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HERE LIES PROJECT CYBERSYN: SALVADOR ALLENDE AND STAFFORD BEER’S CYBERNETIC SYSTEM OF COORDINATION FOR CHILE’S ECONOMY (1971-1973)

ROSE CLANCEY MA Student, University of Ottawa

Abstract

This paper follows the attempt by Salvador Allende’s short-lived government to create a computerized, cybernetic system of control for Chile’s economy: Project Cybersyn. Led by Stafford Beer, British founder of management cybernetics Cybersyn was a project that sought to accomplish feats the superpowers thought impossible with a third-world budget. Cut short by the military coup that ended both Allende’s government and his life, it is unclear what Cybersyn would have eventually amounted to. This paper argues that there are interesting conclusions to be drawn from the life of Cybersyn, despite its untimely death. Cybersyn is a window into how differing liberal and socialist visions of modernity played out in Latin America. Perhaps most importantly, Cybersyn offers us a vision of a computer network distinct from today’s Internet, shaped by a society that embraced cybernetic socialism.

Résumé

Cet article retrace la tentative du gouvernement chilien de Salvador Allende d’implanter le Project Cybersyn, un système informatisé et cybernétique pour contrôler l’économie chilienne. Dirigé par Stafford Beer, le fondateur britannique de la gestion cybernétique, Cybersyn était un projet visant à accomplir les exploits économiques des superpuissances ce qui était considéré impossible avec le budget d’un pays du tiers-monde. Interrompu par le coup d’État qui mit fin au gouvernement d’Allende, il est peu certain que le Project Cybersyn aurait finalement abouti. Cet article argumente qu’il y a des conclusions intéressantes à tirer de la courte existence du Cybersyn Project au Chili. Ce projet est une fenêtre sur les distinctions dans les visions libérales et socialistes de la modernité dans le contexte de l’Amérique latine. Probablement encore plus significatif, Cybersyn Project offre une vision différente d’un réseau informatique distinct d’Internet, produit d’une vision socialiste de la cybernétique.

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On December 30, 1972, the socialist Chilean President Salvador Allende visited the futuristic “operations room” that was the nerve centre of Project

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Cybersyn, an initiative that sought to use modern communications technology to coordinate the Chilean economy.1 Just under nine months later, on September 11, 1973, Allende gave his final address to the Chilean people and then died, likely committing suicide in Chile’s besieged presidential palace, as the military seized control of his country.2 His death ushered in nearly two decades of junta rule in Chile, a period marked by the disappearance and torture of opponents to the regime and heavy economic austerity under the instruction of the “Chicago Boys,” American economists trained by Milton Friedman.3 While the putschists occupied radio stations and overcame the government’s last loyal defenders, they also destroyed Project Cybersyn’s Ops Room, with one soldier reportedly taking a knife and stabbing each of the methodically designed slides that had been prepared for the room.4 While the merits and failures of Allende’s government have been debated back and forth by historians and commentators on the right and left for decades now, Project Cybersyn remains a relatively unexamined aspect of the tragic saga of Allende’s government, remarkable because of Cybersyn’s conceptual similarity to the modern day Internet, an invention of incredible significance.

Project Cybersyn was an attempt by the Chilean government to utilize the principles of cybernetics, defined variously by influential cyberneticists as “the science of control and communication in the animal and machine” (Norbert Weiner), “the art of steermanship” (Ross Ashby), and “the science of effective organization” (Stafford Beer)5, to create a system of centralized socialist economic planning. Project Cybersyn aimed to diverge from the oppressive and alienating Soviet model of central planning by seeking to maximize the influence of front-line workers on economic planning, rather than maximizing the power of state technocrats to impose their will on said workers. The idea behind Project Cybersyn was to put production centres around Chile in real-time communication with a central control room, where technicians would input the data they received from industry into a computer mainframe. That mainframe system would compile and process the data, outputting possible problems which would be sent back to factory managers and workers to be

1 Eden Medina, Cybernetic Revolutionaries (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), 1-2. 2 Victor Figueroa Clark, Salvador Allende: Revolutionary Democrat (London: Pluto Press), 122-132. 3 Bob Hughes, The Bleeding Edge: Why technology turns toxic in an unequal world (Oxford: New Internationalist Press, 2016), 281-283. 4 Medina, Cybernetic Revolutionaries, 211. 5 Ross Ashby, An Introduction to Cybernetics (London: William Clowes and Sons Ltd, 1970); Stafford Beer, The 1973 CBC Massey Lectures, “Designing Freedom,” CBC-FM, 1973.

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addressed by those on the front lines of production. The information would also be compiled into economic reports that would be displayed for government officials in a sort of economic war room where officials could make decisions informed by a real-time economic snapshot of the nation, avoiding the time lag that cyberneticists like Beer argued were perpetually distorting the decisions made by corporations and governments around the world.6

Cybersyn has received little attention from historians for a variety of reasons, including its transnational nature, the remoteness of Chile, its violent and premature death, and its failure to fit well into the Cold War narrative of the struggle between capitalism and communism. What notice early computer networking projects like Cybersyn have received is usually framed as a teleological discussion of precursors to today’s Internet. As such, these projects have not been sufficiently investigated in their own right. Project Cybersyn differed in its design, purpose, and ethos from capitalist America’s ARPANET, the US Cold War project that was the direct predecessor to the Internet, and so it is hardly valid to assume that Project Cybersyn, Urucib (Uruguay’s equivalent),7 or the Soviet “Unified Information Net”8 would have developed into the same type of information network that the Internet has become. Indeed, the example of China’s censored version of the Internet gives a concrete example of the Internet developing differently in a country that is not governed by the ideology of liberal democracy.

