Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile by Eden Medina (review)

Cybernetic Revolutionaries examines the development of a technological project aimed at managing the Chilean economy. Implemented between 1971 and 1973, under the administration of socialist president Salvador Allende, the effort was aided by British national Stafford Beer, a noted consultant in the field of cybernetics and industrial control. The book’s author, Eden Medina, a professor at the University of Indiana, aims to understand how countries on geographic, economic, and political peripheries employ computer technologies. The monograph is the product of years of archival research and interviews stretching from Chile to the United States, Great Britain, and other countries. Medina’s work has allowed her to reconstruct the birth, development, and eventual collapse of the so-called “Cybersyn” project, an information system that combined software innovations and an elaborate communications network in order to facilitate the collection of economic data from across the country in real time. The carefully written book, published by MIT Press, suggests the importance attained by cybernetics during the Cold War, as well as its relationship to a larger effort to established systems of control and management in both economic and political arenas. The Chilean experiment represents a particularly notable case given the country’s ability to establish transnational relationships with regard to the exchange of scientific ideas and technologies, even in the context of underdevelopment.

The first chapter, “Cybernetics and Socialism,” demonstrates that the Cybersyn project emerged from the work of a young engineer at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (PUC), Fernando Flores, who formed part of a small political party allied with the Allende government. Flores was familiar with the work of Stafford Beer, particularly his studies Cybernetics and Management and Decision and Control. In 1971, when Flores occupied the post of general technical manager at the Corporación de Fomento de la Producción (CORFO), the Chilean state agency in charge of promoting and funding industrialization, he invited Beer to visit Chile in order to develop a system for collection of economic data with the objective of helping the government control and direct the economy. In Spanish, the project was called Synco (information and control system), while in English, it was dubbed Cybersyn, a name that reflected its relationship to the ideas of cybernetic synergy. Beer’s ideas were particularly useful for the leftist government, which sought to differentiate itself from Soviet and Cuban forms of totalitarianism, since his understanding of control emphasized self-regulation and the ability of systems to adapt to external and internal change, rather than domination. Moreover, he promoted vertical and horizontal communications within an organization, which allowed for a balance between centralized and decentralized forms of control, and in turn promised to prevent both the tyranny of authoritarianism and the chaos of absolute freedom.

In Chapters 2–5, “Cybernetics in the Battle for Production,” “Designing a Network,” “Constructing the Liberty Machine,” and “The October Strike,” respectively, the author examines the development of the ambitious project. Inspired by futurist aesthetics reminiscent of the film 2001: A Space Odyssey by Stanley Kubrick, the control room for the project was constructed in Santiago, the nation’s capital (an image of which illustrates to cover of the book). The initial advances made by Cybersyn were possible thanks to international collaboration and a market for technologies that allowed the socialist government to contract the firm Arthur Andersen to install software, to purchase equipment from IBM, and to gain the aid of Beer, former director of United Steel. Yet this unusual, ambitious, and futuristic technology for social, economic, and political change faced severe limitations. What was eventually put into place was a telex communications network, which captured information about factories, and a system for analysis of statistics and economic indicators. The telex network in particular acquired a strategic character during the truckers’ strike of October 1972—which was supported by both the rightist opposition and the Central Intelligence Agency...