Tech Won't Save Us - Project Cybersyn Shows All Tech is Political w/ Eden Medina

Episode Date: May 20, 2021

Paris Marx is joined by Eden Medina to discuss Project Cybersyn, a technological system created by Chile’s socialist government in the 1970s to manage production, and what it can teach us about political technology and innovation outside the Global North.Eden Medina is the author of “Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende's Chile.” She’s also an associate professor at MIT and the Rita E. Hauser Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. Follow Eden on Twitter as @edenmedina.Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter, and support the show on Patreon.Find out more about Harbinger Media Network at harbingermedianetwork.com.Also mentioned in this episode:In 2020, Marian Schlotterbeck spoke to Jacobin about the fifty year anniversary of Salvador Allende’s election.Independent and left-wing delegates won major victories in the election for Chile’s constitutional assembly, making it hard for right-wing delegates to stall the process.In October 2020, Chileans voted overwhelmingly to draft a new constitution, following protests that began in 2019.Dictator Augusto Pinochet oversaw a brutal regime from 1973 to 1990, and the crimes of that period are still being prosecuted.Support the show

Technologies are political. So we see that different political and historical contexts set the stage for the creation of technologies that are different from those that we have in the United States. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Eden Medina. Eden is the author of Cybernetic Revolutionaries, Technology and Politics in Chile. She's also an associate professor at MIT and a Rita Hauser fellow at Radcliffe University for Advanced Study at Harvard University. In this week's conversation, we discuss Project Cybersyn, a network technology that was created in the early 1970s in Chile after Salvador Allende was elected as the country's first socialist president and then undertook a campaign of nationalizing key industries to take them under state control.

But then the government needed a way to organize and manage that production to make sure that, you know, levels didn't just stay the same but rose as wages also increased and Chileans expected a higher standard of living under this new socialist government. So Fernando Flores, who was part of this government, set out to use technologies, to use computers, in order to help plan the production of these newly nationalized industries and contacted Stafford Beer, a British consultant who had written a lot on this topic, to come and help the Chilean government. But, and this is a really important point, this was not just an example of British knowledge coming in and creating a system and then leaving. It was really the Chileans kind of driving the project and making use of foreign

knowledge where they didn't have it to build up their own skills and then to build on that information that came from away and to continue innovating in a space where, you know, it was not only outside the global north, but also didn't have the same level of technologies or the same number of computers as, say, the United States or the United Kingdom. And so they had to be really innovative even by using old technologies to build this really cutting-edge system. So this is a fascinating conversation that I had with Eden. I think you're really going to like it. And it also gives us a lot of things to reflect on as we consider what it would mean or what it would look like to build socialist technologies in the present and the kind of questions we would need to be considering and also the challenges that might come up. Tech Won't Save Us is part of the Harbinger Media Network, a group of left-wing

podcasts that are made in Canada. And you can find out more about the other shows in the network by going to harbingermedianetwork.com. As always, if you like the show, please make sure to leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts, and make sure to share the episode on social media or with any friends or colleagues who you think would learn from it. And like every episode, this month's series on tech histories is only possible because of listener support. The shows are available for free to everybody because those who can support the show choose to do so. And those include new supporters like Alexander from London, Hugh, and Raghu Christian from Toronto. So thanks so much to those supporters. And if you like the show and want to join them, you can go to patreon.com

slash techwontsaveus, where you can become a supporter, get a shout out on the show, join our Discord server, and even get stickers at $5 a month or above. Thanks so much and enjoy this week's conversation. Eden, welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. Thank you. It is a pleasure to be here today. It's a pleasure to speak with you. I'm so excited to speak with you about Project Cybersyn and the book that you wrote on this topic that I think a lot of people have gone on to read and have learned a lot about this system that, you know, wasn't lost memory before that, but certainly not as many people knew about it before you wrote your book and started doing your work to, you know, bring it to a wider audience. And so they could learn about what was actually going on in the 1970s in Chile.

And so before we get into actually discussing, you know, the system itself and how it worked, there is important context that people need to understand for them to properly appreciate what went into creating the system. And so I wanted to start by getting some of that context around the political situation in Chile at the time that Project Cybersyn was created. And so some listeners probably won't be very familiar with Chilean politics and specifically what was happening in the 1970s. So can you briefly give us some of that context on the election of Salvador Allende, the lead up to it, and the political situation surrounding the creation of Project Cybersyn? I would be happy to. So 1970 was an extraordinary political moment in Chile, and it was marked by the election

of Salvador Allende, who was Chile's first democratically elected socialist president. And his victory set in motion what came to be known as Chile's peaceful road to socialist change. This was a political project that was designed to nationalize Chile's most important industries, to redistribute land through an agrarian reform, to develop new social programs in areas such as housing and nutrition. It developed mechanisms to increase participation in governance, especially in areas such as worker participation. And it took steps to improve the quality of life for Chile's poor and working classes. And in addition to these programs, it was committed to bringing

about these changes in ways that were nonviolent, that would respect the constitution, and that would respect existing civil liberties, including freedom of speech and freedom of the press. And because of this, because of these commitments, people from around the world wondered whether Chile might be pioneering a new political third way. Because we're in the context of the Cold War, we have the two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union. But what Chile is trying to do actually, you know, it fits somewhere in the middle. So there was a lot of excitement about what the Chilean road to socialism might mean in terms of being a new political model. So there are a few other things that listeners need to know. The first is that we are in the context of the Cold War. This is 1970. And it's important because it helps us understand some of

