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

“Bureaucracy always favors the status quo” (page 201). This quote is the crux of Eden Medina’s fascinating book on the conception, birth, and eventual demise of an international experiment in technological collaboration and social engineering in the early 1970s in Chile. The British cybernetician Stafford Beer made this observation while reflecting on the status of Project Cybersyn in June 1973.

Project Cybersyn, started in early 1970 under his supervision, was not going well. Indeed, it was an improbable effort right from the start, located in Chile—not exactly a technology superpower. The players included Chilean technocrats, politicians, bureaucrats, and scientists; a smattering of other nationalities; President Salvador Allende; and of course Beer himself. The Project Cybersyn experiment was a bold, but ultimately futile attempt to “engineer” the faltering economy of Chile through the use of cybernetics, homegrown communications networks, and computer-simulated economic models. The project sought to marry socialist politics with the “cybernetic management” ideas of Beer to create a vast, real-time decision-support system, linking the production shop floors of Chilean factories to the decision makers in Santiago. It was conceived as an egalitarian system that would accept design ideas as well as actual data both from the top down and the bottom up. When Beer described the system to Allende, the president waited patiently until the workers’ role was described, at which point he “leaned back on his chair and said, ‘At last, el pueblo,’” thereby displaying his ideological convictions that he wanted a system by and for the people (page 75).

Medina describes Project Cybersyn as a marriage of convenience. In 1970, just as Allende’s coalition won a narrow victory in Chile, Beer was looking to implement his broad theories in a large-scale environment. Simultaneously, the director general of the Production Development Corporation of Chile, Ferdinand Flores, was searching for an effective way to control and manage industrial production in a climate of rapid socialization and nationalization of industries. Flores was so impressed by Beer’s books that he contacted him soon after taking office. Beer jumped at the chance to lead Project Cybersyn. Both knew that Cybersyn would be a political system that would unabashedly attempt to support and augment Allende’s socialist revolution.

The only problem was that the Allende-led revolution divided Chile and pitted the “owner” class, consisting mainly of the Christian Democrats, against the “worker” class. Most importantly, Allende’s socialist agenda had strong opponents, notably in the US, which soon embarked on a program to rid Chile of Allende through economic blockades and covert CIA actions.

Given the economic blockade and the wide disapproval of Allende in the north and west, it is curious that the complexities of Chilean politics were lost on Beer when he arrived in Chile in 1971. Medina’s narrative suggests that Beer was so blinded by the thought of implementing his utopian system that he seems to have ignored the serious shortcomings that existed in Chile: lack of trained programmers, lack of computers and networking equipment, and a rapidly weakening Chilean currency. One minor quibble with the book is that it would have been interesting if Medina had focused more on the compulsions that drove Beer to overlook these ground realities when he decided to take up the project.

Medina admirably traces how Beer and his Chilean counterparts deftly maneuvered around the challenges. She recounts how, by the end of 1971, Beer’s “education” was complete; he had learned to appreciate Chilean cultural norms that extended to how the Chilean programmers collaborated and developed systems as well as how they were able to find workarounds to surmount obstacles, both environmental and man-made.

Medina skillfully weaves the Project Cybersyn story with the anti-Allende political developments taking place in Chile at the same time. Some of the stories she narrates are riveting. Especially interesting is the story of the October 1971 strike by the trucking business association. Just as the situation threatened to topple the Allende regime, Flores, Beer and their...