Project Cybersyn

Last update: 01 Aug 2026 00:32
First version: 30 January 2022

Initial notes, January 2022

An early effort astatine utilizing networked computers for economical guidance in Allende's Chile, pinch the engagement of the British cyberneticist Stafford Beer. This has something of a cult pursuing among contemporary socialists, successful nary mini part, I suspect, because of the play glamour of the photographs of the power room, and because of the aura of righteous martyrdom fixed the destiny of Allende and his government. Considering my interests successful the possibilities and limits of economic planning, however, what I want to get very clear connected are:

1. What the various participants (Beer, the various groups among the Chileans) hoped to execute pinch Cybersyn;
2. What the strategy arsenic implemented actually achieved; and
3. What a akin strategy mightiness do pinch modern, aliases reasonably-foreseeable, technology.

The main root connected each this is Medina's book, which I request to actually finish. (Honestly it's been truthful agelong since I started it that I should just re-read from scratch.) But I should besides effort to spot what's been done, successful terms of humanities research, since her book.

Update, 18 October 2023

Having conscionable vanished Medina's book (which seems to person nary successors), and the papers from the 1970s she cites arsenic the method sources, a fewer much notes. (All page numbers are references to her book.)

Cybersyn was to person 4 main components:

1. "Cybernet": A web of telex machines linking factories to the authorities agency that ran the nationalized assemblage of the economy (Corporación de Fomento de la Producción, CORFO), and thence to the 1 (!) mainframe machine disposable to the project. (My reference to networked computers, plural, successful the opening paragraph to this notebook was frankincense dormant wrong, though I deliberation it's a communal misunderstanding.) The thought was that factories would send regular (ideally, daily) measurements of what we'd now telephone key capacity indicators aliases metrics to the cardinal computer, which would process them and pass backmost to each mill what it had learned.
2. "Cyberstride": A cardinal programme moving connected that mainframe which was fundamentally doing anomaly / change-point discovery on the time series coming successful from the periphery . This was fundamentally implementing the method of Harrison and Stevens (1971), per Medina (p. 267n33). As Dan Davies puts it, the contented of the signals it output would person amounted to fundamentally either "situation nominal" aliases "there's thing up astatine the mill".
   An important portion of the creation present was that erstwhile Cyberstride did raise a warning, it was expected to spell backmost to the applicable factory, which would get a chance to woody pinch the matter on its own, frankincense preserving a definite measurement of firm-level autonomy.
3. "CHECO": A simulation exemplary of the Chilean macroeconomy, which was expected to fto policy-makers do what-if exercises.
4. The fabulous power room aliases operations room, which was expected to show accusation from Cyberstride and CHECO to decision-makers. Medina says (pp. 121, 123) that the designers of the room committedness up and down they weren't influenced by 2001 aliases Star Trek aliases the like. If that's true, the Chileans and the Hollywood set-designers must've some drawn drawn connected immoderate communal sources for their ocular style of The Future.

(Beer was besides very taken pinch his thoughts astir "algedonic" [=pain-pleasure] meters which The People could twist backmost and distant to indicate how satisfied aliases dis-satisfied they were, pinch a cardinal read-out, but that was, if not virtually vaporware because a fistful of prototypes were built, then very intelligibly ne'er going to beryllium a thing.)

I person listed the 4 parts successful bid of decreasing completion and utility.

1. The telex web was the only portion that seems to person been actually useful to the Allende management --- and that not successful the measurement intended. In October 1972, the mostly-conservative, mostly-small-business-owner trucking manufacture staged a nation-wide onslaught against Allende. The management utilized the telex web to coordinate the trucks they had control, to effort to support the economy from wholly grinding to a halt. This coordination seems to have made nary usage astatine each of Cyberstride, aliases the power room, aliases any cybernetic principles. The main advantage of the telex complete phone calls was creating written records without the request for note-taking. (Telegrams would person worked arsenic well!) Some tertiary sources make it sound for illustration the authorities collapsed the onslaught successful this way. In fact, as Medina makes clear, the onslaught ended pinch a governmental compromise, viz., Allende brought apical generals into his cabinet, and otherwise temporarily appeased the conservatives, though without fully abandoning his program. It does look that the telex network bought the authorities much clip and a amended bargaining position than it would different person had.
2. Cyberstride was yet brought up and running, but the lag time betwixt taking measurements, moving them done the mainframe, and getting them backmost to determination makers was truthful agelong that it seems to have been a complete flop successful its intended intent of detecting problems early earlier they became superior --- let unsocial anticipating them earlier they became problems. (Medina refers to efforts to get the telex machines to straight communicate pinch the mainframe moving Cyberstride, but it's not clear to maine if those ever succeeded; I/O successful the early 1970s was hard!) This, of course, did not thief seduce busy, not to opportunity frantic, factory managers to give clip and power to feeding the strategy measurements early and often. (I opportunity "managers" because mean workers were uninvolved.) It was, of course, an wholly centralized strategy in position of computation. (How could it not be, pinch only 1 computer?) Rhetoric to the contrary, it did thing to de-centralize control, or to impact workers successful participatory decision-making. It besides was in nary consciousness a planning system, aliases immoderate benignant of replacement for marketplace coordination. When the strategy did pass of problems, it was up to managers and cardinal bureaucrats to scramble to find solutions (e.g., replacement sources of supplies). Figuring retired what variables to measurement for each mill was complicated, and involved sending trained engineers retired to each works and knowing what was going connected there; this was not thing workers had overmuch to do with. (Beer talked a bully crippled to the contrary connected that past point, but it was conscionable talk.)
   I mentioned supra that portion of the original creation was that when Cyberstride identified a problem astatine a plant, it was expected to get immoderate clip to reside it connected its own, successful bid to sphere the autonomy of the enterprise. As Medina explains, however, erstwhile problems were noticed, the unit moving the strategy "alerted the affected enterprise, those successful the cardinal telex room successful CORFO, and [Cybersyn task head Raul] Espejo successful the CORFO informatics directorate --- each astatine the aforesaid time". "Dismantling 1 of the superior safeguards of [enterprise] autonomy mightiness person been arsenic easy arsenic having personification from the telex room locomotion down the hall". (All these quotations are from pp. 183--184.)
3. CHECO produced immoderate models, but astatine nary constituent does Medina mention to any decision-maker really consulting them. From her explanation of the models, it would person been extremely difficult to link them to the benignant of information coming successful done the telex network.
4. The operations room besides doesn't look to person been overmuch use. The screens were not, successful fact, hooked up to computers; they were for displaying slides. "[I]t required immoderate of Chile's champion graphic designers to tie by manus each chart and floor plan the room displayed" (p. 125). I'm judge it was nicer than a dingy convention room pinch an overhead transparency projector, but it wasn't really any much capable. Towards the extremity of his administration, in September 1973, Allende did inquire to person the room moved to the statesmanlike palace, but that seems to person been because he wanted person entree to the cardinal node of the telex web (p. 206).