Allende’s Chile conceived of Project Cybersyn as fitting into their larger project of constitutional revolution, with Cybersyn acting as a high-modernist means of putting the economy in the service of the people. The liberal/capitalist US first pursued computer networking as a means to national security and later as a way for institutions to share computer resources and achieve cost savings, and the authoritarian/communist USSR dreamed of making computer networking a tool of domination over the economy for use by government technocrats; Chile’s vision of their computer network was distinct from those of either of the manichean Cold War superpowers. Allende’s unique political ideology of constitutional, modernizing, Marxist

6 Stafford Beer, Cybernetic Praxis in Government (United Kingdom: Manchester Business School, 1973). 7 Medina, Cybernetic Revolutionaries, 225-226. 8 Slava Gerovitch, “InterNyet: Why the Soviet Union Did Not Build a Nationwide Computer Network,” History and Technology 24, no. 4 (2008): 336.

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revolution caused his government to pursue the dream of a rationalized, worker-led, high-tech economy, connected by modern communications technology.9

The ideology driving Allende’s Chile was viewed in a hostile manner by both the US and the USSR. While the US saw Allende’s flagrant Marxism and ambitious programme of economic nationalization as a threat to their hegemony over the Western hemisphere, the USSR’s Marxist-Leninist ideology prescribed that revolutions required a vanguard party to seize control of the state and displace the entrenched power of the bourgeoisie; the Soviets thought it futile to seek the overthrow of capitalism through peaceful means and had little time for Allende’s “socialism of red wine and meat pies.”10 In this way, Allende’s government did not fit within either the American or the Soviet ideological worldviews, and both deemed it conceptually self-destructive.

Political Background to Project Cybersyn

President Salvador Allende sought to bring great change to Chile, and Project Cybersyn was a part of his program for a modern, independent, socialist Chile. The historic election victory of Allende’s Popular Unity coalition government in 1970 was influenced and driven by decades of struggle against American imperialism, as the US sought to integrate Chile into its anti-Communist coalition. American influence over Chile shaped a society dominated by the problems of massive inequality as land ownership was concentrated under rich, conservative owners, and foreign firms came to control much of the nation’s industrial assets.11 While this inequality created a strong desire for change among the Chilean electorate, the US poured millions of dollars into supporting Allende’s political opponents, which meant it took Allende a very long time to reach power; his first presidential campaign was in 1952. Allende finally won a plurality of the vote in 1970, winning a democratic mandate for his unique programme of constitutional revolution.12

9 Medina, Cybernetic Revolutionaries, 41. 10 Nathaniel Davis, The last two years of Salvador Allende (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Pr., 1985), 129-133. 11 Hughes, The Bleeding Edge, 283. 12 Lubna Z. Qureshi, Nixon, Kissinger, and Allende: U.S. involvement in the 1973 coup in Chile (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2010), 47.

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Allende’s new Popular Unity (UP) government sought to address Chile’s inequality through a Marxist revolution by peaceful means; he described his aim as a revolution of “red wine and empanadas.”13 Allende pursued a third way in the polarized political climate of the Cold War, refusing to accept the widespread poverty and economic inequality that often went hand in hand with falling under the American sphere of influence, while similarly refusing to act as a vanguard party and outlaw the opposition in Chile, as Soviet Marxist-Leninist doctrine suggested he should. Allende sought radical change without sacrificing the comforts of democracy; he sought to cultivate a revolutionary movement in Chile that simultaneously respected Chile’s Western-style democracy while instituting radical socialist economic and political change.14 The UP economic programme centred around the nationalization of industrial enterprises and the employment of these new sources of state revenue to fund projects such as improved healthcare, state housing initiatives, land reform, and other initiatives to increase the quality of life of the Chilean people. 15 Through this programme, Allende and his government sought to put the economy at the service of the people, as opposed to the status quo in which he perceived people as being deprived of liberty in the service of generating profits for the foreign owners of Chile’s economy.

By the end of 1971 Allende had nationalized large swaths of the Chilean economy including banking, textiles, and the copper industry, the backbone of the Chilean economy. These enterprises were put under the control of the Chilean State Development Corporation (CORFO), massively expanding the role of the agency and stretching its resources. It is in this context that a young Chilean engineer named Fernando Flores, the general technical manager at CORFO, wrote to British management cyberneticist Stafford Beer, asking him to come to Chile and act as a consultant for the state planning department. By 1971, Stafford Beer had built up a highly lucrative consulting business for various Western firms.16 Beer specialized in a field that he invented, management cybernetics, which he defined as “the science of effective organization.”17 Through management cybernetics, he sought to rationalize

13 Medina, Cybernetic Revolutionaries, 44. 14 Régis Debray, and Salvador Allende, The Chilean Revolution: Conversations with Allende (Scranton: Pantheon Bks., 1971), 81-87. 15 Hughes, The Bleeding Edge, 283-286. 16 Medina, Cybernetic Revolutionaries, 19. 17 Stafford Beer, Designing Freedom (Toronto: Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 1974), 13.

