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Project Cybersyn was a
Chile Chile, officially the Republic of Chile, is a country in western South America. It is the southernmost country in the world and the closest to Antarctica, stretching along a narrow strip of land between the Andes, Andes Mountains and the Paci ...
an project from 1971 to 1973 during the
presidency of Salvador Allende Salvador Allende was the president of Chile from 1970 until Death of Salvador Allende, his suicide in 1973, and head of the Popular Unity (Chile), Popular Unity government; he was a Socialist Party of Chile, Socialist and the first Marxism, Mar ...
aimed at constructing a distributed
decision support system A decision support system (DSS) is an information system that supports business or organizational decision-making activities. DSSs serve the management, operations and planning levels of an organization (usually mid and higher management) and ...
to aid in the management of the national economy. The project consisted of 4 modules: an economic simulator, custom software to check factory performance, an operations room, and a national network of
telex Telex is a telecommunication Telecommunication, often used in its plural form or abbreviated as telecom, is the transmission of information over a distance using electronic means, typically through cables, radio waves, or other communica ...
machines that were linked to one mainframe computer. Project Cybersyn was based on viable system model theory approach to organizational design and featured innovative technology for its time. It included a network of telex machines (Cybernet) in state-run enterprises that would transmit and receive information to and from the government in
Santiago Santiago (, ; ), also known as Santiago de Chile (), is the capital and largest city of Chile and one of the largest cities in the Americas. It is located in the country's central valley and is the center of the Santiago Metropolitan Regi ...
. Information from the field would be fed into statistical modeling software (Cyberstride) that would monitor production indicators, such as raw material supplies or high rates of worker absenteeism. It alerted workers in near real time. If parameters fell significantly outside acceptable ranges, it notified the central government. The information would also be input into economic simulation software (CHECO, for CHilean ECOnomic simulator). The government could use this to forecast the possible outcome of economic decisions. Finally, a sophisticated operations room (Opsroom) would provide a space where managers could see relevant economic data. They would formulate feasible responses to emergencies and transmit advice and directives to enterprises and factories in alarm situations by using the telex network. The principal architect of the system was British
operations research Operations research () (U.S. Air Force Specialty Code: Operations Analysis), often shortened to the initialism OR, is a branch of applied mathematics that deals with the development and application of analytical methods to improve management and ...
scientist
Stafford Beer Anthony Stafford Beer (25 September 1926 – 23 August 2002) was a British theorist, consultant and professor at Manchester Business School. He is known for his work in the fields of operational research and management cybernetics, and for his ...
, and the system embodied his notions of
management cybernetics Management cybernetics is concerned with the application of cybernetics to management and organizations. "Management cybernetics" was first introduced by Stafford Beer in the late 1950s and introduces the various mechanisms of agency (philosophy) ...
in industrial management. One of its main objectives was to devolve decision-making power within industrial enterprises to their workforce to develop self-regulation of factories. Project Cybersyn was ended with Allende's removal and subsequent death during the
1973 Chilean coup d'état The 1973 Chilean coup d'état () was a military overthrow of the democratic socialist president of Chile Salvador Allende and his Popular Unity (Chile), Popular Unity coalition government. Allende, who has been described as the first Marxist ...
. After the coup, Cybersyn was abandoned and the operations room was destroyed.


Name

The project's name in English ('Cybersyn') is a
portmanteau In linguistics, a blend—also known as a blend word, lexical blend, or portmanteau—is a word formed by combining the meanings, and parts of the sounds, of two or more words together.
of the words 'cybernetics' and 'synergy'. Since the name is not euphonic in Spanish, in that language the project was called , both an
initialism An acronym is a type of abbreviation consisting of a phrase whose only pronounced elements are the initial letters or initial sounds of words inside that phrase. Acronyms are often spelled with the initial letter of each word in all caps wi ...
for the Spanish ('System of Information and Control'), and a pun on the Spanish , the number 5, alluding to the 5 levels of Beer's viable system model.