the constraints that were being imposed on the Allende government by external forces. It is not a surprise to say that Allende's victory terrifies the Nixon White House, which worried about the spread of communism in the hemisphere. We know that Nixon met with the CIA shortly after Allende's electoral victory to discuss plans to even prevent Allende's confirmation. And also, you know, we know from notes to make the Chilean economy scream. And indeed, during Allende's presidency, Chile will see a dramatic decrease in foreign aid and foreign credit. The price of copper, which is Chile's primary export, will drop. And U.S. companies will no longer be willing to sell machinery and spare

parts to Chile, which has a very devastating effect on industry and production levels. We also now know that the CIA would go on to spend millions of dollars in efforts to destabilize and overthrow Chile's socialist experiment. So that is an important part of the context. You also need to know that Allende was elected by a very slim margin. So he only won by 1.3% of the popular vote. So he won the election, but he won by a plurality, not a majority. And as a result, he didn't have majority support for the structural changes that he wanted to make in Chilean society. And the other thing you need to know, and this is key to understand the history of Project Cybersyn, is that Chile's road to socialism, you know, increased the is key to understand the history of Project Cybersyn, is that Chile's road to

socialism, you know, increased the access that poorer sectors of the population had to goods. It increased governance spending. And, you know, these factors, along with others, made inflation a very real possibility. But there was a belief at the time that inflation could be offset by an increase in production. So what you didn't want, you didn't want demand to outstrip supply, because if demand outstrips supply, then prices are going to go up. But if you can raise supply, then perhaps you can keep inflation and prices in check. And what this meant is that the Chilean economy needed to be able to increase production levels, or at the very least, it needed

to be able to keep them constant. Production couldn't go down. And what the Allende government referred to this as, is they needed to win the battle of production. They needed to win the battle of production in order for their political project to succeed. But this created a major problem, because the state is now in charge of running the most important industries in the country, and they have no experience doing this. And not only do they not have experience doing this, they don't have qualified or enough qualified managers to put in the factories to make sure that the management can be effective on the shop floor. And so the government was faced with a very practical problem of socialist change, which is how do you

manage an economy in ways that were consistent with the values that were found in Chile's approach to socialism? I think that's a great explanation of the context that was happening in the 1970s and in Chile specifically. You know, you talked about the attempt by the Allende government to create like a third way. And it was interesting how you described in the book that Fidel Castro visited Chile and criticized the kind of attempt that they tried to make to take this path that was democratic. And that took obviously a very different approach from what Castro was able to achieve in Cuba. But you talked there about the lack of management experience, I guess, in terms of

being able to manage this economy as the government was nationalizing more and more industries. And, you know, there was also a lack of knowledge and talent, I guess, in creating these technological systems that will go into Project Cybersyn. And so one of the people that the government brought in to help in this process, I guess, of creating this technological system was Stafford Beer, a British consultant. So can you give us some background on Beer and the key ideas of his that went into the project? Beer is a very colorful character, and he certainly is a protagonist or one of the protagonists in this story.

Stafford Beer described himself as a cybernetician throughout his professional life, and he is often referred to as the father of management cybernetics. So for listeners who may not be familiar with the term cybernetics, cybernetics is an interdisciplinary science of command and control that grew out of research that took place during World War II, and it looked for commonalities in biological, mechanical, and social systems, and also explored how concepts such as feedback could provide forms of control and self-regulation. And Stafford Beer was very interested in how these ideas could be used to improve the management and functioning of a firm. Over the course of his life, he published 10 books

on cybernetics, as well as a number of articles. One of his articles is in the very prestigious journal Nature. He taught at Manchester Business School. He had a very highly successful career as an international business consultant. He worked in the steel industry, then in the publishing industry, and then he worked for a consulting company called Sigma. He commanded a top salary. He drove a Rolls Royce. He had a very nice house. And he did all of this without a university education, which is quite remarkable, I think. He entered college but left for military service and never went back. And in fact, Manchester Business School had to give him an honorary degree so that he was qualified to be a member of their faculty.

In addition to his work on cybernetics, Beer was a poet and a painter. He published books of poetry. He displayed his works of art publicly. If you look at his writings, sometimes it'll have bits of his poetry or his drawings interspersed, which if you're an academic, you know that that's not normal. That's not typical for an academic publication, but it certainly was for Stafford Beer. Physically, he was very tall. He had a beard for most of his life, sometimes a very long beard. He was ambitious in his thinking. He did not shy away from big ideas. Some people commented on his cigar smoking, and one journalist described him as a cross between Orson Welles and Socrates, which I think is a very nice description. In terms of his ideas, Beer is best known for

applying cybernetics to industry, and he viewed industrial management as a problem of control. And so people might think of control in terms of domination, right? I'm going to control you, I'm going to dominate you. Or if I'm a controlling manager, right, maybe I'm a micromanager who wants to control everything that's, you know, taking place within my department or, you know, within my office space. But for beer, control was not a form of domination, it was it was adaptive. So it was how do you design an organization or a firm so that it can respond dynamically to changes in its environment. And so that, you know, its organization will naturally drift towards the state that you want it to have, the conditions or the actions that you want it to have.

So it's not about forcing the components of the organization to behave in particular ways. It's about designing it so it will naturally be able to adapt and maintain its stability in a desirable way, which is somewhat different. He was interested in exceedingly complex systems. So systems that you can't describe in their entirety, such as a brain or an economy, you know, or a firm. So you need to, you know, you can't map everything out particularly, you need to think probabilistically. And he was also interested in how do you find a balance? How do you find a balance between freedom of the individual parts of a system or the autonomy of the individual parts of a system and having that system maintain its overall viability so that it survives, which is a balance between top-down control and freedom for the parts. And if we think about it,

if we think about that quandary, that space that beer is exploring, and we take a step back, we see that this is the same space that is being explored by the Allende government in Chile, which is how do we strengthen top-down control in the form of a socialist government that now is taking a greater role in running the most important industries and in the economy. But at the same time, we want to preserve civil liberties. We want to broaden participation. We want to respect the constitution, right? So it's that same kind of terrain, one in the domain of cybernetics and management, and the other in the domain of politics that are being explored at this same time. And this actually lends itself to the

connection between these two strands of thought. Beer would arrive in Chile for the first time in November 1971, but he does so at the request of a young Chilean engineer named Fernando Flores. And Flores is only 28 years old at the time, so he's not very old, but he was already in charge of the technical aspects of Chile's national very old, but he was already in charge of the technical aspects of Chile's nationalization effort, which is also very striking. And so Flores was thinking very seriously about how are we going to make this process happen. And from a practical standpoint, he didn't know how to do this. And he came across Beer's ideas, and he found them to be very compelling, not only because it was about the practice of how you might do this, but it was a philosophical approach to how we might do this.

And so he reached out to Beer, hoping that Beer would send one of his consultants to Chile to help the government think about the nationalization process. And instead, Beer jumped at the opportunity. So he's been thinking about these ideas for a while. He's been thinking about how he might move his ideas into the domain of politics. So this is a tremendous opportunity. And so he decides to go himself. And that is the beginning of their rather unique collaboration. Yeah, that is such a fascinating story that you describe, right? How Flores reaches out to Beer and Beer decides like, yeah, I need to participate in this, right? Totally. It's such a coincidence of history, almost, that this collaboration was

able to take place. And I think that plays into another part of your book that seems important in discussing this before we, you know, start to lay out the system as a whole. And that is, I think that there has long been a concern about the ability of, you know, Western technologists or Western governments to use technology and, you know, other forms of economic power to maintain power over the global South, even if it's not in a like a direct colonial way, right. And so in the book, you talked about dependency theory in particular, and how Project Cybersyn envisioned a new way of using and developing technology in the global South, even as it was importing knowledge and code from Britain, from, you know, Stafford Beer and other people who he was contracting with in the

United Kingdom. So can you talk a little bit about dependency theory and how Cybersyn represented a move away from it? Sure. So Cybersyn, it's being built during a moment when Latin Americans are rethinking the ways that they approach development. So in the aftermath of the Great Depression, countries like Chile tried to foster development through industrial growth, which they thought could be achieved by mimicking the path to industrial growth or economic growth that had been traveled by more industrialized nations in the North, most notably the United States, or perhaps, you know, a nation such as England. And this led to policies where you would try to import machinery,

or you would import expertise, or you would, you know, try to create the same conditions in your own country, so that you could produce domestically what had previously been imported, or that you could have the same industrial capabilities as the wealthier nations that you hope to emulate, right? So it was this belief in kind of a universal path to modernity or to progress. But by the 1960s, a new line of thought is emerging from the offices of the Economic Commission on Latin America, which just happens to be based in Santiago, Chile. And this new line of thought is known as dependency theory. And from this approach, it was argued that it was impossible for Latin American nations to follow the same path as, say, the United States, because economic inequality was a necessary part of the

capitalist system. And it was a necessary part of how wealthier nations stayed wealthy. So following this line of thought, you know, importing machinery from a foreign company or allowing a foreign company to set up a local subsidiary, it still would allow the United States or England or wherever to own the means of production. So the answer, some believed, would be to create national industries, to develop national capabilities, or to orient. So that was the word that was being used at the time, to orient science or engineering activities to address local needs. So instead of thinking about universality,

it was about thinking about national capability and the ability to address national needs and national problems. And in some ways, Cybersyn, which we haven't talked about yet, but we will, it fits this frame because it was an effort of a socialist government to orient one of its most modern and expensive capital technologies, a mainframe computer, which, you know, just to give some context, at this time, Chile had 50 computers in the entire country, a handful of mainframes, you know, most of the mainframes were owned by the government. So to take one of these precious mainframe computers and use it to solve one of the most pressing national problems, which at the moment was,

how do you run an economy? So, you know, that is a very oriented use of science and technological capability. But at the same time, you know, the project did depend on frequent visits from an elite British consultant, Stafford Beer. And, you know, the computer technology itself was being developed elsewhere. So it was an imported machine from IBM or Burroughs. So it does have some of these hallmarks, you know, as we come to know it, is not a traditional story of imported expertise and imported technology. And instead, as we follow the history, what we see is how scientific knowledge and technological developments in this case traveled in both directions. And they changed those who were involved in the project in very fundamental ways. So here is perhaps, you know, a key example, Stafford Beer, who has already been introduced in our conversation. His experience with Chilean socialism, it transformed him and it caused him to radically rethink his relationship to material wealth. It caused him

to radically rethink what he's doing as an international business consultant. And also the work of Chilean biologists, Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, gave Beer a new language for thinking about how bureaucracies reproduce themselves. So in terms of who he was, what he was thinking, the future trajectory of his research, it all was transformed through his time in Chile and his interactions with his Chilean colleagues, which he freely acknowledges. And I think Humberto Maturana captures this quite nicely. When I interviewed him, he said that Beer arrived as a businessman and he left as a hippie. So that doesn't, you know, account for, you know, the content of his work, but it does, you know, capture a certain essence of what that transformation made. We also see in this

history instances of how the knowledge and practices and assumptions that are coming from Britain were completely unsuitable for the Chilean context. And because of that, Chilean technologists were improvising and innovating and developing their own approaches out of necessity, right? And of course, people who are involved with the project, when the coup hits, they go elsewhere and they have their success all over the world in very impactful ways. So it's not a typical story of technological colonialism or imported expertise. It's a much more complex story, one that's facilitated by friendship, by mutual respect and political necessity and also by a space of possibility. And so it's a story of Chile doing something in the area of computing that computer experts in places like the United States

and Germany, they didn't even think that it would be possible. But it was possible because of the unique facets of the political context. Yeah, I think one of the really fascinating pieces about the book as well is that it demonstrated that even though the Chilean government and the department or whatnot that was working on the system was relying in part on beer and some of the groups that he was contracting with in the United Kingdom, as that knowledge came back to Chile, they were not only implementing it, but they were learning from it, learning how to build on it, learning how to innovate with it. So it wasn't just like this very simple kind of importation, and then this is how it works, and that's it. You know, the Chileans were really learning from it and building on it, which I think is a really fascinating piece of that.

