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Cybersyn And Early Uniminds
An anonymous reader writes "The Guardian Website is running a story on Cybersyn. An experimental computer network based on cybernetic principles that was used by Chile's revolutionary government between 1971 and 1973 to provide a real-time, decentralized form of economic analysis in the nationalized sector of the Chilean economy. The network has been described as Chile's Internet. There is a photo of the control room which looks something like the deck of the Starship Enterprise.
The whole thing was the brainchild of Stafford Beer, a sort of British Buckminster Fuller. All very Orwellian and Big Brother, the whole experiment was brought to an end by the CIA sponsored coup d'etat on the September 11th, 1973."
Hold on just a minute there.
There was nothing revolutionary about the Chilean government in the years 1971-1973 other than that they were voted in by the first democratic process the country had ever seen.
This is in contrast to the Pinochet government installed by the CIA in response to this unauthorized installation of democracy, whose crimes are well known.
I shall go on.
Cybersyn is the implementation of Stafford Beer's "Viable System Model" which is modelled on the working of the human nervous system.
Totalitarianism would be like if the brain demanded to know every detail of what the hand was doing.
The body doesn't work this way - hand control (for instance) is decentralized, with part being controlled by local "muscle memory", part being controlled where the nerves meet the spinal cord, and part being controlled at different levels of the brain. In order to prevent information overload the information passing upward is filtered at every stage to remove redundancy and irrelevancy.
In Cybersyn, the workings of actual factories was monitored by a couple of IBM/370s (if memory serves) but only statistically, to throw up warning events if the stats went out of whack. These warning events would be passed up to the "industry level", where they would mostly be absorbed since the industry may be operating within tolerances even if the individual factory isnt. Only if the industry had problems would signals be passed to the "master control room".
A highly moving aspect of the whole tale is that the "master control room" is a logical neccessity, but when Beer pointed it out on a system diagram to Allende, his immediate assumption was that the box represented THE PEOPLE.
Actually the Cybersyn implementation couldn't be as decentralized as Beer wanted, because Chile could only afford two computers which, by their nature, had to be centralized processing units. In today's world things would be a lot different, and no doubt Beer would advocate open source as the one way to enforce that the government couldn't be collecting information it shouldn't.
I shall go on. Cybersyn is the implementation of Stafford Beer's "Viable System Model" which is modelled on the working of the human nervous system. Totalitarianism would be like if the brain demanded to know every detail of what the hand was doing. The body doesn't work this way - hand control (for instance) is decentralized, with part being controlled by local "muscle memory", part being controlled where the nerves meet the spinal cord, and part being controlled at different levels of the brain. In order to prevent information overload the information passing upward is filtered at every stage to remove redundancy and irrelevancy. In Cybersyn, the workings of actual factories was monitored by a couple of IBM/370s (if memory serves) but only statistically, to throw up warning events if the stats went out of whack. These warning events would be passed up to the "industry level", where they would mostly be absorbed since the industry may be operating within tolerances even if the individual factory isnt. Only if the industry had problems would signals be passed to the "master control room". A highly moving aspect of the whole tale is that the "master control room" is a logical neccessity, but when Beer pointed it out on a system diagram to Allende, his immediate assumption was that the box represented THE PEOPLE. Actually the Cybersyn implementation couldn't be as decentralized as Beer wanted, because Chile could only afford two computers which, by their nature, had to be centralized processing units. In today's world things would be a lot different, and no doubt Beer would advocate open source as the one way to enforce that the government couldn't be collecting information it shouldn't. (Repeated because this topic finally made me get an account)
And the US Administration has so obviously learned their lesson that they would never dare interfere with another South American country ever again. Yeah Right!!!
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
If you want to know about the chilean guy who was behind this, and what he is up to now, check this article.
For those of you already complaining about how a bloody coup thwarted this clearly great idea, please read that article. It is very politically biased, but it shows how this guys ideas have evolved over time, and I would dare to say he wouldn't think of building such a clearly useless system now.
A system like that cannot take individual human actions into account, it cannot deal with subjective market decisions, it cannot handle human relations. A professor at Universidad de Chile (the one the submitter mentions) told us about this system years ago, and how it seemed to be such a great idea for managing coal production (for example)... until it had to deal with a coal miners strike...
If you want to know why such a centralized system will never be useful check econlib, you might learn a thing ot two.
By the way, I'm chilean.
