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+[[!meta title="The Cathedral & The Bazaar"]]
+[[!tag jogo software foss economics]]
+
+* [The Cathedral and the Bazaar](http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/)
+* Author: Eric S. Raymond
+* ISBN: 978-0-596-00108-7
+* Publisher: O'Reilly
+
+## Review
+
+While Raymond has innumerous insights on the dynamic of the free software
+communities, he got political economy wrong, including, but not only by:
+
+* Choosing to focus on Lockean philosophical considerations.
+* Putting altruism as a mode of appearance for an egotistical reward strategy.
+
+Reading this book years after the "Open Source Revolution" has begun, the whole
+"Open Source X Free Software" debate looks even more important than what sometimes
+were put as a metaphysical, esoteric dispute. Going beyond the requirement that
+a software work is made available giving the "four freedoms", this debate puts
+basic questions about the underlying production process all how societies chose
+to divide labour and share wealth.
+
+More than ever before this debate has huge importance and implications, given
+our current state of affairs where economic models such as "freemium",
+"opencore" and [siren servers](/books/sociedade/who-owns-the-future) are
+privatizing and concentrating the notion of property, i.e, transforming even
+personal property in a "service": you don't own your gadget or content like
+music you purchase, because of DRM, EULAS and the inability to repair your
+stuff, see the iRepair movement.
+
+Raymond assumes that "the verdict of history seems to be free-market capitalism
+is the globally optimal way to cooperate for economic efficiency" which, besides
+being an "end of history"-type fallacy -- as we didn't tried yet many, many
+possible economical systems, but only very few --, has wrong assumptions about
+what is "optimal", "cooperation" and "efficient": just look about resource
+depletion, absurd wealth concentration by the extremely rich and lack of
+basic dignity for most of human population, not to mention animal/nature rights.
+
+Capitalism is based in the need that something is scarce, if not naturally then
+let make it artificial scarce. So there's no way a capitalist business will
+sustain itself by giving everything free as in software -- as it's anyway out
+of question that it will give anything free as in beer.
+
+So while the bulk of Raymond ideas are revolutionary in the sense that capitalism
+needs to constantly revolutionize itself, fade away in diminishing returns or
+go to war mode -- when accumulated production is fanatically destroyed, it does
+not offers insights for the main issue of how to replace capitalism which by
+the previous definition is inequality-producing machine.
+
+Embracing open source as a capitalism moto sounds like being a hacker until
+page two, which is a prevailing ideology of the Silicon Valley elite, which
+sounds much more a meritocracy than hacker culture. We should question things
+instead of taking assumptions for granted.
+
+That's curious, because Raymond cites Buckminster's Fuller "ephemeralization"
+concept in the opening words of his "The Magic Cauldron" essay, which could
+be explored to a new dimension if economics and politics are understood also
+as technological apparatus we use to live better. An ephemeralization, as
+Raymond explains, is "technology becoming both more effective and less
+expensive as the physical resources invested in early designs are replaced
+by more and more information content" (page 115).
+
+So it's clear when Raymond makes assumptions he is actually making a choice on
+capitalist markets and conservative politics (I don't like to use the term
+libertarian: it causes confusions as it means different things on different
+cultures).
+
+If we change the assumptions, we can build different, new economies and
+politics with other different emergent properties, like those based on values
+of emancipation and solidarity. There are other Magic Cauldrons for the Free
+Software spell.
+
+## Ideas while reading the book
+
+* Hypothesis: sustainability of "Open Source" economic model in Brazil was mostly embraced
+  by the government, by an army of free lancers and by a small number of business; while
+  open source is widely used in the country, it's mostly on the free rider mode: everyone
+  using an open stack but develops unpublished code (either closed source os lazilly left
+  out of public sight) or "poor gifts" in the expression of Raymond himself.
+
+## Phenomenology
+
+* Linus Law: "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" (page 30);
+  "debugging is parallelizable" (page 32).
+
+* Delphi Effect: "the averaged opinion of a mass of equally expert (or equally
+  ignorant) observers is quite a bit more reliable a predictor than the opinion
+  of a single randomly chosen observer" (page 31).
+
+* Brooks Law: "complexity and communication costs of a project rise with the
+  square number of developers" (pages 32, 49).
+
+## Freedom and hierarchy
+
+* Kropotkin is cited at page 52: "principle of understanding" versus the
+  "principle of command".
+
+* Conservative vision: "The Linux world behaves in many respects like a free
+  market or an ecology, a collection of selfish agents attempting to maximize
+  utility, which in the process produces a self-correcting spontaneous order
+  more elaborate and efficient than any amount of central planning could have
+  achieved." (page 52). Right afterwards he negates the existence of true
+  altruism.
+
+## Economics
+
+A very liberal point of view:
+
+* Homesteading the Noosphere: "customs that regulate the ownership and control
+  of open-source software [...] imply an underlying theory of property rights
+  homologous to the Lockean theory of land tenure" (65).
+
+* Open Source as a gift economy like a reputation game (81 - 83):
+
+    Most ways humans have of organizing are adaptations to scarcity
+    and want. Each way carries with it different ways of gaining social status.
+
+    The simples way is the _command hierarchy_ [where] scarce goods are allocated
+    by onde central authority and backed up by force. Command hierarchies scale
+    very poorly; they become increasingly inefficient as they get larger.