Totally, absolutely. And so, you know, obviously, we have talked a fair bit about the context now, and, you know, kind of been foreshadowing the arrival of the system as we've talked about some of the key players and what was going on at the time. So I think now is the right time to bring in Project Cybersyn itself. So can you discuss the system itself? You know, how was Project Cybersyn envisioned to work? What were the kind of goals that the Chilean socialists were trying to achieve with it? So Cybersyn consisted of four component parts or systems. So what I'll do is I'll describe them briefly, and then I'll describe how they

work together. So the first component was known as Cybernet, and it was a telex network. So why a telex network? What is the problem? To appreciate this, you need to understand that Chile was trying to create a national computer network that could be used to run the economy using only one computer, which is just, you know, I think we can all appreciate, you know, the difficulty of that problem and that set of constraints and, you know, the kind of very novel thinking that a solution would require. And so what the Chilean team came up with is, you know, they didn't have a computer network that they could build, but they could build a network of telex machines or

teletype machines, which you can think of, you know, these are machines that are akin to a typewriter in some ways, you know, and they use a microwave connection to send text over distances, but they make a clacking sound that is more akin to a typewriter than perhaps some of the technologies we're used to today. So the idea is you can build a national network of these telex machines and have them transmit data about the factories where they're located to a central control room where a computer is located where data could be processed. So building that network of the Telex machines constituted the first step of building this system. The second component was known as CyberStride. And this is a customized suite of software that would run on the mainframe computer. It would take the data from the factories as input, and it would run statistical

processing to figure out what that data meant. So, you know, if you have data from, say, the past week, and then all of a sudden it changes, does that mean a crisis is coming? And it would help economic decision makers figure out when crisis was coming, how they might adapt, if there were shortages. So again, they could react dynamically so that the system could maintain its viability and survive. So the software constitute the second part of the system. The third part was known as Futuro, which was an economic simulator. It was not a direct mapping of the economy, right? It wouldn't tell you exactly what the economy was doing or would do in the future, but rather it was conceived as a tool that would help policymakers play as they were testing out different policy solutions.

And then the final component was known as ops room. And this is, you know, a very futuristic looking space. Perhaps some listeners have seen it before. A very futuristic control room that would allow government leaders or perhaps labor leaders to come in and sit in chairs, look at data projected on the walls, and make decisions that were informed by recent data about the economy. So I'm happy to say more about the ops room later on if there is interest. But for now, what you need to know is that these four components were given the name Project Cybersyn. So Cybersyn referred to the constellation of these systems. And Cybersyn stood for cybernetic synergy. So cybernetic in reference to the science

that was underlying the system and synergy because the whole was seen as more than the sum of the parts. And the way that this worked is, say that you are in a factory being run by the state, you would be sending a small amount of data, let's say around 10 indices of data about production, maybe raw materials, energy, worker absenteeism. You would be sending that to computer center where it was processed using the statistical software. If everything is fine, the manager can just keep doing what they're doing. It's all good. If an anomaly is detected,

a signal would be sent from the computer center back to the factory to say, hey, you might have a problem. You need to resolve this. And the factory would be given a limited amount of time to resolve it on their own. And so this was seen as a way of preserving factory autonomy. But if the managers, they couldn't resolve it in that time period, the people in the computer center would send an alert upwards to the government so that they could intervene from above to help fix the problem. So again, it's enabling top-down intervention while preserving individual liberty, which is what Stafford Beer wanted to do with his cybernetics.

You might also want to keep in mind that this design took into account the goals and values of Chilean socialism. So as I mentioned, the very reason that the system came into being was to win the battle of production. We want to be able to raise production and control inflation. And so, you know, this is why we need to have more effective management. Inflation would become a tremendous problem for the Allende government, but at least at the outset, that was part of the plan. Its designers also developed a plan for worker participation. So again, the government is trying to broaden participation, especially participation of the workers. And so an idea came that perhaps you could involve the

workers in the design of the models of their factories that underpin the statistical software. So workers could help decide which indices of production were important, what range of values are acceptable, how might you view these different aspects of production in relationship to each other, and that that would inform the factory modeling process. So the models, rather than being something created only by technocrats, would be informed by worker knowledge and worker expertise. And then also, in the system, computers are being used in production in ways that would not necessarily lead to unemployment. So today, there's a lot of anxiety about computers coming into our workspaces and replacing us.

