionarias en materia tecnológica.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is an interesting deep dive on a strange-but-true event of the twentieth century: Chile employed a British theorist of cybernetics to devise a novel system to help manage its economy.

I learned about Project Cybersyn from Andrew Pickering's excellent The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future. And it's a weird brag, but, I also timed the reading of Medina's book with a trip to Santiago where I went to see a replica of the very cool Cybersyn Operations Room, curated in part by Medina.

What makes this such an interesting book is that Medina actually went and interviewed a bunch of people who participated in Cybersyn, including the heavy hitters Stafford Beer and Fernando Flores. This, combined with the focus on the intersection of technology and politics, is unique as far as I can tell.

Medina also does an excellent job at threading the following needle: She explains the cybernetic theory on its own terms to do justice to the intentions of the technologists, including taking seriously its somewhat cult-ish slogans and novel vocabulary (cf. Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism): "requisite variety", "viable system", etc. But she is equally frank in pointing out the stark contrast between cybernetic ideology and the messy conditions on the ground in Chile. For example, according to Flores,

cybernetics was valuable in situations in which your enemy is not trying to kill you, but "if they are killing you, the concept is worthless".

I would say that Cybersyn would never have worked in the way Beer intended (Medina wisely chooses not to say anything so definite). It's not clear what it would have looked like had it been "ready" in the sense of actually making contact with the real problems Chile was facing. And in one of the most insightful observations in the book, factory modeler Tomas Kohn says:

Ultimately your work is accepted as long as it provides tools to achieve a more effective traditional management.

What happens where the rubber meets the road, and you turn over your technology to actually be used by people, is that those people's purposes start to shape what form the technology takes in practice. I believe Kohn's observation is what would have continued to happen to Cybersyn had it gotten more of a chance to expand.

Aside from what went wrong, the lesson of the book is as a case study in what this kind of project (engineering a technological solution to a social/political/economic problem) can be good for. One clear benefit of the project was that its telex network Cybernet helped the Allende government during the October strike led by the truck drivers and gremios (business organizations). The network reportedly "transmitted two thousand messages daily during the strike". Perhaps this says something about unintended benefits of investing in technological infrastructure. More crucially, as Medina points out, is the human resources developed in the creation of such a project (this is why the book is titled after the "cybernetic revolutionaries" who worked on Cybersyn). The participants Medina interviews generally report that the project changed them. Medina also reports on the benefits of international technological and cultural exchange: the Brits working on the project had to learn about Chilean politics, and some Chileans learned e.g. British standards of code documentation.

Reading Medina, you get a sense that there is a lot we can learn from even unlikely or abortive attempts to solve problems if we give things their due attention. To make this clear, Medina tracks the intellectual history of putting Cybersyn in the same bucket as Soviet central planning- there are reasons to link the two (both are attempts to solve an exceedingly complex problem of social organization by making up a new strategy almost from whole cloth), but something is lost in collapsing them entirely. Their intents were different, as were their modes of failure.

A cool read about a piece of history that could easily have been lost.

[Luke · Rating 4 out of 5]

A non-revolutionary non-authoritarian non-technocratic vision for computer-facilitated democratic socialist economic feedback and simulation in Allende's Chile. Follows threads (through archived correspondence and interviews with many key people) of Chilean officials enthusiasm for non-Soviet non-capitalist forms of state control, making do with limited computing and communication capacity, and the socialist shift in UK consultant Stafford Beer's flavor of Cybernetics - organisms adapting to changing environment, structural relational change not internal behavioral change, revolution though devolution of power. Within the narrow and dry subject, the author does an excellent job connecting and contextualizing relations to global power dynamics, gender dynamics, and the waxing and waning of technological solutions in political turmoil.

[Băcilă Marcu · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fully automated gay sex space travel luxury cybercommunism is coming.

[Otto Lehto · Rating 4 out of 5]

The brief Allende interlude in Chilean history is mired in myth and mystification. Contrasted with the horrors of the Pinochet regime, and suppressed by the machinations of the army and foreign intelligence agencies, Allende comes across sympathetically. At the same time, his "Chilean road to socialism" took the Chilean economy on a path of rapid collectivization, the increasing centralization of power, and - towards the end of his regime - the active suppression of oppositional voices. But one part of the story of his brief stay in power remains particularly strange and mystifying. This is the episode during 1971-1973, when the British cybernetician, Stafford Beer, was hired by Allende's government to construct a "cybernetic" (computerized) system that could aid the real-time state management of the newly collectivized sectors of the economy. This process involved a lot of interesting developments and quirky characters (the quirkiest of them all being Beer himself!), many of whom are given the spotlight in this charming, thrilling book.