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organizations and to help them run in a more stable, efficient way, using a mixture of concepts from both the social and the “hard” sciences.18

Cybernetics emerged from the work of mathematician Norbert Weiner in the Second World War, who, while working on systems of automatic aiming for antiaircraft guns, began thinking about the way that systems can control and structure the way human and non-human actors function together.19 The core interest in the discipline of cybernetics is how systems reach ‘homoeostasis,’ a state where the system can remain internally consistent even after being rocked by negative feedback.20 Pioneering cyberneticists like Ross Ashby and Stafford Beer attempted to apply cybernetic concepts in order to design human systems that were able to attain and maintain homoeostasis. Many highly placed bureaucrats within CORFO possessed strong interests in cybernetics, believing that cybernetic thinking could be the solution to their difficulties in managing Chile’s rapidly nationalizing industries, and this prompted the young Chilean engineer Fernando Flores to send a letter to Beer in July 1971, asking him to come to Chile and implement his ideas around cybernetic planning on a national scale. It was this letter that marked the true beginning of Project Cybersyn.

Project Cybersyn

Beer was overjoyed by Flores’ letter, describing the feeling he received upon reading the request in crude terms: “I had an orgasm.”21 Beer had just delivered a keynote lecture for the American Society for Cybernetics in Washington, D.C., in which he had advocated for the massive reform of government economic planning through the construction of what he termed “The Liberty Machine.”22 Beer’s Liberty Machine was an imagined revolution in government planning that sought to erase the bureaucratic disconnect between the government and the citizenry through the use of then-advanced communication and computer technology. Flores’ invitation gave Beer an opportunity to actualize the idea that he had just publicly called for, and in many ways Project Cybersyn ended up embodying the core idea of Beer’s

18 Medina, Cybernetic Revolutionaries, 8-9. 19 See: Norbert Weiner, Cybernetics; or, Control and communication in the animal and the machine (Mansfield Centre, CT: Martino Publishing, 2013). 20 Hughes, The Bleeding Edge, 271. 21 Medina, Cybernetic Revolutionaries, 43. 22 Ibid, 32-34.

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Liberty Machine. It was for this opportunity to actualize his theories that Beer agreed to give up his lucrative career consulting for capitalist firms in Britain to move halfway across the world to work in service of Allende’s socialist revolution.23

While Project Cybersyn allowed Beer to advance his own goals, giving him a test case for his ideas, it also served Allende’s wider vision for the Chilean economy, as well as addressing some of the more practical issues that faced Allende’s government. Allende sought a system of economic management that provided the government with the power to intervene and regulate the economy to promote Chilean national sovereignty and social justice, while simultaneously promoting worker freedom and autonomy.24 Essentially, Allende sought to pursue a modern, socialist economy while avoiding the inefficiency, corruption, and tragedies that all too often went along with socialist central planning. The core of Project Cybersyn was a nationwide communications network that would give the workers a direct voice in economic planning.

As Project Cybersyn took shape, it became clear that it consisted of four main sub-projects: a network of telex machines stretching across the government’s nationalized enterprises (Cybernet); statistical software to process the data pouring in daily from across the country (Cyberstride); an economic simulator to guide the instructions sent back to state enterprises (CHECO); and an economic war room where government ministers could make decisions while viewing a real-time model of the state of the Chilean economy (the operations room).25 While the project as a whole was not able to reach completion by the time Allende’s government met its violent end, by August 1973, the last month before Allende’s death and the end of Project Cybersyn, the network was able to create graphs of Chilean economic activity with only a three-day lag, a significant accomplishment as Beer later estimated that traditional economic planning used data that was six to eight months old.26

Beer also envisioned a sister project to Cybersyn called Project Cyberfolk that aimed to expand Project Cybersyn beyond economic management and into the daily lives of the Chilean people. While Project Cybersyn sought to

23 Ibid, 40-41. 24 Ibid, 39-40. 25 Ibid, 88. 26 Medina, Cybernetic Revolutionaries, 205; Beer, Cybernetic Praxis in Government.

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put the government in real-time communication with industry, Project Cyberfolk was envisioned as a project that would put the citizenry in real-time communication with the government. The core mechanism for Project Cyberfolk was a system of what Beer termed ‘algedonic meters’, with algedonic meaning a signal of pleasure or pain.27 He proposed the integration of these meters into television sets, allowing users to turn the knob towards pleasure when they liked the direction the government was headed or towards pain if they were opposed to the tack the government was taking. This information would be compiled and rendered in real time to government decision makers in Project Cybersyn’s control room, helping to guide their decision-making process and to align it with the people’s wishes.28 While a prototype set of Beer’s ‘algedonic meters’ were constructed and even used in meetings of the Catholic University in Santiago,29 the idea of providing the meters to the citizenry remained a distant dream. Beer was also enamoured with the idea of communicating the government’s agenda to the population through Chilean pop and folk culture, specifically through music, a feeling shared by President Allende.30 Project Cyberfolk never made it off the ground, but it nonetheless provides an interesting look at how Cybersyn fit into a wider utopian vision for Chilean society, one in which the people were to be directly and intimately linked to the decisions made by government and the functioning of the economy.