They're automating us. They're leading to our de-skilling, it's all going to be a big mess. And, you know, what people at the time were thinking, well, one of the goals of the Allende government is to decrease unemployment, you want to raise employment levels. So to have workers lose their job because of automation just didn't make sense. So it was a reconceptualization of how computers might be used in the workplace that did not lead to automating and de-skilling. So there are a number of other projects, you know, that spun out of Project Cybersyn. But in a nutshell, that's what Project Cybersyn was designed to do and how it operated. Yeah, I think you bring up a lot of really interesting different points about the project. But what you're talking about there with the workers leads really well into my next question,

because I felt like when I was reading that one of the key points that stood out in your explanation of Project Cybersyn was the question of worker power and decentralization versus technocracy and centralization. And, you know, obviously this plays out in Beer's work that you were discussing earlier, as well as in the design of the system and the ideas of Chilean socialism that were being built into that as well. So I felt that the goal was trying to achieve the former, the worker power and decentralization. But as the project was created and the team was faced with kind of the political and social realities of the political

situation that they were dealing with, that they had to accept a bit more of the latter, a bit more of that kind of centralized control. So can you talk a bit about the dynamic that you observed there and how it evolved through the creation of the project? So what you're bringing to light is that Project Cybersyn is a project of contradictions. And different kinds of contradictions or different facets of these contradictory relationships emerge over the life of the project. And one of the ways that you can see these contradictions is when you compare how the system was conceptualized, which is the ideal case, at the start, since the project was cut short by a military coup that overthrew the Allende government and ended Chilean democracy and ended work on the Cybersyn project, of course, we don't have a lot of information on what the implementation would have been like. So, you know, aspects of the system never made it past the prototype stage,

not all of them, but many of them. But we can make some educated guesses. And here are two examples where actually we do have examples from the historical record or information from the historical record that involve worker power and that get at the issues or the contradictions that you're asking me about. Okay, so here's the first one. We know that the system was shaped by political commitments to broader participation in government, worker participation in particular. So in theory, this meant that when a factory modeler, an operations research scientist, was going into a factory, that a worker should be somebody that they sought out, whose opinion they tried to secure. But in my interviews with factory modelers,

what was shared with me is that legacies of class prejudice remained. And for an operations research scientist, they have a university education, they view themselves as a professional. So when they go into the factory, the person that they end up talking with most likely are the other engineers on the shop floor or members of factory management, right? So in terms of that worker participation transfer of knowledge actually happening, class prejudice is getting in the way of that. Here's another example. The operations room itself was designed to broaden participation in decision making. And one of the ways that we can see this is in the design of the interface. So, you know, nowadays we might have a keyboard or a touchscreen, but for the Cypresson operations room, we have a series of these geometrical buttons that are in the armrest. And this was intentional so that you could operate the operations room. You could access that space if you weren't fully literate

or if you didn't know how to type. But these buttons were also intentionally designed to be large. They were called big hand buttons to encourage pounding. So, you know, in theory, you could sit in the chair and you could pound on the buttons and you could make your point. And that was a way that you could demonstrate that you were very serious about what you were saying. And that is very obviously an aggressive form of expression or, you know, a stereotypically masculine form of expression that was literally being built into the space. So the space was not inclusive of other forms of expression, was literally being built into the space. So the space was not inclusive of other forms of expression, and by extension, other kinds of decision makers. So those are two

examples where we have data from the historical record. Here's another example that is more speculative, and it gets at that centralization, decentralization question that you're asking me about. So if you remember, I just laid out how the system worked, you know, and there's that window of time between when, you know, an anomaly is detected in the system and the factory manager can resolve the problem on their own before the government intervenes from above. And it's that window of time, that delay, that is the crux of preserving autonomy, right, of striking that balance between decentralization and centralization. But if we think about it on a practical level,

and I've thought about this, how do you preserve that window of autonomy, right? I mean, in practice, someone in the computer room could just tell somebody in government and someone could act on that kind of knowledge. So how do you actually protect that autonomy? And I've been thinking about it and you would have to do it through policies and regulations and not through the technology itself. And in the absence of such policies and regulations and their enforcement,

the technology could easily be used to further centralized government power or government control. So just to show that there is that slipperiness, even in the design itself, and that a system that had been touted as decentralized could very easily become something that is centralized. There are other kinds of contradictions that we see. Over time, we see the government moving from an offensive to more of a defensive position, where it's struggling to survive in the face of opposition. And so this change in context, because you asked about change over time,

it pushes members of the Chilean government to focus less on how values are being built into the process of creating and using technology, and more to thinking about how cybernetic thinking and information technology can be used simply to help the government survive. So it's a shift from process to end goal. And in the case of Fernando Flores, we see him coming to this conclusion bit by bit that tech can't save the Chilean revolution, right? It's just there are tanks, you know, there are airplanes, which eventually could lead him to deprioritize the project altogether. Yeah, I think that's a fascinating explanation of that dynamic and how it starts to play out over time, right? And what you're talking about there in the question of how these things would actually play out in terms of that window of time that people had, and, you know, the need for regulation

to kind of preserve that autonomy really shows how the technological system cannot exist alone, right? That there's this whole other construction, this whole other political and social entity that exists around it and that it is kind of in conversation with. And if those aspects do not reflect what you're trying to achieve with the technology, then it might not be achieved, right? I think that what you're discussing there also gets to my next question really well, which is that, you know, a lot of the technologies that we talk about today, or at least until recently, have been treated as politically neutral, even though that is not the case. And a lot of technology or virtually all technology have certain ideas embedded within it. But Project Cybersyn was very clearly an example of a technology that was created with an explicit

political goal in mind, or explicit political goals, plural. Can you discuss a bit about how politics was embedded within the system itself and what that tells us about attempts to create political or left-wing technology? Project Cybersyn is a clear example of a technology that was built to achieve a political aim. You know, so in that sense, you know, right off the bat, it is a very rich example for thinking about the relationship of technology and politics. But the more that you delve into this story and start to examine the complexities of the story, of which there are many,

it becomes clear that this is one of many ways that technologies can have political qualities. So sure, they can assist in the realization of a political goal. They can also help an administration, a party, a coalition, or a person stay in power. They can also be framed rhetorically in ways that align with political values. So in the Cyberson case, members of the team drafted pamphlets to show that this is, you know, associated with the people science. They created murals, and they had one of Chile's most famous folk singers write a folk song about cybernetics and computation in the context of socialist change. And so, you know, in Chile, murals and folk songs were also artistic hallmarks of the political changes that were taking place. So tying them

visually and through audio culture to those kinds of political shifts. Technologies can also be designed to facilitate and encourage a set of desired interactions and relationships, or they can be desired to block or discourage a set of undesired interactions and relationships. So to go back to the operations room, we can design a user interface so that it's accessible to people with limited literacy and typing skills, right? We can have that value of accessibility. We can decide to arrange chairs in a circle so that all the occupants in the room are given equal status. We can remove a table in the operations room to encourage conversation and discourage paper shuffling. Or we

could decide to limit the amount of data that the system collects to prevent government overreach and abuse, right? So all of these decisions are about process. We can also think about the politics of process and work to ensure that the relationships that are involved in the creation of this new technology uphold a set of particular political commitments. So we can ask for worker input in factory models and worker expertise, etc. So, you know, that's just like a snapshot. So politics are everywhere in the system, and there are a number of ways that we can think about it. But what the Cybersyn history helps us do is it helps us see the complexities and nuances even among those different ways of approaching the relationship of technology and politics. So, for example, we can see in this project

that when we use the phrase political project or technology in the service of a political project, political projects contain a multiplicity of beliefs and strategies and priorities. And sometimes these vary widely, and they can even conflict with one another. So in Chilean history, in this particular moment, we see that there are deep divides in the left about what socialist change should look like, and the strategies that should be used to make it a reality. And so this means that we can't just say, you know, rather simply that Cybersyn was a socialist technology without also asking what socialisms were present at the time and what socialisms were actually going to be facilitated through this system or consider what other strategies or end goals were on the table and were not pursued

and why. So there is this multiplicity within the phrase political project. And we also, when we looked at this history, we see how technical experts struggle to fully understand the needs and experiences of those they wish to help. So here's an example. We can talk about technologies that empower workers. And indeed, this is something that Beer talked about a lot. But workers are not a monolith. So, you know, using that appeal to empowering workers, that is doing a lot of glossing over and simplification. When we look at Chilean history, we see that some workers, many workers supported the Allende government, but not all. Some workers aligned themselves with the centrist Christian Democratic Party.

Some workers supported the new participatory mechanisms that the government was putting in place, but not all. Some had already secured access to power through previous union structures and leadership structures and were not as keen to embrace change. So if a technical expert arrives in Chile and says, my system will empower workers, they're already missing the nuance of the space that they're working in. And similarly, because these spaces are so complex, it can be difficult to pin down how power relationships operate in these spaces within these socio-technical systems, and that they're subject to change, so to get a full grasp of that. So you asked about, you know, creating a political technology or thinking about a political technology or a leftist technology. So if that is your concern, I would say these are the kinds of considerations that

you would want to keep in mind. I think you should ask yourself if you're thinking about the relationship of politics and technology as a characteristic of the technology itself. So are you thinking about things like, oh, it's going to be less expensive so more people can access it? Are you thinking about the component parts of the technology, like whether they're sourced from this country or that country or from how does that play out? Are you thinking primarily about keeping a particular administration, party or person in power, if that is your end goal? Or are you thinking about a series of social relationships that form part of how that technology is built and used? And if you're doing that, are you also thinking about ways to maintain those relationships or ways that those relationships might become malleable? And then, drawing from Project Cybersyn, you might even want to think about what happens when these different ways of making technologies political or making politics technological, you can pick your pick, what happens when they're brought into conflict with one another? How do you prioritize them? So for example, in Cybersyn, in the history of Cybersyn, we see this tension between wanting to prioritize an end goal versus wanting to

prioritize the process. Is it enough to win the battle of production? What if it means having engineers go into factories and treat workers with disdain? But what if you prioritize the process and commit to worker participation, knowing that it will make the end goal more difficult and possibly elusive. And so this is the problem space that the people I was studying were navigating. And so I think this history really helps bring these complexities to light and invite further discussion. You can see how, you know, everything that you're discussing there in relation to Project Cybersyn, but also these broader questions that you're laying out are still incredibly relevant today, right? Even in the political situation that we find ourselves in that is quite different from Chile in the 1970s. So I think those are really relevant questions to consider. And then as we think about how

Project Cybersyn evolves and how it is actually able to be used, there is a particular event that you describe in your book as one of the ones that demonstrate the potential usefulness of a Project Cybersyn or at least some of its constitutive parts, right? And so the truck driver strike of October 1972 is a particularly important test of at least one aspect of Project Cybersyn. So why was that event significant? And what role did the technology play in helping the government to overcome it? So the October strike, which is also known as El Paro de Octubre, was a turning point for the Allende government. It was a turning point for Project Cybersyn. And I think, you know, if people read the book Cybernetic Revolutionaries, it's also like a turning point in the narrative of the history as well. And it's this moment when

the government shifts from being on the offensive to being on the defensive. And kind of after the strike, the government is just struggling to stay alive, whereas before it was trying to, you know, implement a vision of a socialist change. And in order to understand the events of the strike, you need to know something of the context. So the strike takes place in October 1972. But throughout 1972, opposition to the government had continued to grow. Opposition had been fueled by rising inflation, consumer shortages, and there's also a propaganda campaign in the media that is instilling fear of socialism, instilling fear of a Yende government. So this is what daily life is like in 1972. And, you know, just as we were talking about the

multiplicity of beliefs within the popular unity government, you know, there are a multiplicity of strategies within the opposition. And so members of the centrist Christian democratic parties, they say, okay, we're going to, you know, we're going to take the constitutional route. We're going to hope to get a two-thirds overthrowing the government is the more desirable solution. And so they start planning to create the conditions that would foment the coup and by extension bring the Allende government to an early end. And the moment for when they can put their plans into action, it arises in October 1972, when the government decides to create a parallel state trucking industry in the southern town of Aysen. And in response, members of a truck owners business association, or GRAMIO, decides to go on strike to protest government activity in this sector. And the

strike soon grows from this area of the country and becomes national. So we see quickly, you know, truck drivers in Aysen, 12,000 truck drivers, 40,000 truck drivers. And the goal is that, you know, they will block the roads, sometimes violently. They will block the flow of fuel, supplies for manufacture, commercial goods, essential items, and they will make it so Chileans cannot access these items that are necessary. Soon, members of other business associations are joining the strike. Professional guilds of doctors, lawyers, and engineers are going on strike. The retail gremio is joining the strike, so you can't get access to stores. Factory owners are closing their factories, etc.

And all of this is with the intention of creating the conditions for a coup by preventing Chileans from getting the goods and services that they need. And members of the right are exacerbating this by hoarding goods and disposing of goods to exacerbate shortages. You know, so it really is this very tense and dramatic moment. Now, in response, members of Chile's industrial belts decide to take matters into their own hands. They figure out how to open their factories. They figure out how to restart production. They rethink networks of distribution so that goods can be placed directly into the hands of Chilean consumers. They can use trucks at their factories to improvise new distribution networks, etc.

And it's at this point that the Telex network that was designed for Project Cybersyn starts to come into play. So a few days after the strike starts, Fernando Flores, remember, he's the engineer who invited Beer to come to Chile. He's talking with another member of the project, Mario Grandi, and they say, hey, what if we use cybernetics and what we've learned from Project Cybersyn to help the government's response to the strike. And so what they do is they create a command center in the presidential palace, and they bring political leaders, government leaders, labor leaders physically to that command center and create, in essence, a human network where people can share what's going on. They can reach out to people who are in their networks and therefore have this adaptive system,

right, that will help the government respond and survive. And moreover, they set up a series of specialized command centers with telex machines. So for example, there was a specialized command center for industry that would connect members of, you know, the government chain of command to what is taking place on the shop floor to find out, oh, what materials are missing in this area? Who needs fuel? What trucks are available? What roads are open? And through this dynamic network of communication, be able to keep some level of production and distribution going and survive. I mentioned that most of the components of Project Cybersyn never made it out of the prototype stage.

The cybernet network, the network of telex machines in this instance, was vital to the Allende government being able to survive the strike and continue to stay in power. And, you know, for people who are interested in cybernetic history, I would argue that it is therefore one of the most significant moments in cybernetic history, because we actually see it contributing to a historical event of recognized importance. But using the telex network, the government was not only able to coordinate its actions dynamically, they were able to generate a written record of what was taking place, which also informed decision making, you know, so it was it was important in multiple ways. And in fact, it was so recognized as important that when the strike concluded, Fernando Flores received a very substantial promotion and he became the Minister of Economics. And at the time, he was only 29 years old.

I'm 29 years old. It's hard to imagine being a Minister of Economics. When you think about it, it is quite remarkable remarkable it is a very remarkable time period absolutely what you're describing there is just so fascinating though right and it and it does i think back up your points that you that you made earlier about the importance of you know not just the technology but this relationship between the technology and the human elements that were ongoing at the time and how it's it's never just the technology existing on its own, that the human piece of this is essential as well. But obviously, as you were discussing, Project Cybersyn was never completed, unfortunately. And Allende was overthrown

in a CIA-backed military coup on September 11th, 1973, after which the Chilean people were subjected to a brutal neoliberal program, not to mention the military repression that was ongoing for some time afterward. But, you know, I'm interested in what lessons come of Project Cybersyn, what we might draw from it, and if we think about the creation of socialist technologies. In the book, you discuss how the goal of Project Cybersyn was not to automate labor, but to empower it, how it was a demonstration of innovation outside the global north and capitalist dynamics, and how it was cutting edge despite using outdated technologies from a global north kind of point of view. In your view, and in the light of the modern ideas about what constitutes technology and innovation, what should we take away from these aspects of Project Cybersyn? Yeah, so there are many things that we can take away from Project Cybersyn. For example, it did use older technologies in creative ways,

like Telex machines become akin to an internet, slide projectors in the operations room become akin to a flat panel display. And it's because they're being used in very creative ways. And, you know, so that might be a takeaway for how we think about our older technologies today, especially, you know, as we're more sustainability minded. So there are a number of things that we can say, but I would like to highlight a few things. So one takeaway that I think hasn't been stressed yet in our conversation is that Project Cybersyn, it was cut short. So, you know, a military coup took place on September 11th, 1973. It resulted in the death of Allende, the end of Chilean democracy for 17 years, and brought the dictator

Augusto Pinochet to power during that time period. So it was a project that was cut prematurely short. Much of what we can say about the project outside of its design is therefore purely speculative. So would it have won the battle of production? Would it have empowered workers? Would it have changed government decision-making in substantial ways? You know, we see hints of what could have been had the government survived, but we can't know for sure. But what we can say for sure from this history and from this event is that international geopolitics can cut the life of innovative technological projects short, and also that it can play a role in determining what technologies succeed and thrive.

