- Eden Medina
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Abstract: This article presents a history of ‘Project Cybersyn’, an early computer network developed in Chile during the socialist presidency of Salvador Allende (1970–1973) to regulate the growing social property area and manage the transition of Chile’s economy from capitalism to socialism. Under the guidance of British cybernetician Stafford Beer, often lauded as 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. The article describes the construction of this unorthodox system, examines how its structure reflected the socialist ideology of the Allende government, and documents the contributions of this technology to the Allende administration.
On 12 November 1971 British cybernetician Stafford Beer met Chilean President Salvador Allende to discuss constructing an unprecedented tool for economic management. For Beer the meeting was of the utmost importance; the project required the president’s support. During the previous ten days Beer and a small Chilean team had worked frantically to develop a plan for a new technological system capable of regulating Chile’s economic transition in a manner consistent with the socialist principles of Allende’s presidency. The project, later referred to as ‘Cybersyn’ in English and ‘Synco’ in Spanish,[1] would network every firm in the expanding nationalized sector of the economy to a central computer in Santiago, enabling the government to grasp the status of production quickly and respond to economic crises in real time. Although Allende had been briefed on the project ahead of time, Beer was charged with the task of explaining the system to the President and convincing him that the project warranted government support.
Accompanied only by his translator, a former Chilean Navy officer named Roberto Can˜ete, Beer walked to the presidential palace in La Moneda while the rest of his team waited anxiously at a hotel bar across the street. ‘A cynic could declare that I was left to sink or swim,’ Beer later remarked. ‘I received this arrangement as one of the greatest gestures of confidence that I ever received; because it was open to me to say anything at all.’[2] The meeting went quite well. Once they were sitting face to face (with Can˜ete in the middle, discreetly whispering translations in each man’s ear), Beer began to explain his work in ‘management cybernetics,’ a field he founded in the early 1950s and cultivated in his subsequent publications.[3] At the heart of Beer’s work stood the ‘viable system model’, a five-tier structure based on the human nervous system, which Beer believed existed in all stable organizations – biological, mechanical and social. Allende, having trained previously as a pathologist, immediately grasped the biological inspiration behind Beer’s cybernetic model and knowingly nodded throughout the explanation. This reaction left quite an impression on the cybernetician. ‘ I explained the whole damned plan and the whole viable system model in one single sitting ... and I 've never worked with anybody at the high level who understood a thing I was saying.’[4]
Beer acknowledged the difficulties of achieving real-time economic control, but emphasised that a system based on a firm understanding of cybernetic principles could accomplish technical feats deemed impossible in the developed world, even with Chile’s limited technological resources.
Once Allende gained a familiarity with the mechanics of Beer’s model, he began to reinforce the political aspects of the project and insisted that the system behave in a ‘decentralising, worker-participative, and anti-bureaucratic manner’.[5] When Beer finally reached the top level of his systematic hierarchy, the place in the model Beer had reserved for Allende himself, the president leaned back in his chair and said, ‘At last, el pueblo.’[6] With this succinct utterance, Allende reframed the project to reflect his ideological convictions and view of the presidential office, which often equated his political leadership with the rule of the people. By the end of the conversation, Beer had secured Allende’s blessing to continue the project.
At face value, a meeting between a British cybernetician and a Chilean president, particularly one as controversial as Allende, seems most unusual.[7] The brief presidency of the Unidad Popular (UP) has arguably inspired more historical scholarship than any other moment in Chilean history. Despite this wealth of literature, little is known about the Chilean government’s experiment with cybernetics during this period and less about its contribution to the UP’s experiment in democratic socialism.[8] The nature of the meeting between Beer and Allende suggests that writing technology into one of the most widely studied periods of Latin American history will bring to light an unstudied facet of the Chilean revolution and, in the process, demonstrate the value of this framework for analysis. In part, documenting the construction of this system provides information on the extent of Chile’s technological capabilities during the early 1970s. More importantly however, the project provides a window for viewing new tensions within the UP coalition, Chile, and the international community at large. The impressions and aspirations expressed by various project participants furthermore reveal an alternative history of the UP era grounded in technological optimism and the merging of science and politics to bring about social and economic change. This article argues that the UP experiment with cybernetics and computation constitutes another innovative, yet unexplored, feature of Chile’s democratic road to socialism. For this reason, examining this technological project promises to enrich our understanding of this complex moment in Chilean history.
Knowledge of this technological undertaking moreover contributes to the literature in the history of science and technology, particularly with respect to studies of cybernetics and the history of computing. The meeting between Beer and Allende suggests that cybernetics, an interdisciplinary science encompassing ‘the entire field of communication theory, whether in the machine or in the animal’, achieved a level of importance in Chile during this period, and that Allende’s Chilean revolution was open to these cybernetic ideas and their application.[9] However, most discussions of cybernetics to date focus on the evolution of these ideas and their application within the USA and the European contexts and do not address how they migrated to other parts of the world such as Latin America. Chilean history provides a clear of example of how alternative geographical and political settings gave rise to new articulations of cybernetic ideas and innovative uses of computer technology, ultimately illustrating the importance of including Latin American experiences in these bodies of scholarship.[10] This article will first present an explanation of how cybernetics entered Chilean consciousness, attracted the attention of the nation’s president, and guided the construction of this singular technological system.
From a different angle, the meeting between Beer and Allende also illustrates the importance of both technological soundness and political ideology in Cybersyn’s construction. Although the project was technically ambitious, from the outset it could not be characterised as simply a technical endeavour to regulate the economy. From the perspective of project team members, it could help make Allende’s socialist revolution a reality – ‘ revolutionary computing’ in the truest sense. Moreover, the system had to accomplish this goal in a manner ideologically congruent with Allende’s politics. As this article will demonstrate, the tensions surrounding Cybersyn’s design and construction mirrored the struggle between centralisation and decentralisation that plagued Allende’s dream of democratic socialism.
Throughout Allende’s presidency, Chile’s political polarisation strongly influenced the perception of the project and its role in Chilean society. The interplay of cybernetic ideas, Marxist ideology and computer technology found in the project illustrates how science and technology contributed to Chilean ideas of governance during the early 1970s and altered the possibilities for socialist transformation. Explicating this multi-faceted relationship constitutes the final focus of this article and demonstrates that studies of technology can expand our knowledge of historical and political processes within the Latin American region.
