99% Invisible - 230- Project Cybersyn

Episode Date: October 5, 2016

On September 11, 1973, a military junta violently took control of Chile, which was led at the time by President Salvador Allende. Allende had become president in a free and democratic election. After the military coup, General Augusto Pinochet took … Continue reading →

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. The date September 11th is of course very significant for people in the US, but the country of Chile also has an important September 11th in their history. On 9-11, 1973, using both airstrikes and ground attacks, a military junta violently took control of Chile. The country was led at the time by President Salvador Ayernde. Producer Katie Mingle Ayernde had become president of Chile in a free and democratic election. After the military coup, General Augusto Pinochet took power and ruled Chile as a dictator until 1990.

After taking over the country, the military dissolved Congress, took control of the media, and went about dismantling all of the socialist and democratic institutions that Ianday's government had built. And somewhere in the midst of all of this, the new military regime discovered something in a non-descript office building in downtown Santiago. It was a room, a very strange room. I've heard people compare it to something out of a Kubrick film, a star track. That's Eden Medina, a professor of informatics and computing at Indiana University in Bloomington describing this strange place. It's quite striking.

It's in this bright, technicaler. Aranges, wood paneling. Picture the deck of the Starship Enterprise, and you're not that far off. The room was hexagonal in shape, with seven white fiberglass chairs arranged in an inward-facing circle. There were colorful, space-agie screens

displaying charts and graphs on all six walls. When Pinotier's men found this room, they didn't quite know what to make of it. It's said that one of them began stabbing its colorful display screens with a knife. And it's no wonder they didn't understand this place. There had never been anything quite like it. This operations room was the physical interface for a complicated system called Project Cybersen. Project Cybersen had been designed to help Chile's socialist experiment work better. It was just one of the ways that former President Ayende had been trying to do socialism differently than it had ever been done before. So let's back up before the coup, before this sci-fi operations room was built.

Salvador Ayende had been elected in 1970. He was the first Marxist president ever elected democratically in any country. That's his campaign song you're hearing right now. It's called Ben Ceremos, or We Shall Overcome. Written by the Ben, Kiela Paiyun, it was one of many protest songs and chance to come out of A Yanday's campaign. Poor and working class people sang,

enchanted, and finally voted A Iyendae, into office. They loved him. And Iyendae hoped he could show the world that Chile was going to be different than the communist and socialist experiments in other countries. His government, after all, had been elected democratically, and it was deeply committed to protecting civil liberties. So it did not want to get rid of the Constitution, it did not want to censor the press,

it wanted to preserve freedom of speech. And right away the government raises employment and wages for people across Chile, and they start a program of agrarian reform to redistribute the ownership of land. And they also began a program to make consumer goods that previously had been reserved for the elite to try to make them more broadly accessible to the Chilean people. Toward this end, Iandai formed an industrial design group in his government. He believed design

was political. We were thinking that we were doing something great, good for people and good for humanity. That's for Nando Flores. He began working in the Ayende government after the election. And he says to say it was an exciting time as an understatement. It wasn't just excitement, it was like being in love. If you have a lovely songwanda, you are thinking the 24 hours a day. We were working in a big, big adventure, but the whole country was an adventure for those people that believe in agenda. The whole country was an adventure for those that believed in a Yende, an adventure, but also a ton of work.

So the central problem is a central problem in socialist revolutions, which is the government must go about turning all the private businesses into public businesses. Just think about the challenge of bringing the most important industries in your country under state control and not having the experience to do so. The government eventually took control of 150 enterprises, including several of the largest companies in Chile. And this is the not so fun part of a socialist revolution, management.

Oh, people are doing political revolution, they don't care about management, but I care. Fernando Flores cared about management. And he had an idea for how to manage Chile's complicated economy. He wanted to use a relatively new science called cybernetics. Cybernetics is a science that became popular around World War II. As humans develop new kinds of machines, we became interested in developing systems for

controlling those machines. Cybernetics looks at how to design intelligent, self-correcting systems. Cybernetics is based on the word, cyberneties, which is Greek for Steersman. The goal of a Steersman is to get the ship to the destination, taking into account all kinds of feedback from the environment,

like wind and currents. All cybernetics systems have goals. So you can think about the heating and cooling system in your home as a cybernetic system. The goal is to keep your house at a desired temperature. The thermostat does this by telling the heater or the air conditioner when to turn on and off depending on feedback it's receiving from the environment. It's an intelligent self-regulating system with a goal. In England in the 1960s, a consultant named Stafford Beer was applying concepts of cybernetics to business management.