+
+    [...]
+
+    Our society is predominantly an exchange economy. This is a sofisticated
+    adaptation to scarcity that, unlike the command model, scales quite well.
+    Allocation of scarce goods is done in a decentralized way through trade
+    and voluntary coopreation.
+
+    [...]
+
+    Gift cultures are adaptations not to scarcity but to abundance. They arise
+    in populations that do not have significant material scarcity problems
+    with survival goods.
+
+    [...]
+
+    Abundance makes command relationships difficult to sustain and exchange
+    relationships an almost pointless game. In gift cultures, social status
+    is determined not by what you control but by _what you give away_.
+
+    -- 80-81
+
+He also explains that the reputation game is not the only drive in the
+bazaar-style ecosystem: satisfaction, love, the "joy of craftsmanship" are also
+motivations for software development (pages 82-83), which is compatible
+with the gift economy model:
+
+    How can one maximize quality if there is no metric for quality?
+    If scarcity economics doesn't operate, what metrics are available
+    besides peer evaluation?
+
+    Other respondents related peer-esteem rewards and the joy of hacking
+    to the levels above subsistence needs in Abraham Maslow's well-known
+    'hierachy of values' model of human motivation.
+
+    -- 82-83
+
+Cites both Ayn Rand and Nietzsche at page 88 when talking about "selfless"
+motives, besides their "whatever other failings", saying that both
+are "desconstructing" 'altruism' into unacknowledged kinds of self-interest.
+
+## The value of humility
+
+    Furthermore, past bugs are not automatically held against a developer; the fact
+    that a bug has been fixed is generally considered more importante than the fact
+    that one used to be there. As one respontend observed, one can gain status by
+    fixing 'Emacs bugs', but not by fixing 'Richard Stallman's bugs' -- and it
+    would be considered extremely bad form to criticie Stallman for _old_ Emacs
+    bugs that have since been fixed.
+    
+    This makes an interesting contrast with many parts of academia, in which
+    trashing putatively defective work by others is an important mode of gaining
+    reputation. In the hacker culture, such behavior is rather heavily tabooed --
+    so heavily, in fact, that the absence of such behavior did no present itself to
+    me as a datum until that one respondent with an unusual perdpective pointed it
+    out nearly a full year after this essay was first published!
+
+    The taboo against attacks on competence (not shared with academia) is even more
+    revealing than the (shared) taboo on posturing, because we can relate it to a
+    difference between academia and hackerdom in their communications and support
+    structures.
+    
+    The hacker culture's medium of gifting is intangible, its communications
+    channels are poor at expressing emotional nuance, and face-to-face contact
+    among its members is the exception rather than the rule. This gives it a lower
+    tolerance of noise than most other gift cultures, and goes a long way to
+    explain both the taboo against posturing and the taboo against attacks on
+    competence. Any significant incidence of flames over hackers' competence would
+    intolerably disrupt the culture's reputation scoreboard.
+
+    -- 90-91
+
+What about Linus behavior, then?
+
+    The same vulnerability to noise explains the model of public humility required
+    of the hacker community's tribal elders. They must be seen to be free of boast
+    and posturing so the taboo against dangerous noise will hold.
+    
+    Talking softly is also functional if one aspires to be a maintainer of a
+    successful project; one must convince the community that one has good
+    judgement, because most of the maintainer's job is going to be judging other
+    people's code. Who would be inclined to contribute work to someone who clearly
+    can't judge the quality of their own code, or whose behavior suggests they will
+    attempt to unfairly hog the reputation return from the project? Potential
+    contributors want project leaders with enough humility and class to be able to
+    to say, when objectively appropriate, ``Yes, that does work better than my
+    version, I'll use it''—and to give credit where credit is due.
+
+    -- 91
+
+## References
+
+* [Homesteading the Noosphere](http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/).
diff --git a/books/technology/cybersyn.md b/books/technology/cybersyn.md
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+[[!meta title="Cybernetic Revolutionaries"]]
+
+* [Cybernetic Revolutionaries | Technology and Politics in Allende's Chile](http://www.cyberneticrevolutionaries.com/).
+* [Cybernetic Revolutionaries | The MIT Press](https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/cybernetic-revolutionaries).
+* Further references [here](https://links.fluxo.info/tags/cybersyn).
+
+## General
+
+* Diagram of The Class War as a homeostatic system, 200.
+
+## Control and descentralization
+
+    Beer’s writings on management cybernetics differed from the contemporaneous
+    work taking place in the U.S. military and think tanks such as RAND that led to the de-
+    velopment of computer systems for top- down command and control. From the 1950s
+    onward, Beer had drawn from his understanding of the human nervous system to
+    propose a form of management that allowed businesses to adapt quickly to a changing
+    environment. A major theme in Beer’s writings was finding a balance between central-
+    ized and decentralized control, and in particular how to ensure the stability of the
+    entire firm without sacrificing the autonomy of its component parts.
+
+    Similarly, the Popular Unity government confronted the challenge of how to imple-
+    ment substantial social, political, and economic changes without sacrificing Chile’s
+    preexisting constitutional framework of democracy. A distinguishing feature of Chile’s
+    socialist process was the determination to expand the reach of the state without sac-
+    rificing the nation’s existing civil liberties and democratic institutions. Both Beer and
+    Popular Unity were thus deeply interested in ways of maintaining organizational
+    stability in the context of change and finding a balance between autonomy and
+    cohesion.
+
+    -- 16
+
+## Adaptive Control
+
+    The idea of control is commonly associated with domination. Beer offered a different
+    definition: he defined control as self- regulation, or the ability of a system to adapt to
+    internal and external changes and survive. This alternative approach to control re-
+    sulted in multiple misunderstandings of Beer’s work, and he was repeatedly criticized
+    for using computers to create top- down control systems that his detractors equated
+    with authoritarianism and the loss of individual freedom. Such criticisms extended to
+    the design of Project Cybersyn, but, as this book illustrates, they were to some extent
+    ill- informed. To fully grasp how Beer approached the control problem requires a brief
+    introduction to his cybernetic vocabulary.
+
+    Beer was primarily concerned with the study of “exceedingly complex systems,”
+    or “systems so involved that they are indescribable in detail.” 52 He contrasted exceed-
+    ingly complex systems with simple but dynamic systems such as a window catch,
+    which has few components and interconnections, and complex systems, which have a
+    greater number of components and connections but can be described in considerable
+    detail
+
+    [...]
+
+    In Beer’s opinion, traditional science did a good job of handling simple and complex
+    systems but fell short in its ability to describe, let alone regulate, exceedingly complex
+    systems. Cybernetics, Beer argued, could provide tools for understanding and control-
+    ling these exceedingly complex systems and help these systems adapt to problems
+    yet unknown. The trick was to “black- box” parts of the system without losing the key
+    characteristics of the original. 53
+
+    The idea of the black box originated in electrical engineering and referred to a sealed
+    box whose contents are hidden but that can receive an electrical input and whose
+    output the engineer can observe. By varying the input and observing the output, the
+    engineer can discern something about the contents of the box without ever seeing its
+    inner workings. Black- boxing parts of an exceedingly complex system preserved the
+    behavior of the original but did not require the observer to create an exact representa-
+    tion of how the system worked. Beer believed that it is possible to regulate exceedingly
+    complex systems without fully understanding their inner workings, asserting, “It is not
+    necessary to enter the black box to understand the nature of the function it performs”
+    or to grasp the range of the subsystem’s behaviors. 54 In other words, it is more impor-
+    tant to grasp what things do than to understand fully how they work. To regulate the
+    behavior of such a system requires a regulator that has as much flexibility as the system
+    it wishes to control and that can respond to and regulate all behaviors of subsystems
+    that have been black- boxed.
+
+    [...]
+
+    Controlling an exceedingly complex system with high variety therefore requires a
+    regulator that can react to and govern every one of these potential states, or, to put
+    it another way, respond to the variety of the system. “Often one hears the optimistic
+    demand: ‘give me a simple control system; one that cannot go wrong,’ ” Beer writes.
+    “The trouble with such ‘simple’ controls is that they have insufficient variety to cope
+    with the variety in the environment. . . . Only variety in the control mechanism can
+    deal successfully with variety in the system controlled.” 56 This last observation—that
+    only variety can control variety—is the essence of Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety and
+    a fundamental principle in Beer’s cybernetic work. 57
+
+    The Law of Requisite Variety makes intuitive sense: it is impossible to truly control
+    another unless you can respond to all attempts at subversion. This makes it extremely
+    difficult, if not impossible, to control an exceedingly complex system if control is de-
+    fined as domination. History is filled with instances of human beings’ trying to exert
+    control over nature, biology, and other human beings—efforts that have failed because
+    of their limited variety. Many of the most powerful medicines cannot adapt to all per-
+    mutations of a disease. Recent work in the sociology of science has positioned Beer’s
+    idea of control in contrast to the modernist ethos of many science and engineering
+    endeavors, which have sought to govern ecosystems, bodily functions, and natural
+    topographies. Despite the many successes associated with such projects, these efforts
+    at control still have unexpected, and sometimes undesirable, results. 58
+
+    Beer challenged the common definition of control as domination, which he viewed
+    as authoritarian and oppressive and therefore undesirable. It was also “naïve, primi-
+    tive and ridden with an almost retributive idea of causality.” What people viewed as
+    control, Beer continued, was nothing more than “a crude process of coercion,” an
+    observation that emphasized the individual agency of the entity being controlled. 59
+    Instead of using science to dominate the outside world, scientists should focus on
+    identifying the equilibrium conditions among subsystems and developing regulators
+    to help the overall system reach its natural state of stability. Beer emphasized creating
+    lateral communication channels among the different subsystems so that the changes in
+    one subsystem could be absorbed by changes in the others. 60 This approach, he argued,
+    took advantage of the flexibility of each subsystem. Instead of creating a regulator to fix
+    the behavior of each subsystem, he found ways to couple subsystems together so that
+    they could respond to each other and adapt. Such adaptive couplings helped maintain
+    the stability of the overall system.