Project Cybersyn was based on Beer's "Viable System Model" (VSM) of management. According Beer, any viable system, i.e., a system that wanted to maintain itself in the face of rapidly changing circumstances, needed ways to process information and adapt to it in real time. For this purpose, public and private management of organizations should take advantage of "cybernetic" principles, such as feedback loops, multi-level decentralized decision-making, rapid information flows, and "variety management" (according to which complexity/variety in the world needs to be coupled with a controller that is capable of fully "absorbing" all that complexity/variety). Cybernetic principles were popular because they provided scientists and managers ways of studying complex systems and thinking about ways of controlling them through technological means. Different cyberneticians recommended different policy solutions. The economist F.A. Hayek famously argued that the free market is a cybernetic system that is capable of controlling a complex system through the system of prices and markets. Beer, on the other hand, was s a firm believer in (anti-authoritarian strands of) socialism, so he believed that the economy needed to be managed in a more deliberate and conscious fashion - not by completely subjugating it to the authoritarian power of the central planner, but be employing a multi-level planning hierarchy that combined upper levels of management with various lower levels of autonomous decision-making. This vision had some overlap with Allende's vision for Chilean socialism, so it makes sense that they found some common ground. So, Beer supervised the construction of "Project Cybersyn," which aimed to implement a system of real-time, multi-level management for the Chilean socialist economy. Although it was never fully completed or operationalized, it was partially used during the Allende presidency. It entailed an impressive computerized network system that transferred (close to) real-time data from all the public sector industries in Chile to a central computer hub in Santiago. There, it was analysed through a computer program that monitored for anomalies and trends. Another computer program was used to make industrial forecasts and predictions. And human analysts would select key data and project it to the walls of the futurist looking command room. This, anyway, was the dream of Beer and his associates. As it turns out, the reality was a bit more complicated. This story is almost too strange to believe but it is absolutely gripping.

What I appreciate about Medina's book is the meticulous appeal to primary sources, including interviews with many of the prime movers of Project Cybersyn. This gives the story a certain air of historical gravitas and intimacy. The descriptive side of the story is carefully separated from a normative assessment. However, this does not always work. For example, when discussing the failures of the Allende policies of central planning, Medina evinces an unquestioning naivety regarding the self-evaluations of Allende, Flores, Beer, and the other key players. This leads to historical inaccuracies when oppositional voices are ignored and when events and interpreted through the self-aggrandizing narrative of the Allende-Beer crowd. For example, a more critical historiography would spend more time asking: 1) Did Project Cybersyn ever have a chance of succeeding? 2) How much of Allende's failures was due to foreign interference and how much was due to the internal failures of Allende's Marxist economic policies? One issue where Medina, to her credit, proceeds with admirable level-headedness is when she critically assesses Allende's and Beer's dubious claims that the "Chilean road to socialism," unlike the Cuban and Soviet varieties, were aimed towards decentralization, worker participation, and the preservation of individual autonomy. At their best, these slogans were highly ideological shibboleths that were often ignored in practice. At their worst, these slogans were conscious obfuscations designed to put a positive spin on an essentially technocratic, centralizing, and bureaucratic power grab.

Whatever the complicated reality behind the intentions and goodwill of Allende and Beer, it is obvious that Project Cybersyn played an important part in the effort to combine economic central planning (which was aimed towards the abolition of capitalism) with computerized network intelligence (which was aimed towards regulating the new socialist economy in a decentralized manner). This story is worth telling and learning from. Medina has done an excellent job narrating its many twists and turns, some of which are stranger than fiction, in a way that is historically illuminating and narratively gripping. But do not come here expecting to find a good, balanced assessment of the successes and failures of the Allende regime and Beer's cybernetic dreams.