And therefore, we cannot evaluate this technological success or thriving on technical merits alone. So what we see is that, you know, technologies thrive in part due to the conditions that brought them into being and allowed them to thrive. And these conditions are connected globally. So to say that a U.S. technology or a U.S. tech sector is dominant because it is inherently technologically superior is ignoring the global connectedness of history. And to focus only on U.S. technological successes or the policies or conditions that made those success possible is to obscure how those same policies or context or beliefs foreclosed opportunities for innovation in other

parts of the world. So drawing attention to that global connectiveness and its effect on innovation, I think is one key takeaway. Another key takeaway, I think, is that the Cybersyn history challenges us to think more deeply about the relationship of technology and politics. So you asked me earlier about neutrality versus whether technology and politics. So you asked me, you know, earlier about neutrality versus whether, you know, technologies have politics. You know, I would say that neutrality is just, it's off the table. You know, technologies, they are created in particular context, they're used for certain aims, they involve power relationships. Technologies are political in many, many, many, many, many ways. Building off of that, I would say that saying a technology

is connected to a political project does not necessarily mean that there is a connection to that political project or that we're all talking about the same kind of connection. So let me expand on that idea. Beer insisted throughout 1973 that cybernetic thinking and the proper use of technology could help save Chile's peaceful road to socialism. And he continued to insist this, even though former members of the project team, who had continued to occupy increasingly more powerful positions in the government, were saying that tech didn't matter anymore. What mattered is that, you know, the government needed

to survive. And when you look at that tension, it raises the question of to what degree Beer understood or could possibly have understood the complexities of the political situation. And I don't mean that as a dig at Beer. I'm just saying, you know, that someone who is, you know, coming in once a month or, you know, every other month, you have a different understanding of the situation. And it makes me think, you know, today, reflect on today, that there are expectations of technical experts, that they're expected to quickly grasp the complexities of social interactions or social problems and develop meaningful technological solutions. But if some of these complicated

problem spaces cannot be understood quickly, not fully understanding the dynamics of these spaces and their complexity can enable an enthusiasm for what technologies can do or what they can change or the kinds of problems they can solve that is not warranted, may not be possible, or may even work against the goals that you're trying to achieve. So I just, you know, I want to put that out there as well as a possible takeaway. And finally, I would say that Project Cybersyn, as a history, really shows us that computing history is global. So we see that different political and historical contexts set the stage for the creation of technologies that are different from those that we have, you know, in the United States, for example. And we also see that innovative political contexts, you know, ones that are

different. I live in Cambridge, Massachusetts, so ones that are different than what I see in Cambridge, Massachusetts, or contexts that are different, such as the popular unity in Chile, these kinds of political innovation can give rise to innovative technological systems. So if we're searching for inspiration and how tech could be otherwise, we can't keep telling the same stories about tech. We can't only be looking at places in the United States or Silicon have you or what have you for inspiration. We need to look elsewhere. And we have to have a better appreciation of how people working in different times and places understood possibility and how they attempted to remake their worlds using the tools that they had at their disposal.

So that's the last takeaway that I will leave your listeners with. I think that is an essential takeaway and such a good one to end this discussion of Project Cybersyn on and this larger question of technology, of innovation, of where it comes from and, you know, of where it can be produced. And I think it really cements the point that we need to not just be paying attention to the development of technology in the United States or certain European contexts, but to take a wider view and to look at what has been happening in more parts of the world. And to close, I wanted to ask you about Chile now. You know, as you discussed in your answer, there was a military coup in 1973

and democracy later came back to Chile. But for a long time, the constitution that was implemented during that coup remained in Chile. And there has been a growing movement in recent years to change that constitution and I think to change a number of things about Chilean politics and the Chilean state through that process. I was reading earlier this week, there was an election to elect a new legislature to see if this process would continue. And it seems like enough people were elected who support changing the constitution to now facilitate some sort of process. So can you talk a little bit about what is going on in Chile right now as this process

continues? Sure. So just briefly, you know, I can explain a bit about the context. So the current constitution in Chile, as you mentioned, was drafted during the dictatorship. And when Chile returned to democracy, political leaders who were, you know, trying to instill a new democratic government opted to make that transition constitutional. And therefore, that constitution continued even after Chile returned to democracy. So there has been, you know, now decades of frustration, struggle, discussion about how democracy couldn't fully return to Chile while that constitution was still in place.

And indeed, that constitution had been intentionally designed to further, you know, some of the beliefs or power structures that were favorable to the military and to the dictatorship. So changing the constitution has not only symbolic, but like very real significance to the trajectory of democratic return within Chile. So just as a way of context, as you mentioned, delegates were just elected who are going to be involved in the drafting of that new constitution. You know, as a historian, I tend to look at things in historical context. And so perhaps, you know, this is already resonating with listeners of the podcast that, you know, there are these moments where, you know, people from around the world watch Chile and wonder what is going to happen. Certainly, in the case of the Allende government, you know, Chile was seen as a place of possibility. I would say for others, the

neoliberal reforms that were put in place by the Chicago boys under, you know, the Pinochet dictatorship, people from around the world were looking at Chile as a place of neoliberal possibility. Chile, once again, is, you know, is a space of political possibility. And, you know, I'm excited to see what will happen. And, you know, I wish Chile well. And I absolutely echo that statement. And, you know, I wish Chile well. And I absolutely echo that statement. And, you know, I think that we'll all be hoping that they get the kind of constitution that the people of Chile deserve to have to really have a proper, you know, democratic entity and to improve their well-being, their society in the way that they want to. Eden, I really appreciate

you taking the time to come on the show to discuss Project Cybersyn, all these topics related to it, and to fill us in on these aspects of Chilean history that I think a lot of people won't be aware of or be very knowledgeable about. So thank you so much. It was a pleasure and I'm happy that there is continued interest in the story and, you know, hope that it is something that also speaks to quandaries in the present day. Eden Medina is the author of Cybernetic Revolutionaries, Technology and Politics in Allende's Chile, an associate professor at MIT, and the Rita Hauser Fellow at Radcliffe University for Advanced Study at Harvard University. You can follow Eden on Twitter

at Eden Medina. You can follow me at Paris Marks, and you can follow the show at Tech Won't Save Us. Tech Won't Save Us is part of the Harbinger Media Network, and you can find out more about that at harbingermedianetwork.com. And if you like the show, you can become a supporter by going to patreon.com slash techwontsaveus. Thanks for listening. Thank you.