He believed a business could be thought of as an intelligent system. If the goal was to sell more product or work more efficiently, you could, using the principles of cybernetics, design the system to work toward those goals. But Stafford Beer had never imagined he'd get to apply his ideas to helping a whole government succeed. And then I suddenly got a letter which very much changed my life. It was from the technical general manager of the state planning board of Chile.

That Stafford Beer in archival tape from 1974, the letter he got was from Fernando Flores. He remarked in this letter that he had studied all my works. He had collected a team of scientists together, and would I please come and take it over. But this was to start me on a journey, which made me travel 8,000 miles over and over and over again. I was commuting between London and Santiago for two years.

Stafford Biers' first trip to Santiago was in 1971. When he arrived, he and Fernando Flores and the team they had assembled in Chile went about designing a cybernetics system that could help them manage the bureaucracy of the new Chilean economy. They would call this project Cybersen. Stafford Beer had long stringy hair and a long beard. He looked like he should be leading yoga retreats, not teaching major corporations about management.

Beer was particularly interested in using cybernetics to help companies redistribute power within the system, and Chile was interested in this too. How do we make institutions non-hierarchical? How do we distribute decision-making? The first thing beer did was map and model Chile's entire economy. This was a really complex process that involved understanding how each part of the economy was affected by other parts and by outside feedback. On paper, it looks like a big block diagram connected with lines and arrows. Now we have the economy. These are the big major branches of industry, heavy industry, light industry, materials industry, and consumer industry.

It wasn't enough, however, to just understand how all the parts of Chile's economy connected. It was also crucial that the different parts be able to communicate with each other. Beer wanted factories to be able to send and receive information. He wanted to create a vast computer network that connected all the factories in Chile. Which was a really novel idea. This was pre-internet. Computer networks weren't really a thing yet. But there was a problem with this idea.

There were only a handful of computers in all of Chile. And beer, he only had access to one of them. These guys, they had to create a computer network using one computer, which is pretty amazing. So, they improvised. They realized, okay, we can't put computers throughout the country, but what we can do is we have these TELX machines. A TELX machine looks like a typewriter, but it's hooked up to a telephone line. So imagine you and your friend you both have Telix machines. You can type a message on the keyboard,

he hits send, and your friend's Telix will receive it, and literally type it out onto a piece of paper. It's like super steampunk G-Chat. I think G-Chat is a great way to think about it. Every day, someone from a factory would send data via Telix to another Telix, where it would be received by an operator and then entered into the central computer. The kinds of data that people might send could include raw materials. How much cotton do you have?

How much coal do you have? The Central Computer Software Program, Cyberstried, was able to analyze the data and warn about potential problems. This is what your worker absentee level was today. This is what it was the day before. This is what it was the day before that. What is it going to be tomorrow? Are you going to have a problem? Decisions could then be made about what to do. And this brings us back to that bizarre hexagonal room, the one that looks like something out of a Kubrick film,

or Star Trek. So the operations room, it is a futuristic decision-making space. Stafford Beer wanted to build a physical space for Project Cyberson. Actually, he wanted to build several of them, all over Chile, but only one was ever finished. The room was inspired in part by Winston Churchill's several of them, all over Chile, but only one was ever finished. The room was inspired in part by Winston Churchill's War Room, so you can imagine the

general sitting around smoking their cigars, or in this case, the Chilean sitting around smoking cigarettes and perhaps drinking Pisco Sowers. But unlike Churchill's War Room, and this is a key difference, this was a room for non-hierarchical decision making. war room. And this is a key difference. This was a room for non-hierarchical decision-making. Stafford Beer imagined factory workers and high-level bureaucrats alike, making decisions together. I asked him, look, do you really need a design for this? I mean, you take some tables, it does just. Their projector is there, so what? That's Gui Bansiappe. Originally from Germany, Bansiappe had been working in Chile's industrial design

group and was busy designing cool products for the masses when he was tapped to help design the operations room for Project Cybersen. Eventually he realized Stafford Beer wanted the room to be so much more than a standard meeting room. During the project I became more and more aware of the complexity and the ambition of this project. It is the interface which made it possible for the users to use the system. The room needed to be democratic instead of the art. And please, no tables.

No table because Stafford Bierset, look, this is a room for making decisions not for reading reports and talking about notes. So he was very categorically about this. The room was designed to quickly convey information about factories all over Chile. You have charts and graphs of factory production on the walls. You have a photograph of the factory that is discussed. You have flashing lights that show whether there are emergencies taking place. Seven people would sit in a circle discussing and deciding how to proceed with various problems.