Debate has raged over Allende’s three-year presidency. Right-wing commentators excuse both the way General Augusto Pinochet subsequently suspended democracy, as well as his harsh economic policy, as tough medicine for a country that had foolishly elected an arrogant, delusional Marxist who was wrecking the nation.31 Meanwhile many leftists remember the 1973 coup as the first 9/11 and romanticize Allende’s Chile as a utopia that could have been, if it had not been for the constant attacks mounted by the US and the

27 Medina, Cybernetic Revolutionaries, 89. 28 Ibid, 88-92. 29 Hughes, The Bleeding Edge, 296-297. 30 Ibid, 289. 31 This interpretation was very popular immediately after the coup, as commentators sought to simultaneously deny American involvement and use the example of Allende to reinforce the danger of electing Marxists across the Third World. Many of these texts were funded directly by Pinochet’s government or the CIA. For examples of this type of work see: Robert Moss, Chile’s Marxist Experiment (Newton Abbot, Devon: David and Charles Limited, 1973); Francisco Orrego Vicuña, Chile: The Balanced View (Santiago: University of Chile, 1975).

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Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).32 Finally, a modern historiography has since emerged, one that falls to the centre-left of this spectrum; it is clear now that the CIA was directly involved with efforts to economically undermine and covertly overthrow the Allende government. At the same time, Allende is not depicted in the hagiographic light that so many Marxist texts portrayed him, but rather as a complex figure whose government made good and bad choices, just like any other.33

Eden Medina’s Cybernetic Revolutionaries is an excellent record of what made Project Cybersyn unique. It is also the only monograph written about Cybersyn, a project that has largely escaped historical study. Medina traces the principle actors responsible for the Cybersyn project from its inception, through its development, and past the fall of Allende’s UP government, showing what eventually happened to figures such as Flores and Beer following the coup. She utilizes a wide range of sources to craft her monograph, including interviews with nineteen of the original participants in the Cybersyn project.34 As many of those she interviewed, including Beer himself, have since died, Medina’s work has a level of insight that in some ways cannot be surpassed. While there are many accessible primary sources, such as Stafford Beer’s 1973 Massey Lecture and his many recorded video lectures, Medina’s work still maintains a unique access to the main historical actors involved in Project Cybersyn.35

Medina’s work on Cybersyn was first published in the early 2000s, and Cybernetic Revolutionaries was published in 2011 as the culmination of her earlier work. Medina’s articles and her book have had the effect of bringing Project Cybersyn into the wider historiography of Allende’s government, most notably in the contest of the October Crisis of 1972. During the October Crisis, in which forty thousand truck owner/operators attempted to starve out the Allende government by depriving factories of raw materials and preventing the

32 This interpretation mainly stems from Marxist commentators, as well as from insiders of Allende’s government that escaped Pinochet’s death squads and concentration camps. Examples include: Ian Roxbourough, Philip O’Brian, and Jackie Roddick, Chile: The State and Revolution (New York: Holmes & Meier Publishers Inc., 1977); Edward Bornstein, Allende's Chile: An Inside View (New York: International Publishers, 1977). 33 Examples of modern historical texts on Allende’s Chile include: Qureshi, Nixon, Kissinger, and Allende; Clark, Salvador Allende: Revolutionary Democrat. 34 Medina, Cybernetic Revolutionaries, 301-302. 35 Beer, Cybernetic Praxis in Government; Idem, Designing Freedom; Idem, The 1973 CBC Massey Lectures, “Designing Freedom.”

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flow of food and necessities to stores across the country, Cybersyn’s telex network was formally deployed by the UP government in order to coordinate their response. Before Medina raised Project Cybersyn’s profile among historians, historians attributed the government’s survival to the actions of local workers who seized control of production and delivery by forcibly reopening factories and seizing the trucks within them, in spite of the factory owners’ orders to strike.36 This interpretation is not so much wrong as it is exclusionary of the crucial role the telex network constructed for Project Cybersyn played in coordinating the local actions of workers.

On the evening of October 15, 1972, Flores and Mario Grandi, the director of the CHECO project to generate economic projections under Cybersyn, hashed out a plan to establish a central command centre in the presidential palace connected to other specialized command centres across Chile through a secret telephone network. Project Cybersyn’s control room served as the industrial command centre, and it was linked to industry across Chile through the telex network.37 Allende approved the plan and the network helped the government to coordinate and assist worker-driven resistance across Chile. The Allende government might well have fallen eleven months earlier if Project Cybersyn had not provided the means to coordinate resistance to the strike. In this way, the deployment of Cybernet in response to the October Crisis proves a wider point: Project Cybersyn did have the capacity to realize a form of decentralized economic management and it was not a delusional, utopian dream, but instead it was a real, functioning system of communication and control.

During the crisis, the telex network allowed the government to coordinate workers’ front-line resistance to the strike by providing information, support, and coordination across the country.38 It did not allow the government to directly manage these enterprises; resistance remained grassroots and locally driven by nature. This fits with the general aim of Cybersyn, namely to create

36 Robert Moss’ CIA-funded, anti-Allende screed attributes the end of the crisis to Bolshevik tactics on the part of Allende. Moss, Chile’s Marxist Experiment, 145-154. Robert Alexander’s more balanced The Tragedy of Chile ascribes Allende’s survival to both widespread support for his government among workers, as well as heavy-handed tactics by his government. Robert Jackson Alexander, The tragedy of Chile (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1978), 301-307. Works published after Medina’s tend to mention Cybersyn’s role, at least as an aside or in a footnote. Clark, Salvador Allende: Revolutionary Democrat, 111. 37 Medina, Cybernetic Revolutionaries, 148-151. 38 Ibid, 148-149.