+
+    Beer called the natural state of system stability homeostasis . 61 The term refers to the
+    ability of a system to withstand disturbances in its external environment through its
+    own dynamic self- regulation, such as that achieved by coupling subsystems to one
+    another. Beer argued that reaching homeostasis is crucial to the survival of any system,
+    whether it is mechanical, biological, or social. Control through homeostasis rather
+    than through domination gives the system greater flexibility and facilitated adaptation,
+    Beer argued. He therefore proposed an alternative idea of control, which he defined
+    as “a homeostatic machine for regulating itself.” 62 In a 1969 speech before the United
+    Nations Educational, Social, and Cultural Organization, Beer stated that the “sensible
+    course for the manager is not to try to change the system’s internal behavior . . . but to
+    change its structure —so that its natural systemic behavior becomes different. All of this
+    says that management is not so much part of the system managed as it is the system’s
+    own designer.” 63 In other words, cybernetic management as described by Beer looked
+    for ways to redesign the structure of a company or state enterprise so that it would
+    naturally tend toward stability and the desired behavior.
+
+    In addition, cybernetic management sought to create a balance between horizontal
+    and vertical forms of communication and control. Because changes in one subsystem
+    could be absorbed and adapted to by changes in others (via lateral communication),
+    each subsystem retained the ability to change its behavior, within certain limits, with-
+    out threatening the overall stability of the system and could do so without direction
+    from the vertical chain of command. To look at it another way, cybernetic manage-
+    ment approached the control problem in a way that preserved a degree of freedom and
+    autonomy for the parts without sacrificing the stability of the whole.
+    The first edition of Beer’s 1959 book Cybernetics and Management did not make many
+
+    -- 26-29
+
+## The Liberty Machine
+
+    The Liberty Machine modeled a sociotechnical system that functioned as a dis-
+    seminated network, not a hierarchy; it treated information, not authority, as the basis
+    for action, and operated in close to real time to facilitate instant decision making and
+    eschew bureaucratic protocols. Beer contended that this design promoted action over
+    bureaucratic practice and prevented top- down tyranny by creating a distributed net-
+    work of shared information. The Liberty Machine distributed decision making across
+    different government offices, but it also required all subordinate offices to limit their
+    actions so as not to threaten the survival of the overall organization, in this case, a gov-
+    ernment. The Liberty Machine thus achieved the balance between centralized control
+    and individual freedom that had characterized Beer’s earlier work.
+
+    [...]
+
+    Beer posited that such a Liberty Machine could create a government where “com-
+    petent information is free to act,” meaning that once government officials become
+    aware of a problem, they could address it quickly; expert knowledge, not bureaucratic
+    politics, would guide policy. However, Beer did not critically explore what constitutes
+    “competent information” or how cybernetics might resolve disagreements within the
+    scientific community or within other communities of expertise. Moreover, it is not
+    clear how he separated bureaucracy from a system of checks and balances that might
+    slow action but prevent abuse.
+
+    -- 33
+
+## Viable System Model
+
+    The Viable System Model offered a management structure for the regulation of ex-
+    ceedingly complex systems. It was based on Beer’s understanding of how the human
+    nervous system functioned, and it applied these insights more generally to the behav-
+    ior of organizations such as a company, government, or factory. 81
+
+    [...]
+
+    Beer maintained that the abstraction of the structure could be applied in numerous
+    contexts, including the firm, the body, and the state. In keeping with Beer’s emphasis
+    on performance rather than representation, it was not a model that accurately repre-
+    sented what these systems were; rather, it was a model that described how these sys-
+    tems behaved. The Viable System Model functioned recursively: the parts of a viable
+    system were also viable, and their behavior could be described using the Viable System
+    Model. Beer explains: “The whole is always encapsulated in each part. . . . This is a les-
+    son learned from biology where we find the genetic blue- print of the whole organism
+    in every cell.” 83 Thus, Beer maintained that the state, the company, the worker, and the
+    cell all exhibit the same series of structural relationships.
+
+    The Viable System Model devised ways to promote vertical and lateral communica-
+    tion. It offered a balance between centralized and decentralized control that prevented
+    both the tyranny of authoritarianism and the chaos of total freedom. Beer considered
+    viable systems to be largely self- organizing. Therefore, the model sought to maximize
+    the autonomy of its component parts so that they could organize themselves as they
+    saw fit. At the same time, it retained channels for vertical control to maintain the stabil-
+    ity of the whole system. These aspects of the Viable System Model shaped the design of
+    Project Cybersyn and provide another illustration of how Beer and Popular Unity were
+    exploring similar approaches to the problem of control.
+
+    [...]
+
+    The Viable System Model did not impose a hierarchical form of management in a
+    traditional sense. The dynamic communication between System One and System Two
+    enabled a form of adaptive man-
+
+    [...]
+
+    The Viable System Model draws a distinction between the bottom three levels of the
+    system, which govern daily operations, and the upper two levels of management, which
+    determine future development and the overall direction of the enterprise. Because the
+    lower three levels manage day- to- day activities and filter upward only the most impor-
+    tant information, the upper two levels are free to think about larger questions. In this
+    sense, Beer’s model tackled the idea of information overload long before the Internet
+    required us to wade into and make sense of an expanding sea of information.
