CYBERSYN
IBM Mainframes, Nationalización, y Cibernética Socialista
ISSUE 1: THE UN/MAKING ISSUE
Other distributed-computer projects existed around the time of ARPANET–OGAS in the Soviet Union and Cybersyn in Chile—with alternate socioeconomic principles, methods, and goals. Neither developed past infancy so we do not know how they could have developed or contributed to the state projects to which they belonged. Still, these early experiments hint at another world, with unimaginable multipolar computer networks crisscrossing the globe, existing within and in ways enabling different economic and emergent sociocultural realities. Perhaps we should learn from those efforts—our internet is not the only natural digital reality and its principles, e.g. “free speech” and profitability, are far from universal.
Eden Medina, in conversation with Gabriel Flores, describes Chile’s limited experiments with cybernetic management systems coinciding with a democratic-socialist economic overhaul in the 1970s. Her book (referenced below) Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende's Chile (MIT Press, 2011), is a meticulous analysis of the decentralized computer-aided decision-planning apparatus Cybersyn, the circumstances of its birth, and the characters that developed it.
How can you make a technological system empowering for workers, how can you make it part of a political project that tries to make life better for the most marginalized people in your country?
Eden Medina: Cybersyn was a project created between 1971 and 1973 in Chile as part of a peaceful road to socialist change. This approach represented a programmatic attempt by the government to bring about a socialist restructuring of the economy: the government would gain greater control of the nation’s most important industries. Project Cybersyn was an initiative to provide the government with a new set of tools to regulate the growing state-owned property area under its management. It was called Cybersyn because it was based on cybernetic principles and the idea of synergy—that the tools, collectively, would be more than the sum of their parts. It ended up being more of a prototype and many aspects of the system were quite futuristic. Perhaps most notably, there was a futuristic cybernetic control room that has since become an iconic image of the project.
And what a beautiful image it is.
It's a nice one.
In your book, you developed a claim that politics are difficult to embed in the design of sociotechnical systems—a term you quote historian Thomas Hughes defining as a web of social, institutional and technological relationships. What lessons do you think Cybersyn gives us for politicizing technology and embedding social technical safeguards?
I think one of the things that the Cybersyn history shows us is the multiplicity of ways that technologies can have politics. They can have politics with a capital “P” in the sense that they're part of an overt political program with explicit goals. They also can have politics with a lowercase “p.” Examining daily relationships among different groups of people shows how technologies can empower some but not others, which is also politics.
The story shows us that even capital “P” political projects can get slippery very quickly when it comes to implementation. For example, building a computer system to help run the nationalized economy in ways aligned with the values of the government’s political program—while increasing participation of workers in the process—became complicated in the implementation phase, despite the rhetoric around its use. As I write in the book, worker participation can mean workers sharing and building aspects of their knowledge into a technological system, but in the long term, this can also lead to worker de-skilling and worker disempowerment. It's pretty complicated in that sense.
I would say that because technology is such a rich site for these kinds of negotiations, it is also a very rich historical text for understanding how these negotiations played out in the past.
Worker participation can mean workers sharing and building aspects of their knowledge into a technological system, but in the long term, this can also lead to worker de-skilling and worker disempowerment. It's pretty complicated in that sense.
EM: The Cybersyn story really does show that the history of technology and computing is global. When I started working on this project a couple decades ago, people didn't really know about Cybersyn. People didn't associate something so futuristic, both in terms of its aesthetics and its ambitions, with Latin America. Yet different contexts make it possible to imagine different kinds of systems; beyond imagination, sometimes you need different contexts in order to actually build them.
That's one of the extraordinary things about Cybersyn’s history—not only that people imagined it, but that they went ahead and built it. People often said the Cybersyn system was a utopian project in the sense that it was a nice vision but it never really came to fruition. It was not utopian in the sense that people actually built it. The operations room actually existed. And while it wasn't used on a daily basis and didn't make it beyond prototype form, it was something that Chile tried to do.
So my interest in the Cybersyn history is perhaps representative of a larger wish for technology history to be more inclusive. If we had more historical narratives and precedents, it would expand the way that we think about technology and technological possibility. And that, in turn, would expand our imagination for thinking about what technological futures might be possible.
When researching this project, I tried finding workers to see if anyone remembered being approached about contributing to the system, or who might have sat in the futuristic operations room. I couldn't find anyone, which points to how the talk of worker participation and worker inclusion might have been more rhetoric than real. People in Chile didn’t really know about the project other than the engineers and designers who built it. But I think now there is more knowledge of this history. In September of 2023, I had a museum exhibition for the 50 year anniversary of the military coup. The exhibition, which I co-curated with Hugo Palmarola and Pedro Alonso, was called How to Design a Revolution: The Chilean Road to Design1. And as part of that, my co-curators and I built a full scale, functional reconstruction of the Cybersyn operations room.
That's one of the extraordinary things about Cybersyn’s history—not only that people imagined it, but that they went ahead and built it...people actually built it. The operations room actually existed.
It was in Santiago, Chile, at the Centro Cultural La Moneda, which is underneath the Chilean Presidential Palace. As part of the exhibition, people could visit the Cybersyn Operations Room. They could walk inside and be surrounded by it and could see that it was real—not a fantasy, not a utopia, it was something that was built. They could sit in the chairs and get the feeling for what it would've been like to have a discussion about the economy in that space, with its futuristic aesthetic.
Visitors not only learned about the room, but they also had the partial experience of it, as part of understanding the Popular Unity history2. That’s important because for a long time—and it's still true to this day—the Popular Unity was seen as a period of protest, divisive politics, and, of course, violence, culminating with the military coup that resulted in Allende’s death. I don't think people appreciated what a tremendous moment of creativity it was and the sense of possibility that many Chileans had.