Dreams come to us as malleable playthings of the imagination. But turning dreams into reality forces us to set aside the lofty sky castles of the mind. In order to live in our dreams - or rather, in order to know WHETHER we can live in them - we need to transmute our original, inchoate dreams into something more solid and robust. And it is not at all clear whether either Allende or Beer would ever have been able to do that. Non-idle dream-chasing forces us to sober up posthaste.

[Rohit · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a fascinating look at the intersection of technology and politics in early 1970s Chile, and the intellectual evolution and work of the great British technologist Stafford Beer. The book does a great job of revealing the political and social influences of Project Cybersyn, and how this might apply to engineering and technological development processes in general.

The narrative and analysis was a bit simplistic and repetitive at times (I'm guessing the target audience was engineers and programmers who have little to no background in subjects like sociology or philosophy or history), and I would have liked to see a lot more analysis on the ways that the cybernetic network was actually on a day-to-day basis, and how it interacted with the industries and factories it was connected with.

[Nico · Rating 5 out of 5]

En serio:
Este libro debería ser al menos en parte, de lectura o conocimiento obligatorio en las escuelas de ingeniería, sobre todo porque es un estudio de un caso chileno de cómo la ciencia y la tecnología no son neutrales ni apolíticas, de cómo se puede hacer innovación (de la de verdad, no ese mamarracho que se vende en todos lados ahora) con baja tecnología, y cómo la inclusión de la tecnología afecta a un grupo social, ya sea alterando o reforzando las relaciones que existen.

[Ray · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good history; interesting look at the relationship between mathematical cyberneticism, economics, and government.

[Medhat ullah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Eden Medina’s Cybernetic Revolutionaries is an entrancing temporal locus where the cold rationalities of technocratic governance collapse into the fervid libidinal flows of an emergent technosociality. It dissects, with meticulous precision, the Chilean experiment in cybernetic socialism, not merely as a historical anomaly but as a fractal aperture into the entanglement of cybernetics, power, and human futurity.The book’s narrative, oscillating between the utopian delirium of Project Cybersyn and the inevitable entropy of the Pinochetian coup, resonates as a recursive feedback loop of systemic ambition and collapse. Medina encodes the vicissitudes of Salvador Allende's administration within the broader matrix of Stafford Beer's cybernetic epistemology, reframing governance as a machinic assemblage rather than a static bureaucratic apparatus. This isn’t just a history of ideas but an autopsy of the cybernetic subjectivity that dared to articulate the unthinkable: socialism without centralization, control without repression.Medina’s historiographical approach could be described as a form of "hyperstitional excavation." The text not only recounts but also animates Cybersyn as an immanent potentiality—its telex machines and control rooms becoming spectral nodes of a distributed intelligence that was as much ideological as technical. The aestheticized Operación Nacional teeters on the precipice of a post-capitalist phylum, mapping Beer's cybernetic diagrams onto the terrain of political praxis.What emerges from Medina’s chronicle is not merely a retrospective on failure but an affective intensification of the question: What is the machinic horizon of governance? The recursive adaptation mechanisms of Cybersyn's operational research echo Deleuze and Guattari’s machinic unconscious, a diagrammatic topology where the socio-economic body without organs becomes modulated by informational flows rather than hierarchical commands.If anything, Cybernetic Revolutionaries is a testament to the horror and allure of accelerationism avant la lettre. It asks whether systems can self-regulate into emancipatory equilibria or if their overcoding always presages their collapse into authoritarian molarity. The descent into chaos that followed Cybersyn’s dissolution echoes Nick Land’s diagnosis of "thanatropic systems": the entropy inherent in any attempt to constrain hypercomplexity within bounded regulatory frameworks.
In Medina’s hands, the cybernetic revolutionaries are neither heroes nor villains but functionaries of a grand experiment in techno-social recursion. Their legacy haunts the contemporary moment, where algorithms and platforms perform a ghostly dance with Beer's forgotten dream of "viable systems."This book is not for the faint-hearted, nor for those who view history as a linear progression. It is an intricate labyrinth of technics, politics, and theory, a Nietzschean genealogy of the cybernetic subject that refuses closure or resolution. In the end, Medina’s work serves as a hyperstitional artifact, beckoning us to confront the unnameable promise and peril of cybernetic modernity.

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

The 70s were such an exciting time, humanity was conducting a number of organisational experiments, trying to work out how best to move forward with our new technology and knowledge. While we all know which won out, neoliberalism, rampant capitalism and the destruction of our sense of collectiveness, it's fascinating to read about some of the other options we were developing. This book covers one aspect of the effort in Chile to conduct a bloodless revolution, within it's democratic framework. This is in stark contrast to the soviet, cuban, and others I'm sure I don't know about.

Project Cybersyn attempted to create a real time economic management system for the country, one that balanced top-down and bottom-up control, in line with Stafford Beer's Cybernetic Management theories. Stafford had been developing these ideas for some decades by this point, and the invitation to contribute to Chile's efforts, and deploy his thinking at the nation level, was the chance of a life time for him. One he took with both hands.

The book's main thesis is that technology is inherently political, rather than neutral as we like to pretend. Technologies come about in a particular context, at particular times, and are heavily influence by them. They can also be used to bring about political goals. The designers of Cybersyn went to great lengths to try and embed the revolutions spirit into the system. Not always successfully, it has to be said. The people involved where young and eager to remake their country, in a new shape, one where people were well treated and engaged. A society, to put it simply.

The story shows that it's our ability to conceive of new possibilities, rather than raw technology, that can make the difference. Chile didn't have the latest computer systems, nor did it have much of what it did have. Yet, it was able to create the prototype of something truly novel, by trying to apply Cybernetics to it's economy. If things had gone better, that remit was set to expand and evolve, morphing the country into something entirely different to the nation states we see today.

Of course, it didn't work out, and that shadow lays heavily across the whole book. Throughout Chile's attempt to remake herself, the wider system did it's best to cripple the effort. This was the height of the Cold War, and you were either on the side of the superpowers, or against, there was no nuance. By trying to find a third path, Chile was cutoff from the West, and didn't want anything to do with the East. Direct political interference was conducted. Perhaps even without this the project would have failed, but we'll never know, and that feels like a tragic missed opportunity sat here today.

[Victor Lopez · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good look into the main players in Chiles' attempt to construct a purely parliamentary/democratic brand of socialism and the way that technology figured into this problem.

Medina does a decent job of presenting the context and circumstances of late 60s Chile (poverty, attempts at developmentalism by previous administrations) and how Allendes administration tried to solve them.

Effectively introduces the main players in the Cybersyn (Synco) project, including figures like Stafford Beer, Fernando Flores, Raul Espejo as well as their ongoing debates regarding the direction of the project.

One thing I really would have liked would have been for Medina to take a back seat and let the participants state their own perspectives themselves, given that the author sometimes would simply reiterate what quoted material had already stated. It doesn't really detract from the main thesis about the fact that technology is never truly neutral and intersects political and economic elements with their societies, but it made portions of the book a little dull.

A strength of this book is that for someone who is a total novice, Medina makes complex cybernetic concepts easier to follow and provides a way of orienting one around the technical details of this nascent planning system and its technical and political challenges without overwhelming the reader. I think this type of book/case study would be something that many engineers, computer scientists, etc. would appreciate and benefit from especially as it emphasizes the effects of ideology on research output and development of technology (there's an somewhat interesting section detailing the role of women clerical workers, or rather their absence, and how this created potential social contradictions within Chilean socialism).

I genuinely appreciated the wealth of information and name drops (Maturana a de Valera's self organized systems theory was absolutely fascinating, and had it not been for this book I would never had learned of it) the author made regarding some of the intellectual influences of Cybersyn which demonstrates that it simply wasn't a case of some British dude bringing an enlightened technology to the otherwise oblivious Chileans, but emphasizes the contributions made by countless Chilean scientists, economists, engineers, political and labor leaders to make such an undertaking possible and to resist reactionary attacks as long as they did.

Overall not bad, quite liked the scope and depth of the work. It really is a shame what Pinochet, his goons and their American supporters did to a country trying to find a path to a more just society.

[Ryan Johnson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cybernetic Revolutionaries

16/2024.

I first heard about this effort by the Allende government to use technology in a radical way to centralize production and make the economy more efficient when I lived in Chile. It’s a novel approach to a homegrown precursor to the Internet, and a cautionary tale about getting the human factor right in any computing system. Parts of it reinforce Dependency Theory, while others refute it. Tech (alone) won’t save us.

