Name: Cybernetic revolutionaries
ISBN: 9780262525961

Cybernetic revolutionaries

Eden Medina tells the history of two intersecting utopian visions, one political and one technological. The first was Chile's experiment with peaceful socialist change under Salvador Allende; the second was the simultaneous attempt to build a computer system that would manage Chile's economy. Neither vision was fully realized—Allende's government ended with a violent military coup; the system, known as Project Cybersyn, was never completely implemented—but they hold lessons for today about the relationship between technology and politics. Drawing on extensive archival material and interviews, Medina examines the cybernetic system envisioned by the Chilean government—which was to feature holistic system design, decentralized management, human-computer interaction, a national telex network, near real-time control of the growing industrial sector, and modeling the behavior of dynamic systems. She also describes, and documents with photographs, the network's Star Trek-like operations room, which featured swivel chairs with armrest control panels, a wall of screens displaying data, and flashing red lights to indicate economic emergencies. Studying project Cybersyn today helps us understand not only the technological ambitions of a government in the midst of political change but also the limitations of the Chilean revolution.

What Hacker News says

HillRatJul 2023

Lots of options out there. A few from my bookshelf: Bijker's "Of Bicycles, Bakelites, and Bulbs" is a case-study-centric work that seeks to build a general theory of STS. Nye's "Technology Matters" is less a work of theory than a critique that poses core questions about how society should seek to integrate technical advances. Latour's "Science in Action," "Reassembling the Social," and "Aramis" are great examples of his approach to whole-of-system analysis of sociotechnical systems. Rogers' "Diffusion of Innovation" is a classic work theorizing how innovation is communicated through social networks.

MIT Press has a wide variety of books that cover specific topics in history, most of which have great theoretic interest: Agar's "The Government Machine," dealing with the evolution of technology and expertise within the UK government; Medina's "Cybernetic Revolutionaries," about Beer's Cybersyn project; and Ensmenger's "The Computer Boys Take Over," about the cultural development of the "programmer," are all great reads.

Also, you can look beyond pure technology for interesting adjacencies: for example, Schatz's "The Genius of the System" describes how changes in technology and management production radically upended Hollywood, resulting in the studio system that dominated from the 1930s through the 1950s, while Harris' "Pictures at a Revolution" picks up the pieces at the end of that system, discussing the rise of "New Hollywood," driven by cultural and technical (particularly the French use of inexpensive filming technologies to create the New Wave) forces.

thread

urschreiMay 2023

The best thing to read is Eden Medina’s “Cybernetic Revolutionaries” (https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262525961/cybernetic-revolution...). There’s also a good Tech Won’t Save Us episode featuring the author: https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/tech-wont-save-us/id15...

thread

fweimerAug 2022

Eden Medina's Cybernetic Revolutionaries is a good resource on this topic.

The way it worked beginning in the 80s was that once you had your local in-country research network, you eventually felt compelled to hook it up to NSFNET (maybe after starting out with an email gateway into ARPANET/CSNET). So it's likely that there would have been just one Internet anyway.

thread

Barrin92Jan 2022

The notion that Cybersyn was a central planning system is common but untrue. That's not what cybernetics, which drew primarily from systems theory approaches, was ever about.

The so called 'cybernetic factory' at the heart of the project was about making real time information exchange between several levels of hierarchy possible, with much delegated to the factories themselves. Centralized decision-making was reserved for high-level planning akin to Auftragstaktik in the German army (I believe it's called mission command in the UK and US).

Friedrich Hayek of all people, who met Beer at a conference in 1960 in Illinois was actually very sympathetic to Cybersyn. The frequent comparisons between Cybersyn and Soviet Planning are pretty much the result of a political campaign against Allende, it doesn't have much to do with the scientific ideas behind the project.

If you have heard people talk about 'smart factories', 'industry 4.0', IoT devices gathering data in real time and relaying them to big computers where they can be analysed and quickly sent back to the workers you have in reality stumbled upon people who are trying to build CyberSyn 2.0, probably without knowing it and less socialist branding.

Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende's Chile by Eden Medina is a good, in depth book on the topic.

thread

carschnoSep 2020

For a more recent study about the Chilean approach, I can recommend "Cybernetic Revolutionaries" by Eden Medina (2011, MIT Press, [link](https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/cybernetic-revolutionaries)).

thread

wahernAug 2019

I read The Tiananmen Papers circa 2003. It's dry but it's primary material, allowing you to make your own judgments about how Chinese politics works. I think it's served me well, and I don't think I've missed out on any insights offered by packaged, scholarly narratives. Precisely because it was primary material it's aged well, even with the huge changes in Chinese society and government since then.

OTOH, I had studied International Politics in undergraduate, and took several classes on SE Asian history and politics. And I also had done some semi-professional research regarding exports controls on supercomputing technology--a big issue back when Linux Beowulf clusters were hot. So I had some background knowledge going in.

Still, there's much to be said for primary material. I know there's some debate about the selection of what went into The Tiananmen Papers, but doing a deep dive on a narrow issue is more useful to understanding the broader society than you'd think, even if the material selection is skewed. For similar reasons, I feel like I learned a tremendous amount about Chilean political history and culture, more than all other sources combined (except perhaps contemporary Chilean newsprint) reading "Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende's Chile". There are fundamental truths about a culture that are revealed by the fine details of how historical events unfold, independent of the larger context (i.e. Allende's soft socialist revolution, or brutally paranoid Chinese state repression).

thread