System

A few dozen of teleprinters acquired by the previous administration, and not 500 as previously reported, were then put into factories. Each factory would send quantified indices of production processes such as raw material input, production output, number of absentees, etc. These indices would later feed a statistical analysis program that, running on a mainframe computer in Santiago, would make short-term predictions about the factories' performance and suggest necessary adjustments, which, after discussion in an operations room, would be fed back to the factories. This process occurred at 4 levels: firm, branch, sector, and total. A fundamental phase of the project was to quantify the production processes in the factories. This began with operational research (OR) engineers visiting the factories and modeling their production flows using a technique that Beer and the local team called "quantified flowcharting". It consisted of drawing a flowchart of the entire production process of a given factory, focusing on the "bottlenecks" of such a process. The connections from one point in the process to another had to be quantified in order to find those bottlenecks. This was a time-consuming process, for which only one OR engineer was assigned to model a given factory. This is likely the reason why, at the end of the project, only about twenty factories were modeled and connected to the transmission and processing system. Once a factory was modeled, it was necessary to collect indices of processes on a daily basis. The "quantified flowcharting" technique used by the project team explicitly required the modelers to rely on the factory operators' knowledge of their own relationships to their machines to generate these indices. This is reminiscent of earlier bottom-up cybernetic processes, such as those signaled by Pasquinelli in his article "Italian Operaismo and the Information Machine". The collected indexes were then recorded on a paper form and given to a typist secretary at the factory who, using an in-house teletype machine, sent these data to a traffic station, where the information was first checked for format accuracy. Algedonic feedback improved system adaptability and viability. If one level of control did not remedy a problem in a certain interval, the higher level was notified. The results were discussed in the operations room and a top-level plan was made. The network of telex machines, called 'Cybernet', was the first operational component of Cybersyn, and the only one regularly used by the Allende government. Beer proposed what was initially called Project Cyberstride, a system that would take in information and metrics from production centers like factories, process it on a central mainframe, and output predictions of future trends based on historical data. The
software Software consists of computer programs that instruct the Execution (computing), execution of a computer. Software also includes design documents and specifications. The history of software is closely tied to the development of digital comput ...
used Bayesian filtering and Bayesian control. It was fundamental written by British engineers of the Arthur Andersen consultancy company and implemented in Santiago with Chilean engineers of the National Company of Computation, ECOM. Cybersyn first ran on an IBM 360/50, but later was transferred to a less heavily used Burroughs 3500 mainframe. New research, however, suggests that the project's software suite always ran on ECOM's IBM 360/50 mainframe computer. The futuristic operations room was designed by a team led by the interface designer Gui Bonsiepe. It was furnished with 7 swivel chairs, considered the best for creativity. The chairs had buttons to control several large screens that projected data, and status panels that showed slides of preprepared graphs. The tulip chairs were similar in style to those in
Star Trek ''Star Trek'' is an American science fiction media franchise created by Gene Roddenberry, which began with the Star Trek: The Original Series, series of the same name and became a worldwide Popular culture, pop-culture Cultural influence of ...
, but the designers claimed no science fiction influence. The project is described in some detail in the second edition of Stafford Beer's books ''Brain of the Firm'' and ''Platform for Change''. The latter book includes proposals for social innovations such as having representatives of diverse 'stakeholder' groups into the control center. A related development known as Project Cyberfolk, which Beer envisioned as an extension of Cybersyn but never realized, would allow citizens to send real-time feedback to the government about their level of satisfaction or dissatisfaction with policies announced on television. Next a rapid partial implementation started realization of the system vision.


Implementation

Stafford Beer Anthony Stafford Beer (25 September 1926 – 23 August 2002) was a British theorist, consultant and professor at Manchester Business School. He is known for his work in the fields of operational research and management cybernetics, and for his ...
was a
British British may refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * British people, nationals or natives of the United Kingdom, British Overseas Territories and Crown Dependencies. * British national identity, the characteristics of British people and culture ...
consultant in
management cybernetics Management cybernetics is concerned with the application of cybernetics to management and organizations. "Management cybernetics" was first introduced by Stafford Beer in the late 1950s and introduces the various mechanisms of agency (philosophy) ...
. He also sympathized with the stated ideals of Chilean
socialism Socialism is an economic ideology, economic and political philosophy encompassing diverse Economic system, economic and social systems characterised by social ownership of the means of production, as opposed to private ownership. It describes ...
of maintaining Chile's democratic system and the
autonomy In developmental psychology and moral, political, and bioethical philosophy, autonomy is the capacity to make an informed, uncoerced decision. Autonomous organizations or institutions are independent or self-governing. Autonomy can also be ...
of workers instead of imposing a
USSR The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR), commonly known as the Soviet Union, was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 until Dissolution of the Soviet ...
-style system of top-down command and control. He also read
Leon Trotsky Lev Davidovich Bronstein ( – 21 August 1940), better known as Leon Trotsky,; ; also transliterated ''Lyev'', ''Trotski'', ''Trockij'' and ''Trotzky'' was a Russian revolutionary, Soviet politician, and political theorist. He was a key figure ...
's critique of Soviet bureaucracy, which influenced his design of the system in Chile. In July 1971, Fernando Flores, a high-level employee of the Chilean Production Development Corporation (
CORFO The Production Development Corporation (CORFO, from ) is a Chilean governmental organization that was founded in 1939 by President Pedro Aguirre Cerda to promote economic growth in Chile. Originally, CORFO was responsible for the creation of ...
) under the instruction of Pedro Vuskovic, contacted Beer for advice on incorporating cybernetic theories into the management of the newly nationalized sectors of Chile's economy. Beer saw this as a unique opportunity to implement his ideas on a national scale. More than just offering advice, he left most of his other consulting contracts and devoted much of his time to what became Project Cybersyn. He traveled to Chile often to collaborate with local implementors and used his personal contacts to secure help from British technical experts. With an initial implementation date of March 1972, the aggressive implementation schedule led to the system reaching prototype stage in 1972. As Cybersyn took shape, it impacted events in Chile.


Impact

The Chilean government found success in its initial nationalization efforts, achieving a 7.7% rise in GDP and 13.7% rise in production in its first year, but needed to maintain continued growth to find long-term success. According to technology historian Eden Medina, 26.7% of the nationalized industries which were responsible for 50% of the sector
revenue In accounting, revenue is the total amount of income generated by the sale of product (business), goods and services related to the primary operations of a business. Commercial revenue may also be referred to as sales or as turnover. Some compan ...
had been incorporated to some degree into the Cybersyn system by May 1973. The total costs of the economic simulator amounted to £5,000 at the time of design ($38,000 in 2009 dollars). The Cybersyn system was used effectively in October 1972. The telex network enabled communication across regions and the maintenance of distribution of essential
goods In economics, goods are anything that is good, usually in the sense that it provides welfare or utility to someone. Alan V. Deardorff, 2006. ''Terms Of Trade: Glossary of International Economics'', World Scientific. Online version: Deardorffs ...
across the country. According to Gustavo Silva, then the executive secretary of energy in
CORFO The Production Development Corporation (CORFO, from ) is a Chilean governmental organization that was founded in 1939 by President Pedro Aguirre Cerda to promote economic growth in Chile. Originally, CORFO was responsible for the creation of ...
, the system's telex machines helped organize the transport of resources into the city with only about 200 trucks, lessening the potential damage caused by the employers' truck strike. The government of
Salvador Allende Salvador Guillermo Allende Gossens (26 June 1908 – 11 September 1973) was a Chilean socialist politician who served as the 28th president of Chile from 1970 until Death of Salvador Allende, his death in 1973 Chilean coup d'état, 1973. As a ...
relied on
real-time data Real-time data (RTD) is information that is delivered immediately after collection. There is no delay in the timeliness of the information provided. Real-time data is often used for navigation or tracking. Such data is usually data processing, proc ...
to respond to the changing strike situation. The strike actions against the Allende government were funded by the
United States The United States of America (USA), also known as the United States (U.S.) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It is a federal republic of 50 U.S. state, states and a federal capital district, Washington, D.C. The 48 ...
as part of an
economic warfare Economic warfare or economic war is an economic strategy used by belligerent states with the goal of weakening the economy of other states. This is primarily achieved by the use of economic blockades. Ravaging the crops of the enemy is a classic ...
. The elected Allende government survived in part due to the Cybersyn system. Eventually the Allende government was brought down by a CIA-supported coup d'état in 1973. Other governments, such as those in
Brazil Brazil, officially the Federative Republic of Brazil, is the largest country in South America. It is the world's List of countries and dependencies by area, fifth-largest country by area and the List of countries and dependencies by population ...
and
South Africa South Africa, officially the Republic of South Africa (RSA), is the Southern Africa, southernmost country in Africa. Its Provinces of South Africa, nine provinces are bounded to the south by of coastline that stretches along the Atlantic O ...
, expressed interest in building up their own Cybersyn system. In the
history of computing hardware The history of computing hardware spans the developments from early devices used for simple calculations to today's complex computers, encompassing advancements in both analog and digital technology. The first aids to computation were purely mec ...
, Project Cybersyn was a conceptual leap forward, in that computation was no longer put exclusively to work by the military or scientific institutions.


Legacy

The legacy of Project Cybersyn extended beyond supporting the Allende government, inspiring others to explore innovations in economic planning.


Historical significance

Computer scientist
Paul Cockshott William Paul Cockshott (born 16 March 1952) is a Scottish academic in the fields of computer science and Marxist economics. He is a Reader at the University of Glasgow. Since 1993 he has authored multiple works in the tradition of scientif ...
and economist Allin Cottrell referenced Project Cybersyn in their 1993 book ''
Towards a New Socialism ''Towards a New Socialism'' is a 1993 non-fiction book written by Scottish computer scientist Paul Cockshott, co-authored by Scottish economics professor Allin F. Cottrell. The book outlines in detail a proposal for a complex planned socialist ...
'', citing it as an inspiration for their own proposed model of computer-managed
socialist Socialism is an economic ideology, economic and political philosophy encompassing diverse Economic system, economic and social systems characterised by social ownership of the means of production, as opposed to private ownership. It describes ...
planned economy A planned economy is a type of economic system where investment, production and the allocation of capital goods takes place according to economy-wide economic plans and production plans. A planned economy may use centralized, decentralized, ...
. ''
The Guardian ''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in Manchester in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'' and changed its name in 1959, followed by a move to London. Along with its sister paper, ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardi ...
'' in 2003 called the project "a sort of socialist internet, decades ahead of its time". While Cockshott and Cottrell created a proposed model, another author explored fictional alternatives.


Fictional portrayals

Chilean author Jorge Baradit published a Spanish-language science fiction novel ''SYNCO'' in 2008. It is set in an
alternate history Alternate history (also referred to as alternative history, allohistory, althist, or simply A.H.) is a subgenre of speculative fiction in which one or more historical events have occurred but are resolved differently than in actual history. As ...
year 1979 where the 1973 coup had failed and "the socialist government consolidated and created 'the first cybernetic state, a universal example, the true third way, a miracle'." Baradit's novel imagines the realized project as an oppressive dictatorship of totalitarian control, disguised as a bright utopia.


Defenses and critiques

In defense of the project, former operations manager of Cybersyn Raul Espejo wrote: "the safeguard against any technocratic tendency was precisely in the very implementation of CyberSyn, which required a social structure based on autonomy and coordination to make its tools viable. ..Of course, politically it was always possible to use information technologies for coercive purposes, but that would have been a different project, certainly not Synco". More recently, a journalist saw Cybersyn prefiguring algorithmic monitoring concerns. In a 2014 essay for ''
The New Yorker ''The New Yorker'' is an American magazine featuring journalism, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons, and poetry. It was founded on February 21, 1925, by Harold Ross and his wife Jane Grant, a reporter for ''The New York T ...
'', technology journalist Evgeny Morozov argued that Cybersyn helped pave the way for
big data Big data primarily refers to data sets that are too large or complex to be dealt with by traditional data processing, data-processing application software, software. Data with many entries (rows) offer greater statistical power, while data with ...
and anticipated how
Big Tech Big Tech, also referred to as the Tech Giants or Tech Titans, is a collective term for the largest and most influential technology companies in the world. The label draws a parallel to similar classifications in other industries, such as "Big Oi ...
would operate, citing
Uber Uber Technologies, Inc. is an American multinational transportation company that provides Ridesharing company, ride-hailing services, courier services, food delivery, and freight transport. It is headquartered in San Francisco, California, a ...
's use of data and algorithms to monitor supply and demand for their services in real time as an example.


Contemporary relevance

Writers explored Cybersyn as a model for planned economies using contemporary processing power. Authors Leigh Phillips and Michał Rozworski also dedicated a chapter on the project in their 2019 book '' The People's Republic of Walmart''. The authors presented a case to defend the feasibility of a planned economy aided by contemporary processing power used by large organizations such as
Amazon Amazon most often refers to: * Amazon River, in South America * Amazon rainforest, a rainforest covering most of the Amazon basin * Amazon (company), an American multinational technology company * Amazons, a tribe of female warriors in Greek myth ...
,
Walmart Walmart Inc. (; formerly Wal-Mart Stores, Inc.) is an American multinational retail corporation that operates a chain of hypermarkets (also called supercenters), discount department stores, and grocery stores in the United States and 23 other ...
and
the Pentagon The Pentagon is the headquarters building of the United States Department of Defense, in Arlington County, Virginia, across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C. The building was constructed on an accelerated schedule during World War II. As ...
. The authors question whether much can be built on Project Cybersyn, specifically, "whether a system used in emergency, near–civil war conditions in a single country—covering a limited number of enterprises and, admittedly, only partially ameliorating a dire situation—can be applied in times of peace and at a global scale." The project remained uncompleted due to the military coup in 1973, which led to economic reforms by the Chicago Boys.