In the exhibition, we had 350 graphic and industrial design objects from the period. Some were very ambitious, like the Cybersyn operations room. Others were more mundane, like the creation of special spoons to measure powdered milk (used to feed Chilean children and improve nutrition). But collectively, when you see all of it together, you see that Chileans were trying to make society better in so many different ways. I think that's an inspiration.
You featured some of those designs in the book. I really liked this turntable. I want that! Sometimes the best design comes from constrained resources.
“The history of Project Cybersyn is a reminder that technologies and technological ideas do not have a single point of origin. Ideas and artifacts travel and can come together in different ways depending on the political, economic, and geographical context. These unique unions can result in different starting points for similar technological ideas. For example, this history has suggested an alternative point for the use of computers and national communication and data, data sharing networks.”
I want to imagine with you what an internet with the starting conditions of Cybersyn instead of ARPANET3 would've looked like; how would our relationships to one another mediated through the internet have changed?
This is a tricky question for a historian, because you're asking about a counterfactual. As historians, we tend to stay away from those. I would also push back against referring to Cybersyn as a “socialist internet.” I would say that it is an alternative computer network, just as the OGAS4 in the Soviet Union is a different computer network, and the internet is another. The internet grew out of a particular project, a particular context.
When thinking about computer networking and alternative possibilities, I would focus less on the technology itself and more on its role in enabling a project of social, political, and economic change. Maybe the more interesting and grounded question is how Cybersyn would've contributed to those projects had the Allende government survived a bit longer5. Maybe parts of it would have. One of the main components of the Cybersyn was its telex network, which spanned the length of the country and allowed for rapid communication.This led the government to have more dynamic decision making.
I do think that certain ideas about Cybersyn remain relevant, such as: how can you make a technological system empowering for workers, how can you make it part of a political project that tries to make life better for the most marginalized people in your country, and how can you do it in ways that are bold and ambitious—perhaps that people haven't seen before? That's interesting. It's interesting that Chile tried to do that.
The Cybersyn project was created as a form of decentralized control. So what does that mean? The system had one mainframe computer so everything was going into a centralized computer room. However, the data flows were going in and out, across the country from from the north to the south, and were being transmitted to managers within the factories.
The idea was that the managers would send the data to the central computer using the telex network. Statistical software would look at the data to identify where problems were taking place. If the software located a problem, the system would notify the manager and give them a chance to fix it. Managers thus retained a degree of autonomy. They could make decisions before the government decision makers in Santiago would intervene to say, “Let us solve this problem for you.” The managers thus maintained their freedom to manage, but not so much that the identified problem could worsen into a crisis. So, was this a decentralized system? Was it a centralized system? You know, it kind of gets at that slipperiness between the two concepts.
I think that slipperiness is good for thinking about our internet of today. We can think of it as a distributed system, which is kind of the original ethos of its design. I think we would all agree that the internet is no longer a distributed system. There are certain passage points that we probably need to go through, Google being one of them. We can think of the media that we can consume and the central passage points inherent to them. We can also think about the physical infrastructure of the internet in terms of centralization and decentralization, for example where cables are located and the geography of where our signal traffic has to travel. There are certain places that are more of an “obligatory passage point,” to quote sociologist Michel Callon, than others. And that has real ramifications. It has real ramifications that affect freedom, privacy, surveillance, our ability to purchase goods, and the ways companies and governments collect our data.
I think the concept of slipperiness—how different models can slide back and forth between distributed, decentralized and centralized—is perhaps useful for thinking about the internet of the future, the kinds of configurations that we might want, and the ways these networks might contribute to the creation of power dynamics that run counter to those we desire.
1. Brindley, M. (2023, October). Designing a revolution. MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
https://news.mit.edu/2023/designing-revolution-1002
2. Unidad Popular (Popular Unity) was a coalition of Chilean leftist parties in support of Salvador Allende's presidential victory in the 1970 election. The coalition, led by Allende, promoted a peaceful road to socialism through national expropriation of large land holdings “latifundios” and the “commanding heights” of the economy, key industries that included agriculture, heavy industry, and most notably copper mining. The 1973 coup ended UP rule in Chile.
3. Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) was a computer network established in 1969 and operated by the US Department of defense in collaboration with private companies and academic institutions that laid the technological groundwork for the modern internet.
4. OGAS (National Automated System for Computation and Information Processing), was a computer network designed in the USSR in 1962 in an effort to automate economy management. It was denied funding and never fully developed.
5. The 1970-1973 Unidad Popular - Allende rule of Chile marked the first democratically elected socialist government in the Americas. It was, however, plagued consistently with internal and international pressures. The UP coalition won the presidency with 36% of the popular vote, and faced opposition from the centrist Christian Democratic Party and the conservative National Party, as well as internal frictions. The socialist politics and nationalization efforts of the UP threatened US and multinational commercial interests, and US President Richard Nixon along with his Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, collaborated with corporate leadership to destabilize the Chilean economy, sponsoring local bourgeois strikes (which was famously managed through some of the infrastructure established through Cybersyn), cutting off imports and making “the economy scream.” The conditions had been established for a successful military coup by Augustin Pinochet in 1973. His government did not continue developing Cybersyn, and destroyed much of what was left. For a more in depth history on this, please refer to Professor Medina’s book.
6. Stafford Beer was an eccentric British cyberneticist who specialized and developed the field of management cybernetics. He was recruited by Fernando Flores, who was at the time the general technical manager of the State Development Corporation (CORFO), to help develop Cybersyn.
This conversation is also part of the Fortunately digital series SWARM, exploring solidarity and mutuality within collectives.