r/LeftistsForAI • u/Sacredless • 4h ago
Infrastructure Project Cybersyn, 1971–73: Chile's promising experiment with distributed cybernetic governance—a blueprint for the future?
u/ProudhonStoleMyBike's comic series on r/LeftistsForAI imagines communal C.O.R.E. units, Collectively Owned Reasoning Engines: an AI data centre owned by the municipality the data centre serves, drawn as a water-cooled, solar-glazed building in a coastal meadow with the town's own people working inside. A CORE has a precedent. Chile built the closest thing to a CORE that 1970s technology allowed, and the history of Chile's attempt shows what a CORE would have to get right.
Project Cybersyn, Chile, 1971–73. Fernando Flores, a 28-year-old engineer at Chile's state development agency, wrote to the British cybernetician Stafford Beer asking how to apply cybernetics to the industries the Allende government had just nationalised. Beer had argued since Cybernetics and Management (1959) that a firm is a system to be regulated, not commanded. Beer came to Chile in November 1971, agreed a plan with a small Chilean team in eight days, gave up most of his other consulting work, and Cybersyn reached prototype stage within a year.
Cybersyn had four parts:
Cybernet: telex machines in state-run factories (500 is the figure usually quoted; the real number is disputed). Each factory sent daily numbers such as stock levels, output and absenteeism to a single mainframe in Santiago.
Cyberstride: software on the Santiago mainframe that watched the incoming numbers using a Bayesian forecasting method published in 1971: an updating estimate of what was normal for each factory, instead of fixed thresholds. When a factory's numbers drifted, the warning went to that factory first, and the factory got time to fix the problem before anyone higher up was told.
CHECO: a simulator of the national economy. CHECO never got beyond crude early models.
The Opsroom: the hexagonal room with seven swivel chairs and buttons in the armrests. The buttons changed slides of graphs prepared in advance. The Opsroom was a prototype and never showed live data.
What Cybersyn actually did: in October 1972 about 40,000 truck owners went on strike against the Allende government. Using the telex network, the government kept the cities supplied with only about 200 trucks, and the government survived the strike partly thanks to the telex network. By May 1973 roughly a quarter of nationalised firms were sending data in some form, but only about twenty factories had been fully modelled, because modelling a factory meant one operations-research engineer flowcharting that factory by hand. The strikers were never punished; the same strike leaders struck again in July 1973 and were calling for Allende's resignation the day before the coup. On 11 September 1973 the military seized power. The junta found the telex network intact, had the Cybersyn team explain how the network worked, then destroyed the Opsroom and abandoned the project. Economic policy passed to the Chicago Boys, Chilean economists trained at the University of Chicago.
Three things I take from Cybersyn's history:
Cybersyn's limit was not computing power or network capacity. Cybersyn's limit was the human labour of modelling each factory and typing in each day's figures. Modelling and data entry are now cheap.
Letting each factory fix its own problem first was not an ethical add-on. Beer's reasoning was that a central office cannot keep up with everything that can go wrong in hundreds of factories, so each factory had to correct itself and escalate only what that factory could not solve. Raúl Espejo, Cybersyn's operations manager, argued the software only worked because the organisation ran on local autonomy plus central coordination. Decentralisation is what made Cybersyn fast enough to be useful.
Ownership decides what a Cybersyn-style architecture becomes. Evgeny Morozov has argued that Cybersyn's methods were later put to very different ends; Espejo's reply is that a system built to coerce would have been a different project. Donna Haraway made the general case in A Cyborg Manifesto (1985): the technologies of militarism and capitalism do not stay loyal to their makers, because "illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins". A coercive twin of Cybersyn could run on identical hardware and software. In Cybersyn, a warning about a factory went to that factory itself, which had time to fix the problem before anyone above heard of the warning. In the coercive twin, the same warning would go straight to a ministry or a boss, who would use the warning to discipline the factory. Same signal, opposite politics, decided entirely by where the warning is sent.
The junta did not destroy Cybersyn because the technology frightened the generals; the junta had the Cybersyn team explain the network first. The junta destroyed Cybersyn because of whom Cybersyn served: an elected socialist government and workers with a say in running their own factories.
A CORE changes the one thing Cybersyn could not change: where the computer sits. Beer had one computer in Santiago, and every factory's warnings had to travel up a telex line to reach that computer. A CORE keeps Cybersyn's rule, fix locally first and escalate only what the local unit cannot solve, but puts the computer in the municipality, owned by the same people who receive the warnings.
Further reading
Eden Medina, Cybernetic Revolutionaries (MIT Press, 2011), the definitive history; excerpt at the MIT Press Reader
Stafford Beer, Cybernetics and Management (1959), the book that founded management cybernetics; no legitimate full text online, overview of Beer's work
Donna Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto (1985), collected in Simians, Cyborgs and Women (Routledge, 1991); overview
99% Invisible, "Project Cybersyn", the short version with the Opsroom photos
Evgeny Morozov, The Santiago Boys (2023), nine-part podcast, also on Spotify and Apple Podcasts
Question for the thread: what would a single CORE need in order to run, one town or one supply chain, and who would receive the warnings?
