Peer2Politics

A history of real-time information technlology, war, politics, commerce and the rise of the idea of organisational cybernetics. Project Cybersyn was a Chilea...

On 12 November 1971, in the presidential palace in the Republic of Chile, President Salvador Allende and a British theorist named Stafford Beer engaged in a highly improbable conversation. Beer was a world-renowned cybernetician and Allende was the newly elected leader of the impoverished republic.

 

The challenges faced by Cybersyn’s protagonists were not unique to their era — we will face similar ones. While the project was far from perfect, its lessons should not be ignored by those seeking a future where technology is democratically harnessed for social good.

"Project Cybersyn was a Chilean attempt at real-time computer-controlled planned economy in the years 1970–1973 (during the government of president Salvador Allende). It was essentially a network of telex machines that linked factories with a single computer centre in Santiago, which controlled them using principles of cybernetics. The principal architect of the system was British operations research scientist Stafford Beer." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn)