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."

Comments

As opposed to "nutritional principles"?

[rot26]

I bet "Cybernetic Principles" sounded really groovy in 1971, although I'm curious how you can build a computer network, or a computer-anything for that matter, without them.

Not quite the internet

[Brento]

Voters, workplaces and the government were to be linked together by a new, interactive national communications network, which would transform their relationship into something profoundly more equal and responsive than before - a sort of socialist internet, decades ahead of its time.

Uhhh, no, that's nothing like the Internet, actually. The Internet links men with chicks, to transform their relationship into something profoundly more equal and responsive than before - the guys shell out money and get pr0n. Nothing socialist about it, and certainly nothing to do with voters.

CIA sponsored coup d'etat

[Anonymous Coward]

How can the americans say so lightly that cia organised a coup, and in the same breath ask why people around the world dislike them?

34

Re:CIA sponsored coup d'etat

[Anonymous Coward]

For a couple of reasons.
Firstly, the USA is an extremely large country, and only has one neighbour of any relative population size. This helps make the USA far more of a self-contained world than just about any other country out there. It also means that ~97% of television content is locally produced, furthering this.

America is extremely nationalistic and has a national myth of grandious pridefulness 2nd to very few. Most Americans don't want to tolerate anything that gets in the way of that nationalism. It skews the mind into thinking that Americans are superior and that foreigners are inferior, no matter what the ears hear and the eyes see.

So if the USA is taking out governments in places like Venuzvela, Chile, Greece, Zaire etc, it is because they're 'enemies of freedom', while supporting evil regimes like the government of Turkey for 'the greater good'. I doubt anyone much in America sees the oxymoron of this.

It was much the same with the British Empire. It stood for 'freedom' and 'christian charity' and so on. In reality, the people in power were just cold greedy sociopaths. Same with America. And the people cling to the national myth out of their personal fears, and in part because the people against the national mythos are for sociological reasons often even more dysfunctional than those for it.

Chilean Enterprise

[grub]

"Computadora, te, gris del earl, caliente." :)

Not Orwellian at all

[Anonymous Coward]

At last! A /. article on my pet subject!

The system contains strict limits on what information is passed upwards - this is how it was able to function on 1970s computer hardware over 1970s WANs. The absence of totalitarian control is a crucial design factor. There just isn't the bandwidth, nor would you want it.

Beer is the most freedom-loving person you could hope to imagine. He designed Cybersyn to enhance freedom, not to crush it. He sadly died last year.

For a full account of this system, read Beer's book "Brain of the Firm".

Re:Not Orwellian at all

[StaffordBeerIsMyHero]

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)

Re:Not Orwellian at all

[tessaiga]

Beer is the most freedom-loving person you could hope to imagine.

Ah, this must be where the phrase "free as in Beer" I keep seeing on Slashdot comes from.

Re:Kissinger

[Anonymous Coward]

Its not just the whole winning the war thing that prevents him from being prosecuted. The International Criminal Court (ICC) which was setup to try war crimes was opposed vehemently by the United States and it got to the point that the US refused to take part in any peace-keeping forces globally unless the US was exempt from the actions of the ICC. Just the other day in fact they blocked the adoption of a UN resolution to boost protection for aid-workers in conflict zones because the bill proposed that killing an aid worker would be considered a war crime in accordance with the Rome Statute of the ICC. They basically refuse to have any US military or political leader, past or present, held accountable for any of their actions in the global sphere. It must be a weight of your mind though, when considering whether to invade a country completely unprovoked...

I wont post links. Google for '"War crimes" USA ICC' and you'll find more than enough reputable links to support everything I've said.

Ministry of love...

[Noryungi]

Hmph. At the risk of sounding like a leftie:

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.

Why is this "Orwellian and Big Brother[ish]"? You seem to forget that the "CIA sponsored coup" was actually a pretty bloody affair itself... More than 3000 people "disappeared" (tortured and fed to the fishes), some because they were just suspected of left-of-center sypathies.

But don't take my word for it, read the following:
Amnesty International 1, Amnesty International 2, Amnesty International 3, Human Rights Watch, and even this week's Economist, etc... I could go on, but you get my drift.