+
+    -- 35-38
+
+## Management Cybernetics and Revolution
+
+    The tension inherent in Beer’s model between individual autonomy and the welfare
+    of the collective organism mirrors the struggle between competing ideologies found in
+    Allende’s democratic socialism. Allende’s interpretation of Marx’s writings emphasized
+    the importance of respecting Chile’s existing democratic processes in bringing about
+    socialist reform, a possibility that Marx alluded to but never realized. 91 In contrast to
+    the centralized planning found in the Soviet Union, Allende’s articulation of socialism
+    stressed a commitment to decentralized governance with worker participation in man-
+    agement, reinforcing his professed belief in individual freedoms. Yet he also acknowl-
+    edged that in the face of political plurality the government would favor the “interest of
+    those who made their living by their own work” and that revolution should be brought
+    about from above with a “firm guiding hand.” 92
+
+    [...]
+
+    In October 1970, nine months before Beer heard from Flores, the cybernetician de-
+    livered an address in London titled “This Runaway World—Can Man Gain Control?”
+    In this lecture Beer unknowingly foretold his coming involvement with the Allende
+    government. Commenting that government in its present form could not adequately
+    handle the complex challenges of modern society, Beer concluded: “What is needed is
+    structural change. Nothing else will do. . . . The more I reflect on these facts, the more
+    I perceive that the evolutionary approach to adaptation in social systems simply will
+    not work any more. . . . It has therefore become clear to me over the years that I am
+    advocating revolution.” 94 Beer added, “Do not let us have our revolution the hard way,
+    whereby all that mankind has successfully built may be destroyed. We do not need to
+    embark on the revolutionary process, with bombs and fire. But we must start with a
+    genuinely revolutionary intention: to devise wholly new methods for handling our
+    problems.” 95 Less than one year later, Beer would be in Chile helping a government
+    accomplish exactly this.
+
+    -- 39-40
+
+## Cyberfolk
+
+    Thus Beer proposed building a new form of real- time communication, one that
+    would allow the people to communicate their feelings directly to the government. He
+    called this system Project Cyberfolk. In a handwritten report Beer describes how to
+    build a series of “algedonic meters” capable of measuring how happy Chileans were
+    with their government at any given time. 72 As noted in chapter 1, Beer used the word
+    algedonic to describe a signal of pleasure or pain. An algedonic meter would allow the
+    public to express its pleasure or pain, or its satisfaction or dissatisfaction with govern-
+    ment actions.
+
+    -- 89
+
+## Constructing the Liberty Machine
+
+    As scientific director Beer created a work culture closer to the startup culture of the
+    1990s than to the chain- of- command bureaucracy that flourished in the 1960s and
+    1970s and was characteristic of Chilean government agencies. He viewed his position
+    as scientific director more as that of a “free agent” than a micromanager. After establish-
+    ing offices at the State Technology Institute (INTEC) and the Sheraton, he informed the
+    team that he would work at either location at his discretion and call on project team
+    members as required. Moreover, he refused to stick to a traditional nine- to- five work
+    schedule. Team members often found themselves working alongside the bearded cyber-
+    netician into the wee hours of the morning. This schedule enabled them to attend to
+    other projects at their regular jobs during the day and helped create an informal cama-
+    raderie among team members that bolstered their enthusiasm for the project.
+
+    [...]
+
+    In a memo to the Cybersyn team, Beer explains that he broke Cybersyn into clearly de-
+    fined subprojects that small teams could address intensively. This arrangement allowed
+    for a “meeting of the minds” within the smaller group, and because the small team
+    did not need approval from the larger group, it could progress quickly. At the same
+    time Beer insisted that each team keep the others informed of its progress. He arranged
+    large brainstorming sessions that brought together the members of different subteams.
+    In these sessions, he instructed, “sniping and bickering are OUT. Brain- storming is es-
+    sentially CREATIVE. . . . At least everyone gets to know everyone else, and how their
+    minds work. This activity is essentially FUN: fun generates friendship, and drags us all
+    out of our personal holes- in- the- ground.” Project leaders could then take ideas from
+    the brainstorming sessions and use them to improve their part of the project, thus in-
+    corporating the suggestions of others. Beer contrasted this “fun” style of management
+    with the more common practice of bringing all interested parties together to make
+    project decisions. That approach, he felt, eventually led to bickering, sniping, or sleep-
+    ing. It “masquerades as ‘democratic,’ [but] is very wasteful,” he observed. 12 In addition,
+    he required all project leaders to write a progress report at the end of each month and
+    distribute it to the other team leaders. Beer viewed the brainstorming sessions and
+    the written project reports as serving a function similar to the signals passed between
+    the different organs of the body: they kept members of the team aware of activities
+    elsewhere. They also allowed the different subteams to adapt to progress or setbacks
+    elsewhere and helped Cybersyn maintain its viability as a coordinated project while it
+    advanced toward completion.
+
+    -- 97-99
+
+## The October Strike
+
+    Flores proposed setting up a central command center in the presidential palace that
+    would bring together the president, the cabinet, the heads of the political parties in
+    the Popular Unity coalition, and representatives from the National Labor Federation—
+    approximately thirty- five people by Grandi’s estimation. Once these key people were
+    brought together in one place and apprised of the national situation, Flores reasoned,
+    they could then reach out to the networks of decision makers in their home institu-
+    tions and get things done. This human network would help the government make
+    decisions quickly and thus allow it to adapt to a rapidly changing situation. “Forget
+    technology,” Flores said—this network consisted of “normal people,” a point that is
+    well taken but also oversimplistic. 21 The solution he proposed was social and technical,
+    as it configured machines and human beings in a way that could help the government
+    adapt and survive.