My assessment, based connected each this, was that if the Allende authorities had, by some miracle, survived (*), and Cybersyn had been built retired arsenic intended, what would person resulted would've been an pioneering illustration of what we'd now telephone a "dashboard", search clip bid of capacity indicators and throwing alerts to imaginable change-points successful the series. This tin beryllium a useful point for decision-makers, if the correct worldly is being measured and they person immoderate expertise to enactment connected the information, but the authorities of that of course depends wholly connected who has entree to the information, who gets to make decisions connected the ground of the information, what kinds of decisions they get to make, who they are accountable to for the results of their decisions, etc., etc. For that matter it depends connected the accusation being entered into the system honestly successful the first place, and not fudged to conceal problems, to exaggerate distress, aliases to group easier goals for oneself. (Medina doesn't mention this rumor astatine all, truthful it mightiness not person occurred to anyone, but it would person mattered if Cybersyn had really go important.) In immoderate case, as a replacement for marketplace coordination, Cybersyn was simply a non-starter. To picture it arsenic a decentralized readying strategy is nonsense.

Nowadays, of course, the package would tally easy connected anyone's phone. It'd be easy to springiness each mill head their ain anomaly-detector, and the telex network would beryllium subsumed into the mean telephone network. Why you'd want to share the accusation alternatively than having anomaly discovery done locally is, pinch modern technology, little clear --- presumably it'd beryllium because someone pinch entree to each the section accusation could do immoderate useful aggregation, possibly by assimilating it into a macroeconomic model. (For that to beryllium useful you'd request a bully macro model, which are bladed connected the ground; maybe an input-output exemplary of inter-plant/inter-industry linkages would beryllium useful enough.) You could tally that cardinal node retired of a spiffy room, wherever the screens could moreover beryllium connected to computers.

I do not want to extremity connected a dismissive note. The group who worked connected Project Cybersyn tried to do thing caller and difficult and worthwhile nether difficult conditions. What they achieved was singular capable to request nary exaggeration.

*: And I don't spot really it could have, pinch its policies; if the CIA and/or home reactionaries didn't overthrow them, the Communist Party would have. (Cf. Nove.)

Recommended (in order):
• Daniel \( D^2 \) Davies
  • "Computers pinch ashtrays", Back of Mind, 26 July 2023
  • "The statistical bosom of the system", Back of Mind, 30 August 2023
• Eden Medina, Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics successful Allende's Chile [In summation to my mini-review, spot Alex Harrowell]
• Raul Espejo, "Cybersyn, large data, assortment engineering and governance", AI and Society (2022) [End-of-career reflections by 1 of the Chilean task leaders]
• P. J. Harrison and C. F. Stevens, "A Bayesian Approach to Short-term Forecasting", Operational Research Quarterly 22 (1971): 341--362
• Alec Nove, "The Political Economy of the Allende Regime", pp. 51--78 successful P. O'Brien (ed.), Allende's Chile (New York: Praeger, 1976), reprinted connected pp. 3--29 of Nove's Socialism, Economics and Development (London: Allen and Unwin, 1986)
• Gene Castellano, "The DuPont Company's Chart Room", Hagley Museum and Library weblog, 18 December 2015

To read:
• Stafford Beer [Need to get these from the assemblage library, successful immoderate cases from storage...]
  • Brain of the Firm, 2nd edition
  • Cybernetics and Management
  • Designing Freedom
• Sebastian Edwards, The Chile Project: The Story of the Chicago Boys and the Downfall of Neoliberalism [Interesting review successful a somewhat-dodgy-looking magazine]
• Andrew Pickering, The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future [Long section connected Beer, which I presume covers this]