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a system of economic planning that put the power into the hands of the workers, rather than consolidating it in the hands of state technocrats.39 The example of the October Crisis also proves that cybernetics was at least somewhat practical for economic management, as it was cybernetic thinking and cyberneticists that guided the government in its response. The secret telephone network set up during the strike, suggested by the cyberneticists who worked on Project Cybersyn, was so useful that it remained in continuous use by the government until the coup.40 In this way, the deployment of cybernetics and Cybernet in response to the October Crisis proves that not only was Project Cybersyn not a pipe dream and cybernetics not a code word for totalitarian Communism, but instead Project Cybersyn was a novel and effective mode of communication and planning, one that allowed the government to follow the will of the people, rather than the other way around. Cybernetics and Project Cybersyn had the ability to directly empower the public in a way that, as the next section will show, was thought impossible by the US and the USSR.

Contemporaneous Computer Networking Projects: ARPANET and “Computopia”

Chile was not the only nation that made forays into computer networking in the early 1970’s. 41 Both the US and the USSR experimented with building computer networks at this time, and ARPANET, the American computer networking project, is a direct ancestor of the modern day Internet. But different motivations drove the computerized network projects of the US government and Chilean government, and each project embodied a different ethos. While Cybersyn emerged from Allende’s project of constitutional socialist revolution, ARPANET originated from the American desire for an invincible national defence scheme. This same American obsession inspired other mega-projects such as the US interstate highway system, which was

39 Ibid, 39. 40 Ibid, 148-151. 41 Strictly speaking, Cybersyn was not a computer networking project. It was instead a network of telex machines feeding a computer mainframe which processed the data from the telex network, returning it to its source. However, Cybersyn was very similar in design and aim to a computer networking project; Chile simply did not have the equipment to install a computer at every node of their network. In this way, Cybersyn took the form of a telex network by necessity, not by design, and was as close to a computer network as third-world, embargoed Chile could afford.

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funded by a public that feared congested roads out of cities in the event of a nuclear attack.42

The idea of a computerized communication network arose in the US as a potential countermeasure to the crippling of FM radio communications as the result of a nuclear bomb being detonated in the US ionosphere. Project RAND, the think tank for the US Air Force in the 1950s, also argued that “A limited number of ground strikes could knock out AT&T’s highly centralized national telephone network.”43 In 1962, Project RAND researcher Paul Baran penned a memo entitled “On Distributed Communication Networks” that proposed a solution to this national security threat. Essentially Baran suggested nuclear-proofing lines of communication through the dispersion of the network into various scattered nodes, each of which would pass along information like “hot potatoes” until that information reached its destination. In this way, even in the event of a coordinated ballistic missile strike against the US communication network, the nation would likely retain partial or even complete communications capacity as no single strike could destroy all nodes of the American communication network.44

Baran’s proposal was ingenious, but also beyond the technology of his day. The analogue systems that existed at the time were limited in the number of connections they could make, making it tricky to build the kind of distributed network Baran envisioned. Worse still, the quality of the information suffered with every link, meaning that the hub-and-spoke method did a far better job of preserving the original quality of the information as it required far fewer links. It was for this reason that Baran turned to computers as a possible means of implementing his distributed communications scheme. If the network was digital, then this would solve both the problem of quality and the limited number of connections per node. Up until this point, the two fields of communications and computer science had been totally isolated, to the extent that Baran worried that his project would fail due to a lack of staff with knowledge of both fields. But Baran managed to persevere; by 1965

42 Jeff L. Brown, “Interstate highway system 1956,” Civil Engineering 72 (Nov. & Dec. 2002): 11-12. 43 Johnny Ryan, A History of the Internet and the Digital Future (London: Reaktion Books, 2013), 13. 44 Ibid, 14-15.

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Project RAND officially recommended that Baran’s proposal be funded and moved forward as a research enterprise.45

The Air Force initially approached AT&T to work on Baran’s project but the corporation “objected violently” to Baran’s idea. Baran’s proposal carried a price tag of $60 million, while the AT&T analogue network cost $2 billion per year. AT&T’s leadership argued for continued reliance on the old analogue technology, both out of a sense of doubt in the new digital technology and out of a fear of endangering their stranglehold on the current communication network. In the end, AT&T experts and executives made it clear that they wanted nothing to do with the digital communications project and they cast as much doubt on the project as possible.46 With no viable research team to pursue the project, the distributed communication network plan was shelved in 1966, squashed by AT&T as a threat to their profit margin, an illustration of how industrial capitalism can sometimes stifle innovation. Chile’s socialist mode of economic organization, in contrast, enabled them to pursue projects like Cybersyn that would have been impossible within a society dominated by capitalist ideology; as Medina writes, “Cybersyn was possible because it was built in Chile, not in one of the nations of the industrialized world, during this particular historical moment.”47

While the drama of Project Rand’s abortive networking project was resolving, another experiment in digital communication was unfolding in a separate US think tank: the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). In contrast to the massive Project RAND, ARPA was a small agency that contracted out viable projects to labs across the US.48 The original impulse to investigate computer networking within ARPA was not as grandiose as Project RAND’s goal of protecting the American national communication network from nuclear attacks; instead ARPA was motivated to develop research networking as a means to share computer resources internally as a cost-saving measure.

By 1968, the project had been funded with the intention of building a four-node network linking the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), UC Santa

45 Ibid, 15-16. 46 Ibid, 16-17. 47 Medina, Cybernetic Revolutionaries, 187. 48 Ryan, A History of the Internet and the Digital Future, 24-26.