Seven, because it's an odd number to facilitate voting in a circle so that no one would be prioritized over anyone else, so it's not a rectangular table with a head. Each chair in the operations room had a place to set your whiskey glass, an ass tray, and a set of buttons one could use to control the display screens on each wall. It's madmen meets Star Trek. Though Bonziet Bayton says they weren't consciously trying to make it look futuristic. Certainly was not our idea,

or we didn't make science fiction. We made science reality, which is some different, I would say. But to me, there is a bit of fiction in all of it. It's an immaculate piece of design, but it can seal a clunky technology. The buttons on the chairs, for instance, were connected to some wires that ran under the floor and behind the wall and eventually connected to three slide caracels. And depending on the combination of buttons that you pushed, it would advance one slide carousel or another

or tell the slide carousel to move backwards as a way to pull up the desired image. These screens couldn't display information in real time. You could only display and discuss slides that had been pre-made. So it's this image of modernity, but behind it there's just a lot of human labor going into to making this illusion possible. While Project Cyberson was coming together and the futuristic operations room was being designed and built, things were not going so well

for the Yende government. So all of this is taking place during the heart of the Cold War, and Latin America has emerged as a battlefield. The US had been actively working with people within Chile who were unhappy with the government. So the US was intervening in Chile in many, many, many different ways so that the AND government would fail.

They had been involved in denying Chile's foreign credit. It became increasingly difficult for Chileans to get a hold of US spare parts to US machinery. If you don't have the parts, you can't keep the machines running. The economy was collapsing. Inflation had started to skyrocket, so people are having trouble getting basic items. And then just three years after Ayende was elected, came Chile's September 11th. September 11th? So, in history? Well, I don't want to talk about that. I, for me, is a very dramatic day. It brings memories. That's for non-ando Flores again.

I was with the palace, with the press conference and some other people. We were as flooded, we were bombed by planes. While the presidential palace was bombed by a military junta supported by the United States, I end day gave his final radio address to the country. Long live Chile, long live the people, long live the workers he is saying. These have been my last words and I'm certain that my sacrifice will not be in vain. I'm certain that at the very least it will be a lesson that will punish felons, cowardice and treason.

Those explosions were recorded in the actual radio broadcast. Salvador Añende took his own life that same day, shortly after giving that address. It's estimated that during Pinachet's rule, about 38,000 people were imprisoned, and most of those prisoners were tortured. Close to 3,000 people were executed. Another 1,200 people went missing, and around 200,000 people were exiled to other countries. In fact, Kiela Paiun, the band that wrote Allende's campaign song, was exiled to other countries. In fact, Kila Pallune, the band that wrote Ayandes' campaign song, was exiled to France, where they wrote a new song. The people united will never be defeated.

The song became the anthem of resistance against Pinochet, and the chorus has continued to be a chant that left his protests across the world. Project Cybersen never got fully up and running. The Telex network was set up, and the system was starting to receive data from factories, but it was slow to come in. And the operations room was finished, but it hadn't really been put to use yet. Gui Bon Siepé managed to escape Chile with the one color photograph ever taken of the

operations room and various other documents related to Cybersen. It was for me emitting at the intersection of science and technology, politics and design. This does not happen very often, I would say. Cybersen was maybe just a bit ahead of its time. A network pieced together with telek's machines and one computer, just a couple decades before the internet made this kind of thing commonplace. In Operations Room, designed to convey information as quickly as possible, only you had to crawl behind a wall and put a new slide in the carousel when you wanted to show something to the group.

Subrison's technology was probably never up to the task at hand. But then again, it was a technology designed to help socialism succeed while the United States did everything in its power to make it fail. Maybe no technology was up to that task. Having sake at that time, we were so inspired by the possibility that it is possible to change society. When you look at the operations room, I mean, how can you not look at it and see that this is someone's dream?

Right? That this is someone's utopian vision. There is a kind of hope about it. When Pinachet took over Chile, he destroyed this strange futuristic space that embodied the utopian dreams of the I&D government. He had no use for such a thing. 99% invisible was produced this week by Katie Mingle, which refused to have Sam Greenspan, Kurt Colstad, A Trouffman, Emmett Fitzgerald, Terran Mazza, Delaney Hall, and me Roman Mars. Special thanks to Patrick McRae, Sarah Henry, and Paul Pangaro.

Fernando Flores spent three years as a political prisoner in Chile and was eventually able to escape with the help of Anastasia International. Stafford Beer continued to lecture on cybernetics until his death in 2002. Eden Medina's book Cybernetic Revolutionaries, Technology and Politics in Iendase Chile has so many more details about cybercent. Find a link to it and see the one glorious color photograph of cybercent's operations room at our website. It's 99pi.org. We are a project of 91.7K ALW San Francisco and produced on Radio Row in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. You can find this show and join the discussions about the show on Facebook.

You can tweet at me at Roman Mars and the show at 99pi.org. We're on Instagram and Tumblr too. But everything 99PI comes together at 99PI.org. Radio to PI. From P-R-X. Thanks.