In the early 1970s, Chile’s Socialist government went to English eccentric Stafford Beer, looking for an alternative to Russian-style central planning, and he promised them a cybernetic synthesis, Project Cybersyn, made from old telex machines, an IBM 360 mainframe, and some Star Trek-inspired sets. Alex Tabarrok explains:
The military regime that overthrew Allende dropped the project and probably for this reason when the project is periodically rediscovered it is often written about in a romantic tone as a revolutionary “socialist internet,” decades ahead of its time that was “destroyed” by the military because it was “too egalitarian” or because they didn’t understand it.Although some sources at the time said the Chilean economy was “run by computer,” the project was in reality a bit of a joke, albeit a rather expensive one, and about the only thing about it that worked were the ordinary Western Union telex machines spread around the country. The two computers supposedly used to run the Chilean economy were IBM 360s (or machines on that order). These machines were no doubt very impressive to politicians and visionaries eager to use their technological might to control an economy. Today, our perspective will perhaps be somewhat different when we realize that these behemoths were far less powerful than an iPhone. Run an economy with an iPhone? Sorry, there is no app for that.
Indeed, you don’t have to read far between the lines of Andy “socialist internet” Beckett’s account to get a flavor of what was really going on:
Beer’s original band of disciples had been diluted by other, less idealistic scientists. There was constant friction between the two groups. Meanwhile, Beer himself started to focus on other schemes: using painters and folk singers to publicise the principles of high-tech socialism; testing his son’s electrical public-opinion meters, which never actually saw service; and even organising anchovy-fishing expeditions to earn the government some desperately needed foreign currency.(Note the classic, ‘the visionary failed because others lacked idealism’ story. Meanwhile the visionary is off on an anchovy-fishing expedition.)
Jeremiah Axelrod and Greg Borenstein put together a 25-minute presentation emphasizing the sci-fi theatricality of the whole endeavor:
The control room is like the bridge of the Starship Enterprise in another respect — both are stage sets. Nothing about the room is real, even the computer displays on the wall are simply hand drawn slides projected from the other side with Kodak carousels.Ironically, when rumors of the project began to circulate, the illusion of omniscience and omnipotence that Beer had created, the same illusion that so appealed to Allende and that had funded Beer’s visions and experiments, this illusion caused fear that an all-knowing big brother was on the way — and such fear may even have encouraged the coup.
After the coup, rather than destroying the project because of its “egalitarian” nature, the military regime was more likely to have been disillusioned and disappointed to discover project Cybersyn’s impotence.