Project Cybersyn, as it was known, was a huge leap forward in government use of data analytics to drive decisions. It shows visionary leadership. It’s not hard to imagine a different path for tech development wherein the US didn’t unleash Arpanet to the broader world and projects like this instead led to some alternate version of the Internet.

Apart from a picture of the Star Trek-inspired consoles, I didn’t know much about Cybersyn. It turns out it was a really unique interconnected network of data collection and processing, to deliver analytic capabilities to government. Some of the criticisms are valid- it was highly technocratic and could be dehumanizing in the wrong hands. But it was a legitimate response to a profound need for economic and social development.

Incidentally there’s a podcast about it but I find the delivery a bit sensationalistic and so dropped it in favor of this book, which is incredibly well researched and constructed.

The book is a more academic history than adventure tale, but includes the important details of how the US interfered in the development of this “Third Way” by restricting access to American tech. Some stories are timeless. The British technologist behind the architecture, Stafford Beer, seems to have presaged Fully Automated Luxury Communism that was emerging in Italian academia just after this time.

Technology brought to use by governments reflects political goals. Cybersyn was a technology meant to effect the political goal of improved national economic production in a Socialist context; citizen participation was also desired (see the CyberFolk component)although the technology limited somewhat their feedback in the system. The Chilean administration was clearly aware that the implications of the tech they chose to promote would have social consequences- it was a very deliberate and thoughtful time. Nevertheless, the opposition also tried to characterize the project as Orwellian and covert in nature; proof that great tech and great policy can be obscured by losing the narrative.

#techpolicy #chile #latam #internet #cybernetics #cybersyn

[Allan Olley · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a fascinating review of a unique technological project. The attempt to use cybernetic principles to design a system (Cybersyn) to allow the socialist government of Salvador Allende to achieve optimal control and develop the large number of state owned businesses acquired under the government's nationalization program. The system would martial the limited computer and communication resources of Chile and was conceived by British cybernetician and management consultant Stafford Beer at the initiative of up and coming cabinet member Fernando Flores. They assembled a team that included many Chilean professionals and various British producers. The program never reached fruition in part because of the instability of the Allende government, in part because of fundamental issues with the project, but did have some practical effects before the fall of the ouster of Allende.

The book is a careful analysis of surviving accounts and records of Cybersyn including interviews with many of the principle workers. The broad principles of Beer's cybernetic philosophy of management are explained and some of the basic history of Chile is also explained to give context to developments. The account is remarkable for illustrating the tensions at work among the people building the system, such as the urge for grass roots political participation on the one hand and on the other the desire for efficient technocratic control without worry about deeper political ideals or goals.

The Kindle copy of this book is about as effective as Kindle books are in general. A general note there are lots of endnotes in this book and the way Kindle (on desktop) handles endnotes is not optimal, since you have to jump to the endnote to read it (no preview) and when I try to click on the endnote link on a touch screen it can be difficult to hit the exact pixel necessary to activate the link.

[Indumugi C · Rating 5 out of 5]

Enjoyed reading Cybernetic Revolutionaries thoroughly. The book aims to bring together the story of Project Cybersyn - a project of marrying two utopian visions, democratic socialism and decentralized economic control through cybernetic management. Project Cybersyn was a bold technological experiment undertaken by Chilean bureaucrats, technocrats, engineers, and politicians to 'engineer' a faltering economy. Where this book gets most interesting is the way it depicts the various readings, political or merely technological, of one technology. Stafford Beer and Fernando Flores envisioned the Cybersyn as a project that could make it easy for worker participation in the overall coordination of the Chilean economy, but that dream did not translate to the technology or its design - this was fatal to how Chileans viewed the importance of Cybersyn. It is also mildly shocking (not surprising) how quickly British newspapers vilified Cybersyn as totalitarian based on mere hearsay, when Chile could have been given the opportunity to improvise on Cybersyn to achieve what it truly aimed to. Developed countries view technological developments from the developing world in binaries of make or break, without opportunities for improvisation - such opportunities and time upon which the West has rode its technological development.

The book also proffers a biographical account of Stafford Beer, a thoughtful and passionate theorist and consultant on cybernetics, and whose ideas on cybernetic management remain authoritative to date. It is surprising to note that most popular histories do not mention the inroads that cybernetics made into Chile and the role of Stafford Beer in popularizing those ideas.

