Project Cybersyn

Definition

Project Cybersyn (from cybernetics and synergy; in Spanish, Proyecto Synco) was an early computer network built in Chile between 1971 and 1973, under the socialist presidency of Salvador Allende, to regulate the rapidly growing social property area and to manage the transition of the Chilean economy toward socialism. It remains the most ambitious attempt ever made to run a national economy on cybernetic principles in something close to real time.

History

Project Cybersyn Control Room

Under the guidance of the British cybernetician Stafford Beer, often called the father of management cybernetics, an interdisciplinary Chilean team designed cybernetic models of factories within the nationalised sector and created a network for the rapid transmission of economic data between the government and the factory floor. Beer applied his Viable System Model to the economy as a whole, treating each enterprise, sector and ministry as a recursively nested viable system rather than as a level in a command hierarchy.

The system had four principal components:

• Cybernet — a network of roughly 500 telex machines, largely repurposed from existing stock, linking state enterprises to a mainframe in Santiago.
• Cyberstride — statistical software that monitored production indicators, using Bayesian filtering methods developed with British consultants to flag significant deviations rather than report everything, so that management attention was called only where it was needed.
• CHECO (CHilean ECOnomy) — an economic simulator for forecasting the consequences of policy.
• Opsroom — a hexagonal operations room with seven fibreglass swivel chairs, wall displays of production data and Viable System Model diagrams, and armrest controls rather than keyboards, on the deliberate assumption that decision-makers would use the room directly rather than through typists.

The October 1972 Strike

The system's most-cited success came in October 1972, when some 50,000 striking truck owners blockaded the roads converging on Santiago. Using the telex network to coordinate, the government was able to guarantee the transport of food into the city with roughly 200 trucks driven by strike-breakers — a logistics problem solved by a network that had been built for a different purpose.

Aftermath

After the military coup of 11 September 1973, the Chilean military abandoned the project and the control room was destroyed. Beer had already grown uneasy about the gap between the system's decentralising intentions and the uses a state might make of it, and wrote about that tension for the rest of his life.

The definitive scholarly account is Eden Medina's Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende's Chile (MIT Press, 2011), which argues against reading Cybersyn either as a socialist internet or as a failed surveillance state, and shows how thoroughly its technical design encoded a political theory.

Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology

Cybersyn is the clearest historical example of a socio-technical system whose politics were deliberately built into its architecture rather than added afterwards: Beer's design was intended to preserve worker autonomy by attenuating information upward rather than pushing commands downward. That it was destroyed by a coup rather than by technical failure makes it a case study in how thoroughly the fate of infrastructure depends on the fate of the state that hosts it.

Sources

• Project Cybersyn on Wikipedia
• Medina, Eden. "Designing Freedom, Regulating a Nation: Socialist Cybernetics in Allende's Chile." Journal of Latin American Studies 38 (2006): 571–606.

Related Reading

• Stafford Beer
• Ross Ashby
• Cybernetics
• From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism