Designing Freedom, Regulating a Nation: Socialist Cybernetics in Allende's Chile

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 Eden Medina is Assistant Professor of Informatics in the School of Informatics at Indiana University and is affiliated with the Indiana University Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies. * The author wishes to thank the Social Science Research Council and the American Council of Learned Societies for supporting this research through an SSRC International Predissertation Fellowship as well as the Adelle and Erwin Tomash Fellowship in the History of Information Processing awarded by the Charles Babbage Institute. Part of this material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0322278. Any opinions, findings and conclusions expressed in the material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. This work has benefited from the insight and criticism provided by David Mindell, Peter Winn, Hugh Gusterson, Chappell Lawson, members of the MIT STS writing workshop, and the anonymous reviewers. J. Lat. Amer. Stud. 38, 571–606 f 2006 Cambridge University Press 571 doi:10.1017/S0022216X06001179 Printed in the United Kingdom ‘Synco’ in Spanish, would network every firm in the expanding nationalised 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 Cañete, 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 Cañete 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 organisations – 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 antibureaucratic manner ’.5 When Beer finally reached the top level of his systematic hierarchy, the place in the model Beer had reserved for Allende himself, 1 ‘Cybersyn ’ comes from a synthesis of the two concepts driving the project, ‘cybernetics ’ and ‘synergy ’. The abbreviation ‘Synco’ conveyed the objective of the project, namely ‘Sistema de Información y Control ’. The project name has also appeared as ‘Sinco’ or ‘Cinco’. 2 Stafford Beer, Brain of the Firm (New York, 1974), p. 257. 3 Wiener himself christened Beer the ‘ father of management cybernetics ’. 4 Stafford Beer, interview by author, Toronto, Canada, 15–16 March 2001. 5 Beer, Brain of the Firm, p. 257. 572 Eden Medina