[KT · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating and well-researched history of the Allende government's attempt to use cybernetics and computation to centrally plan the Chilean economy

This well-written account really brought to life the challenges of building Cybersyn in the face of strikes from Chilean petty Bourgeoisie, US-led economic blockade and general political precarity of the Allende government, and the role and contribution of cybernetics to the government's survival

Particular highlights included:
The design of the operations room that carried explicit gender bias towards favouring men including being modeled after a gentlemen's club and a masculine-coded form of communication - thumping the keys
Thus showing how cultural and political priors can limit technological innovation, as well as how preexisting ideas about gender and class restricted the way historical actors imagined the future and ultimately how the Allende government framed its revolutionary subjects and limited the redistribution of power within Chile's socialist revolution

The inconsistent relationship between technology and politics such as how modelers and engineers would ignore workers or treat them with condescension despite the explicit instructions to work with worker committees, thus workers were not involved in shaping the modeling process despite the Allende government wanting to increase worker involvement in decision making, in fact an argument could be made the CyberSyn system was disempowering Chilean workers by continuing management practices that worsened factory working conditions

[James · Rating 3 out of 5]

Cutting-edge technology crossed with a peaceful socialist revolution in Chile make this analysis of the Chilean cybernetics programme and its implementation of the Allende government are fascinating piece of history, both political and technological.

However it is unfortunately let down by an extremely basic level of analysis and discussion: The analysis reads just like a basic paper on this topic at the university level – introductions and conclusions of chapters are extremely repetitive, the author constantly telling and not showing. Taking a purely chronological approach puts the programme into context but does not do its analysis any real favours. There just needs to be more than a seemingly surface level analysis and grasp of what happened. It felt there were missed opportunities to explore more deeply the political and technological crossovers between cybernetics and Chilean-style socialism as well as looking more broadly at the cultural aspects of the programme.

As seemingly one of the very few historical works about cybernetics during the 1970s, where the science found its second home outside of America and how technology into plays with politics, this is still an interesting and poignant memorial to the program, to the collaborators who worked for a peaceful socialist revolution in Chile, and as a testimony to Stafford Beers and his vision of a cybernetics that would work for the better good of all people.

[Robin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very readable. Couldn't help but feel the tragedy not just at violent ending but at the neo-liberal transformation of some of the architects. This reinforces Guevara's insight that a socialist project depends on a socialist human , one who gets constructed as much she constructs herself under socialism. Can any such project be 'allowed' to function long enough for a new human to emerge from it. Otherwise all such projects are ultimately doomed to fail in a world wholly antithetical to any such social/communal project. Otherwise every generation, especially technocrats who.emerge into positions of functional power continue to believe in a separate realm of technocracy free from "ideological baggage", this missing Guevara's crucial insight completely.

FYI:having been to Chile in midst of the recent crisis , trying to gauge the local social consciousness left me underwhelmed in the way expressed above.

[Timothy · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an unusual history, focused as it is on the history of computing and cybernetics far outside the US and Europe. It tells a story that is entertaining and thought-provoking, even though the project that it documents was never fully implemented. There is also an interesting tie-in to Understanding Computers and Cognition: A New Foundation for Design, a formative book for me.

On the bad side, the writing is dry and the analysis, while adequate, comes across as uninspired. Still, this is a story that needed to be told, and I'm glad that I came across it.

[Jimmy · Rating 4 out of 5]

An immensely valuable collection of information on Project Cybersyn, its successes and shortcomings, which would be important to consider in any political project aimed at decentralized yet coordinated control. Only alluding to any kind of comparative study, this book feels most like a start of a line of research.

[Sam Wollenberg · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely comprehensive and insightful telling of Project Cybersyn, its successes, failures, and historical legacy in Chile and beyond. As Medina concludes, Cybersyn is a wonderful "example of how high-risk technological projects, and attempts to combine the technological and the political, can produce positive outcomes, even if they never reach completion."

[Drew · Rating 3 out of 5]

With today being the anniversary of the CIA-backed coup of Chile, I finally decided to sit down and finish this after over a year of picking it up and putting it back down. Medina has done some incredible research, but the story is a slog even for those interested in the topic. The 99% Invisible podcast episode is an excellent primer to see if you want to dive in on this.