List of US-sponsored/CIA involvment in coups/invations in Central America from 1975:
-Nicaragua 1979
-El SAlvador 1979-1989
-Grenada 1983
-Panama 1989
And CIA has been linked to paramilitary organizations, coups and secret operations in Puerto Rico, Peru, Bolivia, Colombia and Venezuela (as late as 2002).
The list is pulled from the back off my head and prob. not complete.
So did the act to stop CIA from doing this have any effect at all?
IMO, no.
Melius mori in libertate quam vivere in servitute.
Having recently moved from the US to Austria, I can safely say the US banking system sucks. The electronic banking aspect is incompletely implemented and only those parts which are convent to institution are implemented. On a side note, the customer service here in Austria is also stellar compared to the standard fare in the US. Just another in a long line of incidents demonstrating the fall of the US...
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
Cybernetics is the application of control processes from biological systems to artificial systems.
You're thinking of bionics. (Although the definition you give isn't exact for that, either). Cybernetics is the study of control and communication in both living and non-living systems.
Here are the dictionary links:
bionics
cybernetics
(Triva note: the term "cybernetics" was coined by Norbert Wiener, "bionics" was coined by Dr. Jack Steele -- my father-in-law)
-- Alastair
I bet "Cybernetic Principles" sounded really groovy in 1971
True. But when Staff wrote 'Cybernetics and Management" in 1959, the idea that you could apply Wiener's 1948 observational theories to real enterprises, let alone an entire national economy, has got to have been one of the all-time crazy ideas. Like Team Syntegrity (part of the Viable Systems Model, kicking off from the idea that every imaginable system can in some sense be modelled as an icosahedron), based on Buckminster Fuller's idea that 'all systems are polyhedra' - nuts perhaps, but terribly terribly useful and possibly *the* most complete model of 'organisations' (whatever they are, read the book!) ever constructed.
Here's a lecture(pdf) Staff gave in 1973 looking back at his work in Chile. And nearly two decades later, here's 'world in torment' which gives both a lovely flavour of what Staff was all about and a frightening summary of where the world may be going.
NOTHING has ever hit me with the same combination of 'wow' and 'my brain is burning' than Staff's Viable Systems Model seminars, sorry, Syntegrations. But like the man used to say, 'you need big words for big ideas. And you should find it hard to understand.' And you just knew you were being inspired by one of *the* great minds.
I will respond to a selected few comments you have made.
;-)
I have been to Chile many times. I've talked to people who live there. The 1970s coup was very necessary. The whole country was an economic disaster and there were massive food shortages
I have lived in Chile since 1989, one year before Pinochet miscalculated the support he would get in a second plebiscite and was replaced by a "democratic" government.
The people you have talked to have told you one side of the story. As a matter of fact, you seem to have listened very carefully to them, as you have repeated the far-right-wing speech quite accurately.
Communists hate Pinochet because he was the only person to ever remove a communist government from power.
Might I point out that calling someone a "communist" in Chile amounts to saying that they do not glorify the military government and its actions? Note carefully that the criteria for being a communist has not changed. The difference is that from 1973 onwards you were "disappeared", tortured and often shot, while today you are just looked down upon by the right wing sector of society.
I bid you to take a few moments to think about your words: might it not be more likely that so-called communists resent the military government for having tortured and killed fathers, mothers, friends, family members, and, well, innocent people?
To this day, there is no understanding among the two sides in Chile. Day after day, year after year, the 11th of September comes and goes, and there is no understanding. So-called "communists" are told to their faces that the disappeared "do not exist", that they are a "marxist myth", or that they all ran away abroad. People mindlessly repeat the mantra that Allende's government was a disaster (it was, but not without considerable help from the USA and the Right), that it would have been much worse, look at Chile now, what a miracle, and so on.
Go on, I challenge you to read up about the Chicago Boys, about the amount of money spent manipulating Chile's media, about the right- and CIA- organized trucker strikes, about what Pinochet did to the public health system (AFP and ISAPREs).
Show your commitment to being well-informed, and form an opinion based not upon conversations with one side of an extremely polarised society, but on historical documents.
For your convenience, here are a few links, starting with an interview with Noam Chomsky: Secrets, Lies and Democracy, The Lawless State , U.S. Responsibility for the Coup in Chile. Please, take some time to Google a bit (or, heaven forbid, go to your local library
My motorbike travels in Chile.