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Barbara, UCLA, and the University of Utah and a budget of $563,000.49 IBM stated their disbelief in the project, as they believed that such an ambitious project would never succeed without a much larger budget, again showing the inability and unwillingness of large US corporations to innovate. Despite corporate naysaying, at 10:30 PM on October 29, 1969, UCLA sent a transmission to SRI attempting to issue a login command to the SRI computer; the network managed to transmit “lo” before crashing.50 Despite its inauspicious beginning, that transmission proved that the technology did work. ARPANET, the ancestor of the modern day Internet, was born.

By April 1971, the year Project Cybersyn began, ARPANET had already expanded to fifteen nodes with twenty-three host computers.51 With twenty-three host computers to Cybersyn’s one,52 ARPANET was a project that was larger in scale than Cybersyn, but, ironically, it was far more narrow in vision; while ARPANET merely aimed to provide cost savings to institutions by pooling computer resources and its most used feature, a predecessor to e-mail, was only added as an afterthought, Project Cybersyn was conceived of as a means by which to coordinate all of Chile’s economy and to ensure that economy was directed and controlled by the people. This again illustrates the way in which Chile was empowered to think larger than the US because of their high-modernist socialist vision; Allende’s government sought to collectively develop a novel economic system, while the American ideology of liberal capitalism prescribed leaving innovation to private actors.

The USSR’s proposed computer networking scheme was much closer to Project Cybersyn in vision than the American ARPANET, but the project never made it off of the ground. After decades of heavy-handed, top-down planning under Stalin, Soviet technocrats and economists, as well as Krushchev himself, sought a new, more modern approach to economic planning, and so they turned to cybernetics, Weiner’s science of “control and communication in the animal and machine.”53 Because of this connection between cybernetics and the Soviet state, the discipline of cybernetics was far 49 Ibid, 26-29. 50 Leonard Kleinrock, "The Day The Infant Internet Uttered Its First Words," UCLA - Computer Science, UCLA, n.d. Web, Accessed December 10th, 2016, http://www.cs.ucla.edu/the-day-the-infant-internet-uttered-its-first-words/. 51 Peter H. Salus, Casting the Net: From ARPANET to Internet and beyond (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Pub., 1995), 66. 52 Medina, Cybernetic Revolutionaries, 71. 53 Ibid, 8.

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more popular in the USSR than it ever was in the US; in the USSR, cybernetics was seen as an approach that would lead to renewed growth, further the development of Communism, and actualize Kruschev’s “thaw” of the dark winter that had been Stalin’s regime.54

Krushchev saw cybernetics as an integral science for building the USSR in the atomic age, saying in November 1962 at a Party Central Committee Plenum that: “In our time, the time of the atom, electronics, cybernetics, automation, and assembly lines, what is needed is clarity, ideal coordination and organization of all links in the social system both in material production and in spiritual life.”55 In the USSR, cybernetics was seen as a way to rationalize society, bringing it closer to the realization of a socialist modernity of full automation, perfect information, and the elimination of scarcity, in the same way Allende’s government saw Beer’s “science of effective organization” as a means to modernize and socialize Chile’s economy, freeing Chile from underdevelopment. Cybernetics fit especifically well with the Marxist-Leninist ideology of the USSR because of its promise of increasing control over large systems, ironically the precise opposite of why cybernetics was attractive to Chile.

Because of its popularity among the Party elite, cybernetics became a buzzword among Soviet technocrats. The proclamations of Soviet cyberneticists were so pervasive and ambitious that they prompted a worried report by the CIA, who feared that “by 1970 the USSR may have a radically new production technology, involving total enterprises or complexes of industries, managed by closed-loop, feedback control employing self-teaching computers.”56 This fear was a manifestation of the American post-Sputnik, “missile gap” panic, as the Americans feared they were “falling behind” the USSR in the technological race, and it reflects a distorted view of the potential of cybernetics in the USSR.57 Nonetheless, the fact that the CIA singled out cybernetics as a potential threat shows that cybernetic principles were being discussed seriously among Soviet technocrats.

54 Gerovitch, “InterNyet: Why the Soviet Union Did Not Build a Nationwide Computer Network,” 335-341. 55 Ibid, 240. 56 Ibid, 336. 57 Ryan, A History of the Internet and the Digital Future, 23-24.

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In 1963, Soviet cyberneticist Victor Glushkov proposed a three-tier, computerized, cybernetic economic control system that he imagined as spanning the entirety of the USSR. His proposal “included tens of thousands of local computer centres to collect ‘primary information,’ 30-50 mid-level computer centres in major cities, and one top-level centre controlling the entire network and serving the government.”58 This was a very ambitious project, and both Soviet technocrats and Western observers viewed Glushkov’s proposal as unworkable. Liberal economists questioned whether economic models could ever capture the vastness of the Soviet economy, as individual planning organs and enterprises could easily manipulate the data being fed to the massive machine. Meanwhile, traditional Soviet economists resisted the project out of a sense of conservatism; Glushkov’s proposal necessitated a complete overhaul of the existing Soviet economic order, and he estimated it would cost a total of 20 billion rubles, money the economists felt would be better spent on more moderate economic reforms rather than a radical economic revolution.59 With Brezhnev replacing Khrushchev in October 1964, the project was cannibalized, with state agencies constructing their own networks on an ad hoc basis, resulting in 414 separate networks by 1970 rather than the unified network that Glushkov had envisioned. These networks were built on different architectures and thus could never be integrated, making a unified Soviet computer network an impossibility. 60

Glushkov’s vision was far greater in scale than Project Cybersyn, or indeed anything the Americans ever planned or executed in this period. The project was very similar in design and purpose to Project Cybersyn however; just like Project Cybersyn, the Soviet “computopia” planned to use mathematic and cybernetic models combined with the lightning-fast technology of computerized communication to create a real-time system for economic management, providing perfect information to decision makers. But while Cybersyn sought to put those decision makers in the service of the people, Glushkov’s system had no such illusions; Project Cybersyn was designed to reverse the relationship of domination technocrats had over workers while Glushkov’s system aimed to entrench it.

