Hola. This is Barbara, your guide to the latest cultural news from the Spanish-speaking world. While preparing a book review for the podcast Mikroökonomen, I have been reminded of a technological project that is known to expert groups of management cybernetics and operations research but hardly known to a broader public. Chile's Cybersyn project (derived from cybernetics + synergy, also “Proyecto Synco”) from 1971-1973 is often visualized by its main operations room, as you can see in the computer-generated image below, thus hiding the computer power needed to run it. Let’s have a short glimpse at this project that was well ahead of its time in trying to use economic planning to build a human-centred economy.
CyberSyn in the context of central and democratic decision-making
I don't want to go into the details of the book we are about to review shortly, but I do want to give you the context of the book because it also helps you to get an idea of what CyberSyn was all about. Philipp Leigh and Michal Rozworski published their book titled The People’s Republic of Walmart in 2019. The main idea of the book is to challenge the notion that centralised planning is exclusively an authoritarian, socialist concept. They argue that we can learn from several central planning approaches made in the past to reform our economies and make them more sustainable. One of the approaches that they describe and analyse is the CyberSyn project of the socialist Government of Chile under the presidency of Salvador Allende.
How did CyberSyn work?
CyberSyn, short for Project Cybersyn, was an ambitious attempt at computer-aided decision-making in Chile. It aimed to create a real-time computer network to manage the national economy. Developed by British cybernetician Stafford Beer, CyberSyn was a pioneering project seeking to combine technology, cybernetics, and socialism to improve economic planning and decision-making. As Leigh and Rozworski say Allende’s and Beer’s understanding of how the economy should be run, matched:
Allende’s desire that Proyecto Synco not be a technocratic answer to economic planning along Soviet lines, but a tool in the hands of workers on the shop floor to engage in decision-making themselves, impressed Beer and hinted at a much wider application of the system than just the nationalized sector. (Leigh & Rozworski, The People’s Republic of Walmart, How the world’s biggest corporations are laying the foundation for socialism, 2019, p. 222).
The project was designed to help Chile's socialist economy succeed by enacting changes to the economy as they relied on almost real-time data coming in from the factories and state-run companies. It was led by Fernando Flores who had also initiated the contact between Allende and Beer. Flores was 29 years old when he took over as project lead! Alas, there were not enough computer resources (the system relied on a network of telex machines providing electronic communications between industries, enterprises and the government at large to take the system to a satisfying technical level of maturity to handle supply and demand. Needless to say, that also management capabilities were scarce given that Allende was already under immense political pressure while CyberSyn was still in a prototype state. With the military coup in 1973, the project, and all economic reforms undertaken by Salvador Allende and his government were ended. You’ll find an overview of the project in Eden Medina’s article “Designing Freedom, Regulating a Nation: Socialist Cybernetics in Allende's Chile” which explains in detail the architecture and the components of the system.
There’s also a good video overview of the project in English:
What we can learn from CyberSyn today
50 years after the coup, we might think of the project as an early attempt of a developing country to become the technological forefront of progress. However, CyberSyn may be more than a mere historical anecdote but can be viewed as an experiment from which we can learn much today. In terms of learning for a more sustainable economy today, CyberSyn may offer some crucial insights, like
1. Integration of technology in economic planning and decision-making: Leveraging technology and real-time data for economic management, like CyberSyn’s efforts, can offer insights into creating more efficient and streamlined economic strategies, i.e. in predicting gas consumption over time and procuring the quantities needed, managing grid-connected renewable energy systems etc.
2. Participative economic planning: CyberSyn aimed at integrating workers and communities in the decision-making process. Today, more participatory approaches in economic planning can help to ensure that diverse voices are heard and accounted for in policy-making, fostering a more sustainable and equitable economy.
I hope you enjoyed this digression into economic history. Literature is abundant on the topic. If you wish to dig deeper, I would suggest MIT’s Eden Medina, mentioned earlier, as a starting point. She is a scholar who has dedicated a lot of her research to Chile’s cyberrevolutionaries. She is an important source for Leigh and Rozworski, too.
I think it is important to realise that technological innovation does not always depend on Silicon Valley but on creative thinkers in emerging economies who need a solution for real problems. Just imagine we would use today’s technological means to implement Cybersyn?!
I am also curious to learn: When did you encounter the project for the first time? I am sure some of the sci-fi people among you can share more references than those that I have provided ;).