Media coverage

Cybersyn also caught the attention of podcasters. In October 2016, the podcast
99% Invisible ''99% Invisible'' is a radio show and podcast produced and created by Roman Mars that focuses on design. It began as a collaborative project between San Francisco public radio station KALW and the American Institute of Architects in San Franc ...
produced an episode about the project. The '' Radio Ambulante'' podcast covered some history of Allende and Project Cybersyn in their 2019 episode ''The Room That Was A Brain''. Finally, Morozov expanded from an essay into his own podcast series. In July 2023, Morozov produced a nine-part podcast about Cybersyn, Stafford Beer and the group around Salvador Allende, titled 'The Santiago Boys'.


See also

* Alexander Kharkevich, the director of the Institute for Information Transmission Problems in Moscow (later Kharkevich Institute) * Comparison of system dynamics software *
Critique of political economy Critique of political economy or simply the first critique of economy is a form of social critique that rejects the conventional ways of distributing resources. The critique also rejects what its advocates believe are unrealistic axioms, flawe ...
*
Cyberocracy In futurology, cyberocracy describes a hypothetical form of government that rules by the effective use of information. The exact nature of a cyberocracy is largely speculative as, apart from Project Cybersyn, there have been no cybercratic gove ...
* Cybernetics in the Soviet Union * Economic calculation debate *
Economic planning Economic planning is a resource allocation mechanism based on a computational procedure for solving a constrained maximization problem with an iterative process for obtaining its solution. Planning is a mechanism for the allocation of resources ...
*
Enterprise resource planning Enterprise resource planning (ERP) is the integrated management of main business processes, often in real time and mediated by software and technology. ERP is usually referred to as a category of business management software—typically a suit ...
* Fernando Flores * Victor Glushkov (1923–1982) Soviet mathematician and founding father of Soviet cybernetics * History of Chile * History of computer hardware in Eastern Bloc countries * Material balance planning * OGAS *
Planned economy A planned economy is a type of economic system where investment, production and the allocation of capital goods takes place according to economy-wide economic plans and production plans. A planned economy may use centralized, decentralized, ...
*
Post-scarcity Post-scarcity is a theoretical economic situation in which most goods can be produced in great abundance with minimal human labor, so that they become available to all very cheaply or even freely. Post-scarcity does not mean that scarcity ...
* Socialist democracy *
Scientific socialism Scientific socialism in Marxism is the application of historical materialism to the development of socialism, as not just a practical and achievable outcome of historical processes, but the only possible outcome. It contrasts with utopian social ...
*
System dynamics System dynamics (SD) is an approach to understanding the nonlinear behaviour of complex systems over time using stocks, flows, internal feedback loops, table functions and time delays. Overview System dynamics is a methodology and mathematical ...
* The Lucas Plan * Viable system model


References


External links


Eden Medina, "Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende's Chile", (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2011).

Eden Medina, "Designing Freedom, Regulating a Nation: Socialist Cybernetics in Allende's Chile." Journal of Latin American Studies 38 (2006):571-606.
(pdf)
Eden Medina, "Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende's Chile" (adapted excerpt). ''Cabinet'' magazine, no. 46 (Summer 2012).
* Diego Gómez-Venegas, "Forecasting the Present: A Media Archaeo-Genealogical Inquiry into Project Cybersyn", (Berlin: Humboldt-Universitaet zu Berlin, 2024).
Lessons of Stafford Beer






by Alexei Barrionuevo. 'The New York Times.' March 28, 2008



on BoingBoing * Varnelis, Kazys (March 4, 2006).
Project Cybersyn
. varnelis.net. Retrieved October 22, 2024.
Rhizome.org: Project Cybersyn

Stafford Beer, and Salvador Allende's Internet, and the Dystopian Novel

Free As In Beer: Cybernetic Science Fictions

Planning Machine at The New Yorker

Allende's socialist internet at Red Pepper
*
Network Effects: Raul Espejo on Cybernetic Socialism in Salvador Allende's Chile
, Kristen Alfaro interviews
Raúl Espejo Raul, Raúl, Raül, and Raüll are forms of a common first name in Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, Galician, Asturian, Basque, Aragonese, and Catalan. The name is cognate of the Anglo-Germanic given name Ralph or Rudolph and the French ...
for 'Logic'. January 1, 2019. {{Authority control Projects established in 1971 Cybernetics Economy of Chile 1970s in Chile Presidency of Salvador Allende Socialism in Chile Economic planning Experimental computer networks History of computing in South America Networks Socialism 1970s in economic history Information management Chilean inventions Government by algorithm