58 Gerovitch, “InterNyet: Why the Soviet Union Did Not Build a Nationwide Computer Network,” 342. 59 Ibid, 342-343. 60 Ibid, 343-344.

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Cybersyn Through the Lens of Multiple Modernities

Project Cybersyn was an attempt to modernize Chile according to a socialist interpretation of modernity. In design, the project was nearly identical to the Soviet system proposed by Glushkov, seeking to coordinate production in order to build a more efficient economic system for the proletariat, albeit with Cybersyn being far less ambitious. But, at the same time, Stafford Beer was not an orthodox Marxist and his political vision was closer to Fabian socialism than Marxism-Leninism.61 Beer’s form of management cybernetics was far closer to the liberal cybernetic tradition established by Norbert Weiner, as he sought to break down hierarchies and barriers to free communication within society,62 than it was to the form of cybernetics popular in the USSR, which emphasized cybernetics as a means to hierarchical control over the nation. Allende’s constitutional revolutionary project was also detached from Marxist-Leninist, vanguard party ideology. In this way, Project Cybersyn straddled the Cold War divide, embodying aspects of both liberal capitalist and Marxist socialist modernity.

But, in addition to the Old-World visions of liberal and socialist modernity, Project Cybersyn was also influenced by the unique, Latin American experience and vision of modernity. In his introduction to the collection of essays Latin America Writes Back: Postmodernity in the Periphery, Emil Volek describes Latin America as going through a “second modernization” from the 1950s onward.63 Essentially, Volek traces the history of Latin America in the twentieth century as a move from incompetent, protectionist, and isolationist regimes to brutal, reactionary, military dictatorships, then into the light of modern, enlightened, liberal democracies.

His view is highly teleological but it does capture the broad strokes of Allende’s Chile, albeit in a supremely reductionist manner; in response to economic stagnation and the domination of foreign powers, Allende began to institute an autarkic economic regime that aimed to render the Chilean workers masters of the products of their labour. In response to widespread economic

61 Medina, Cybernetic Revolutionaries, 41. 62 Gerovitch, “InterNyet: Why the Soviet Union Did Not Build a Nationwide Computer Network,” 340-341. 63 Emil Volek, “Introduction: Changing Reality, Changing Paradigm: Who Is Afraid of Postmodernity?” in Emil Volek, ed., Latin America Writes Back: Postmodernity in the Periphery (an Interdisciplinary Perspective) (New York: Routledge, 2002), xi.

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collapse, which might have been due either to either Allende’s socialist economic policies or a combination of the US embargo and economic sabotage by the opposition, depending on the political stripe of the observer, Allende was overthrown by General Augusto Pinochet, who established a brutal military dictatorship and dismantled the government’s nationalization scheme in favour of a radical form of neoliberalism. Pinochet’s hold on power was finally broken by an “enlightened” people who, in a liberal triumphalist view, had progressed to the stage where they were ready for moderate liberal democracy, the people of Chile who voted for an end to Pinochet’s rule in the historic 1988 plebiscite. In this way the story of Chile and the story of Project Cybersyn can be read as a part of the “second modernization” phenomenon observed by Volek, although I would certainly contest Volek’s overly teleological and liberal triumphalist view.

At its heart Project Cybersyn was a modernization scheme and Latin America has had a troubled relationship with modernity. Volek describes how Latin America draws its heritage from Spain, a nation of people that responded to the onset of modernity in the late 15th early 16th century by barricading themselves behind the Pyrenees and enforcing Catholic traditionalism by way of the torturous methods of the Spanish Inquisition. Meanwhile, the impetus for independence among the Creole elites in Latin America was itself a spirit of resistance to the Spanish Crown’s half-hearted reforms. In this way, Volek argues that Latin America is “the periphery of a periphery,”64 the marginal colony of a marginal European state; this reading of Latin American history portrays the region as enacting a centuries-long campaign of resistance to modernity, first as a part of Spain and then against the modernizing Iberians themselves.

José Joaquín Brunner expands upon this theme in his essay “Traditionalism and Modernity in Latin American Culture.” Brunner draws inspiration from the Gabriel García Márquez’s monumental 1967 novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. Brunner uses the term Macondism, named for the fictional town of Macondo that acts as the setting of the novel, to express the unique and troubled relationship Latin America has with modernity. He defines Macondism as a broad phenomenon that, among other things, acts as a metaphor for all that is “Magic Real” in Latin America, and is thus inaccessible by the political, commercial, and scientific cartography of

64Volek, “Introduction,” xxi.

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modernity and the moderns. Macondism blurs the reality and maladjustments of present-day, real Latin America in favour of the unattainable and unnamable essence of America, and so thus represents an alternative rationality to the “Protestant and Faustian character of the rationality axis of Modernity.”65 Macondism is a useful concept because it places a name on the unique flavour of anti-modernity that exists in Latin America.