+
+    In addition to the central command hub in the presidential palace, Flores estab-
+    lished a number of specialized command centers dedicated to transportation, industry,
+    energy, banking, agriculture, health, and the supply of goods. Telex machines, many
+    of which were already in place for Project Cybersyn, connected these specialized com-
+    mand centers to the presidential palace. 22 Flores also created a secret telephone network
+    consisting of eighty- four numbers and linking some of the most important people in
+    the government, including members of the Popular Unity coalition and the National
+    Labor Federation. According to Grandi, this phone network remained active through-
+    out the remainder of Allende’s presidency. 23
+
+    Both the telex and the telephone network allowed the command centers to re-
+    ceive upward flows of current information from across the country and to disseminate
+    government orders back down, bypassing the bureaucracy. Flores assembled a team at
+    the presidential palace that would analyze the data sent over the network and compile
+    these data into reports. High- ranking members of government used these reports to
+    inform their decisions, which Flores’s team then communicated using the telex and
+    telephone networks. This arrangement gave the government the ability to make more
+    dynamic decisions.
+
+    The Project Cybersyn telex room, housed in the State Development Corporation
+    (CORFO), served as the industrial command center during the strike. In addition to
+    transmitting the daily production data needed for the Cyberstride software, the CORFO
+    telex machines now carried urgent messages about factory production. “There were
+    enterprises that reported shortages of fuel,” Espejo recalled. Using the network, those
+    in the industrial command center could “distribute this message to the enterprises that
+    could help.” 24 The network also enabled the government to address distribution prob-
+    lems, such as locating trucks that were available to carry the raw materials and spare
+    parts needed to maintain production in Chilean factories, or determining which roads
+    remained clear of obstructionist strike activity. Espejo recalled, “The sector committees
+    were able to ask the enterprises to send raw materials, transport vehicles, or whatever
+    to another enterprise” that needed them. At the same time, enterprises could send re-
+    quests to the sector committees and have these requests addressed immediately. “It was
+    a very practical thing,” Espejo continued, referring in particular to the state- appointed
+    managers known as interventors. “You are the interventor of an enterprise, you are run-
+    ning out of fuel, you ask the corresponding sector committee. . . . Or [the interventors]
+    know that the raw materials they need are available in Valparaíso and that they need a
+    truck to go and get it. With bureaucratic procedures it would have been more difficult
+    to resolve these situations.” 25
+
+    [...]
+
+    After the strike, Silva said, “two concepts stayed in our mind: that
+    information helps you make decisions and, above all, that it [the telex
+    machine] helps you keep a record of this information, which is different from
+    making a telephone call. [Having this record] lets you correct your mistakes
+    and see why things happened.” Silva added that the energy command center relied
+    primarily on the telex network because it gave up- to-
+
+    [...]
+
+    The telex network thus extended the reach of the social network that Flores had
+    assembled in the presidential command center and created a sociotechnical network
+    in the most literal sense. Moreover, the network connected the vertical command
+    of the government to the horizontal activities that were taking place on the shop
+    floor. To put it another way, the network offered a communications infrastructure
+    to link the revolution from above, led by Allende, to the revolution from below, led
+    by Chilean workers and members of grassroots organizations, and helped coordinate
+    the activities of both in a time of crisis.
+
+    -- 148-150
+
+## Automation, autonomy and worker participation
+
+    Beer was spinning ideas in “One Year of (Relative) Solitude,” but he was aiming for
+    a new technological approach to the worker participation question that would create a
+    more democratic and less stratified workplace. And he concluded that giving workers
+    control of technology, both its use and its design, could constitute a new form of
+    worker empowerment.
+
+    This assertion differed substantially from how other industrial studies of the day
+    approached the relationship of computer technology and labor in twentieth- century
+    production. Such studies, especially those inspired by Marxist analysis, often presented
+    computers and computer- controlled machinery as tools of capital that automated la-
+    bor, led to worker deskilling, and gave management greater control of the shop floor.
+    In Labor and Monopoly Capital (1974), Harry Braverman credits such machinery “as the
+    prime means whereby production may be controlled not by the direct producer but by the owner
+    and representatives of capital ” and cites computer technology as routinizing even highly
+    skilled professions such as engineering. 53
+
+    [...]
+
+    In the 1950s Norbert Wiener, author of Cybernetics , believed computers would
+    usher in a second industrial revolution and lead to the creation of an
+    automatic factory. In The Human Use of Human Beings (1954), he worries that
+    auto- mated machinery “is the precise economic equivalent of slave labor. Any
+    labor which competes with slave labor must accept the economic conditions of
+    slave labor.” 56
+
+    -- 159-160
+
+    Two factors explain the difference between Beer and Braverman, who were writing
+    at about the same time. First, the computer system Beer designed did not automate
+    labor. Given the Popular Unity commitment to raising employment levels, automating
+    labor would not have made political sense. Second, Beer was writing and working in a
+    different political context than Braverman. The context of Chilean socialism inspired
+    Beer and gave him the freedom to envision new forms of worker participation that were
+    more substantial than what Braverman saw in the United States. It also allowed Beer
+    to see computer technology as something other than an abusive capitalist tool used by
+    management to control labor. Beer’s approach also reflected his position as a hired sci-
+    ence and technology consultant. His use of technology to address worker participation
+    differed from the contemporaneous efforts of the Allende government on this issue,
+    efforts that had focused on devising new governing committees within the industrial
+    sector and electing worker representatives.
