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

This book offers a historic review of an unlikely project: Cybersyn. It happened in Allende’s Chile in the early 1970s. Cybersyn was the innovation of British cybernetician Stafford Beer, creator of the Viable System Model (Beer, 1972, 1981). Chile, through this project, gave Beer an opportunity to use his model and several innovative technologies that were ahead of their time. Medina’s account of the model is well researched and properly contextualised and her account of the overall project resonates well with my memories—I was deeply involved in Cybersyn development.

The author explains in depth Cybersyn’s technological underpinnings: Cyberstride, a computer tool to manage the economy in real time; Cybernet, the development of a communications network based on telexes; Checo, a model of the economy based on system dynamics; and the Operations Room, a decision space where all these tools came together. Did these tools increase the reach of managers or enhance the autonomy of the workers? Were these tools undermining skilled workers abilities, or enhancing their capacity to solve local problems? What was the social meaning of the communications network?

The book illustrates well that the Viable System Model was not used to model the Chilean economy but as a heuristic for action. Medina makes apparent that “Beer was more interested in studying how systems behaved in the real world than in creating exact representations of how they function” (p. 25). She also notes that “Beer’s emphasis on action over mathematical precision set him apart from many of his peers in the academic operations research community who, Beer believed, privileged mathematical abstraction over problem solving” (p. 25). Beer’s emphasis was on performance rather than modelling. This fact put pressure on the local team, which had to carry out much methodological and practical work, an aspect that the book perhaps underplays.

Perhaps the most powerful insights offered in the book relate to the encounter of technology and politics. Medina is aware of Cybersyn’s conflicts: many of its participants had a limited view of revolution, and were perhaps aiming at the impossible by trying to maintain organizational stability in a context of huge political change. However, Cybersyn, as a technological device, could not free itself from the politics of the day. That it had relevance to politics is instantiated by the increasing influence of Cybersyn’s political leader, Fernando Flores, over President Allende.

At the same time Medina makes apparent the limited political influence that Cybersyn had throughout its life. Paradoxically, the climax of the project, when it contributed to the defeat of middle-class strikers in October 1972, coincided with Flores’s declining interest in it. The strike was the beginning of a weaker relationship between technology and politics; it had become apparent that the technology in use was insufficient to produce the required change.

Medina illustrates the conflict between politics and technology with reference to the reception the project received from the press at the time: “Unfortunately, by refusing to respond to the press reports, Flores and the rest of the Chilean team allowed the negative impressions of Cybersyn to gain momentum” (p. 176). Also, with reference to the Richard Goodman lecture in the United Kingdom (Beer’s main public presentation of Cybersyn), Medina states that, “By emphasizing technology instead of Cybersyn’s relationship to the social and economic goals of Allende’s nationalization program, Beer failed to definitively separate himself from the technocrats he criticized” (p. 180).

In summary this book offers a compelling account of the difficulties and contradictions built into a visionary use of science and technology to support a highly turbulent political process. Much can be learned from this experience.