Project Cybersyn can be seen as an endeavour that attempted to defy Macondism by using advanced technology to overcome Chile’s underdevelopment, but, ironically, Cybersyn also embodied many of Macondism’s core tenants. Project Cybersyn can be imagined as having a place in One Hundred Years of Solitude, perhaps as one of José Arcadio Buendía’s impractical schemes66 or maybe in a tyrannical form as a project initiated by the foreign-owned Fruit Company to monitor their workers,67 as Project Cybersyn echoes the same sort of imperfect importation of Western ideas and technologies that echo throughout Gabriel García Márquez’s work. So while Project Cybersyn is in one way an attempt to erase and move away from the Latin American tradition of anti-modernity, in a sense Cybersyn preserves the particular Latin American approach to modernity by dreaming larger than either the US or the USSR, despite the fact that Chile was incredibly poor in comparison to the superpowers, in this way rejecting the existing, dominant visions of modernity stemming from the European world.

Project Cybersyn also epitomizes the ideology of high modernism as explored by James Scott in his 1998 book Seeing Like a State. At its core, Scott’s concept of high modernity consists of the ideological belief that a geometrically organized society, fully legible at all levels to those at its commanding heights, should be brought about through the unexamined use of science and technology.68 Scott links the development of tools such as censuses, centralized resource management schemes, and standardized systems of weights and measures, to the origins of high modernism within

65 José Joaquín Brunner, “Traditionalism and Modernity in Latin American Culture,” in Emil Volek, ed., Latin America Writes Back: Postmodernity in the Periphery (an Interdisciplinary Perspective) (New York: Routledge, 2002), 14-15. 66 Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude (Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1974), 2-8. 67 Ibid, 305-307. 68 James C. Scott, Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 4-5.

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early modern society,69 and Project Cybersyn is the logical extreme of this movement to make the ship of state fully legible to the elites who steer it, despite its ostensibly worker-driven nature. While Project Cybersyn was meant to disempower middle management in favour of workers on the ground, the control room that lay at the heart of Project Cybersyn is perhaps the purest distillation of the high modernist dream possible. It was intended that in the control room the President and their advisors would have a perfectly accurate view of the actual state of affairs on the ground throughout the nation, as well as perfect information of what their citizen-subjects were doing and how they felt about their government. In this way, Project Cybersyn drew from a variety of seemingly conflicting traditions: a Fabien socialism that lay between the stark ideologies of the Cold War superpowers; a simultaneous rejection of existing visions of modernity in the Latin American tradition; and an embrace of a high modernist vision of a wholly rationalized nation.

Following the coup that ended both Allende’s government and Project Cybersyn, Beer’s work became far more political in nature.70 On January 24, 1974, Stafford Beer recorded a lecture entitled “On Cybernetics” for his students at the Manchester Business School, in which he reflected on his work in Chile. In this lecture, he stated that the letter he received from Flores “very much changed my life.”71 He fondly recalled Allende interrupting his explanation of his viable systems model, just as Beer was about to use Allende himself as an example for System Five, the brain of the organization, to say, “Ah System Five at last: the people.”72 Beer said that this statement by Allende made a tremendous impact on him and, while the lecture was not about “the political aspect” of cybernetics or his work in Chile, he reminded his audience that “I don’t have to go and work in places where I don’t want to be” before taking a deep breath and moving on with his talk.73

Beer saw Project Cybersyn as an undertaking that could have changed the world had it been allowed to bloom. In his 1973 Massey Lecture Designing Freedom, published in book form in 1974, Beer advocated for the adoption of cybernetic ideas by bureaucracies worldwide. He pointed to Chile as an

69 Ibid, 11-33. 70 Medina, Cybernetic Revolutionaries, 224-225. 71 Beer, Cybernetic Praxis in Government. 72 Ibid. 73 Ibid.

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example proving that his ideas could in fact be implemented. But he also said on a more sombre note that “On 11th September 1973, Salvador Allende died in a bloody business, of which the consequences for mankind are incalculable today. I tell you solemnly that in Chile the whole of humanity has taken a beating.”74 Beer viewed the US-backed coup that ended Allende’s life and government, as well as Project Cybersyn, as being of world-historical significance. In Project Cybersyn, Beer saw a unique model that he thought could have transformed the world, departing from tired, old ideologies that he argued could never use technology to increase the liberty of their people and instead merely translated old systems for use with new technology, vision unchanged.

The historical record shows that Beer was not entirely wrong, although he certainly had a penchant for high-minded thinking. The use of the Cybernet telex network during October Crisis shows that Project Cybersyn did have some real potential for managing the national economy in a novel, highly decentralized way, as it allowed the government to lead a true worker-driven resistance to the Crisis. During the Crisis, it was the workers who chose to reopen factories and Cybersyn allowed Allende’s government to coordinate and support those worker-led efforts. Just as Allende intended, Cybersyn allowed the government to take a backseat to the power of the people in a radical, unprecedented sense. Given time, Project Cybersyn might have matured into an effective means of economic organization, but, of course, it is useless to speculate on possibilities of history. Project Cybersyn died with Allende and it will never be clear what the project would have amounted to. What is clear is that computer networking has ended up becoming one of the most influential technologies of the twentieth century; in this way, Cybersyn was ahead of its time. Project Cybersyn and its conceptual sister Project Cyberfolk are proof that the idea behind the Internet was not exclusive to Western, liberal, capitalist modernity, or even Soviet Russia; Chilean socialist modernity envisioned a connected nation, with citizens linked together by a digital network up and down Chile’s long coast.

74 Beer, Designing Freedom, 47.

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