+
+    [...]
+
+    Beer’s proposal bears a close resemblance to the work on participatory design that
+    emerged from the social democratic governments in Scandinavia in the 1970s. The
+    history of participatory design is often tied to Scandinavian trade union efforts to em-
+    power workers during that decade, and thus to create a more equitable power relation-
+    ship between labor and capital in Scandinavian factories. 58 These efforts were either
+    contemporaneous to Beer’s December report or began several years later, depending on
+    historical interpretation. Like the aforementioned automation studies, early participa-
+    tory design work viewed technologies such as computer systems as representing the
+    interests of management, not labor. However, participatory design used the primacy of
+    management as a starting point and then tried to change the dynamics of the labor-
+    capital relationship by changing the social practices surrounding the design and use
+    of technology.
+
+    -- 161
+
+    Furthermore, appointing worker representatives to control the use of Cybersyn
+    would not guarantee that the system would be used in a way that represented the best
+    interests of the rank and file. Studies of worker participation have shown that worker
+    representatives often separate themselves from their co- workers on the shop floor and
+    form a new group of administrators. As Juan Espinosa and Andrew Zimbalist write in
+    their study of worker participation in Allende’s Chile, “It has been the historical experi-
+    ence, with a few exceptions, that those interpreting workers’ priorities and needs have
+    grown apart from the workers they are supposed to represent. . . . [They] become a new
+    class of privileged administrators.” 63 Simply put, it would be impossible to give “the
+    workers” control of Cybersyn as Beer suggested, even if Chilean workers possessed the
+    skills to use the technology or build the factory models.
+
+    Despite these oversights, Beer did realize that the October Strike was a transforma-
+    tive event for Chilean workers. Their self- organization and improvisation during the
+    strike played a central role in maintaining production, transportation, and distribu-
+    tion across the country. During the strike, workers organized to defend their factories
+    from paramilitary attacks, retooled their machines to perform new tasks, and set up
+    new community networks to distribute essential goods directly to the Chilean people.
+    Members of larger industrial belts collaborated with other groups of workers to seize
+    private- sector enterprises that had stopped production during the strike. Historian Pe-
+    ter Winn notes that during the strike workers came together regardless of politics,
+    industrial sector, factory, or status, thus “generating the dynamism, organization, and
+    will to stalemate the counterrevolutionary offensive and transform it into an opportu-
+    nity for revolutionary advance.” 64 In short, the strike transformed the mindset of the
+    Chilean working class and showed that workers could take control of their destiny and
+    accelerate the revolutionary process.
+
+    -- 162-163
+
+## Self-organization
+
+    Despite these oversights, Beer did realize that the October Strike was a transforma-
+    tive event for Chilean workers. Their self- organization and improvisation during the
+    strike played a central role in maintaining production, transportation, and distribu-
+    tion across the country. During the strike, workers organized to defend their factories
+    from paramilitary attacks, retooled their machines to perform new tasks, and set up
+    new community networks to distribute essential goods directly to the Chilean people.
+    Members of larger industrial belts collaborated with other groups of workers to seize
+    private- sector enterprises that had stopped production during the strike. Historian Pe-
+    ter Winn notes that during the strike workers came together regardless of politics,
+    industrial sector, factory, or status, thus “generating the dynamism, organization, and
+    will to stalemate the counterrevolutionary offensive and transform it into an opportu-
+    nity for revolutionary advance.” 64 In short, the strike transformed the mindset of the
+    Chilean working class and showed that workers could take control of their destiny and
+    accelerate the revolutionary process.
+
+    Although his information was limited, Beer was aware of workers’ activities during
+    the strike, and was excited by them. In fact, the ideas he presented in his December
+    report, “One Year of (Relative) Solitude,” were designed to support the “people’s auton-
+    omy.” Beer wrote, “The new task [outlined in the report] is to try and get all this, plus
+    the spontaneous things that I know are happening [such as the cordones industriales ]
+    together.” 65 From his perspective, it looked as if Chilean workers were self- organizing
+    to keep the larger revolutionary project viable. It is important to stress, especially given
+    the criticism he would receive in the months that followed, that Beer viewed his role as
+    using science and technology to help support these bottom- up initiatives.
+
+    Although Beer’s take on participatory design was inspired by the events of the Oc-
+    tober Strike, it also came from his understandings of cybernetics. “The basic answer of
+    cybernetics to the question of how the system should be organized is that it ought to
+    organize itself,” Beer writes in the pages of Decision and Control . 66 In his writings Beer of-
+    ten cited nature as a complex system that remains viable through its self- organization.
+    He argued that such systems do not need to be designed because they already exist. To
+    modify the behavior of such a system, one need not control its every aspect but rather
+    change one subsystem so that the overall system naturally drifts toward the desired
+    goal. Perhaps the injection of worker action could drive Chile toward a new point of
+    homeostatic equilibrium, one that was congruent with the overall goal of socialist
+    transformation.
+
+    -- 163-164
+
+## Cybernetics
+
+    Increasingly, Cybersyn was becoming a technological project divorced from its
+    cybernetic and political origins.  The best- known component of the project,
+    the telex network, was not even associ- ated with the overall Cybersyn system,
+    let alone with Beer’s ideas about management cybernetics.
+
+    In contrast, members of the core group had become serious students of cybernetics.
+    Several months earlier they had formed a small study group known as the Group of
+    14 and tasked themselves with learning more about cybernetics and related scientific
+    work in psychology, biology, computer science, and information theory. They read the
+    work of Warren Weaver, Claude Shannon, Heinz von Foerster, and Herbert Simon and
+    invited Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela to speak to the
+    group (both accepted). Maturana was arguably the first substantial connection between
+    Chile and the international cybernetics community. In 1959, while a graduate student
+    at Harvard, he had coauthored an important paper, “What the Frog’s Eye Tells the
+    Frog’s Brain,” with Warren McCulloch, Jerome Lettvin, and Walter Pitts, all of whom
+    were important figures in the growing field of cybernetics. 76
+
+    -- 166
+
+## Cybersyn Goes Public
+
+    These initial press accounts illustrate a finding from science studies research, namely,
+    that for a technology to be successful it must be taken up by people other than the in-
+    ventors. What Bruno Latour, a sociologist of science, writes of scientific ideas also holds
+    true for technologies: “You need them , to make your [scientific] paper a decisive one.” 16
+    However, this appropriation creates a dangerous situation. Engineers need others to
+    support their technologies so that the technology will be successful, but in the process
+    the engineers lose control of their invention. Latour warns, “The total movement . . .
+    of a statement, of an artefact, will depend to some extent on your action but to a much
+    greater extent on that of a crowd over which you have little control.” 17 As Latour ob-
+    serves, others may decide to accept the technology as it is, but they could also dismiss,
+    appropriate, or change the technology in fundamental ways.
+
+    -- 177
+
+## Simple technologies
+
+    To these criticisms, Beer responded that the system used simple technologies such
+    as telex machines, drew from excellent programming talent in London and Santiago,
+    and relied on many “human interfaces,” meaning it was not automated. He also said
+    that he was tired of hearing the assertion that such a system could be built only in the
+    United States, and stressed that building the futuristic control room required only “the
+    managerial acceptance of the idea, plus the will to see it realized.” 18 But, he added, “I
+    finally found both the acceptance and the will—on the other side of the world.” 19 This
+    final comment was a not- so- subtle jab at his British compatriots, who over the years
+    had questioned the legitimacy and feasibility of his cybernetic ideas.
+
+    -- 178
+
+## Necessary instability; power and control
+
+    The comments Espejo, Flores, and Schwember telexed to Beer show that they ob-
+    jected to other facets of the speech as drafted. They wrote that, while they agreed
+    that cybernetic thinking might help the government increase social stability, they
+    also wondered whether instability might be an important part of social progress. “His-
+    torical development is a succession of equilibriums and unequilibriums [ sic ],” Espejo
+    telexed. Disequilibrium “might be indispensable.” This is an interesting observation,
+    although it was not raised as an objection to Cybersyn in subsequent press accounts.
+    The Chileans also challenged Beer’s framing of the Chilean revolution as a control
+    problem. “The social phenomena goes [ sic ] further than the control problem,” Espejo
+    wrote; “there is for instance the problem of power.” If cybernetics looked only at con-
+    trol and ignored power relationships, “there is the danger that cybernetics might be
+    used for social repression,” Espejo continued, echoing the fears that had already ap-
+    peared in the press. Beer responded: “I cannot write the next book in this one lec-
+    ture.” 30 But perhaps Beer would have given greater thought to this issue had he known
+    that his critics would be most concerned with whether Cybersyn facilitated social
+    repression.
+
+    [...]
+
+    Beer writes that “the polarity between centralization and
+    decentralization—one masquerading as oppression and the other as freedom—is a
+    myth. Even if the homeostatic balance point turns out not to be always
+    computable, it surely exists. The poles are two absurdities for any viable
+    system, as our own bodies will tell us.” 31 The algedonic, or warning, signals
+    that Cybersyn sent to alert higher management constituted a threat to factory
+    freedom but it was a necessary one, for not alerting higher management might
+    pose a greater threat to system survival. “The body politic cannot sustain the
+    risk of autonomic inac- tion any more than we can as human beings,” Beer
+    observed. 32 In proposing the idea of effective freedom, Beer was arguing (1)
+    that freedom was something that could be calculated and (2) that freedom should
+    be quantitatively circumscribed to ensure the stability of the overall system.
+    For those who had followed Beer’s work over the years, effective freedom was a
+    new term to describe the balance of centralized and decentral- ized control
+    that Beer had advocated for more than a decade. It also reflected the same
+    principles as Allende’s democratic socialism, which increased state power but
+    preserved civil liberties. But for the uninitiated, the claim that a control
+    system that explicitly limited freedom actually preserved and promoted freedom
+    must have seemed like a political slogan straight out of 1984 . 33
+
+    -- 180-181
+
+    In fact, Hanlon was not alone in recognizing Cybersyn’s potential for
+    centralized control. On 1 March Beer telexed to Espejo, “Accusations come from
+    Britain and the USA. Invitations [to build comparable systems] come from Brazil
+    and South Africa.” Considering the repressive governments that were in power in
+    Brazil and South Africa in the early 1970s, it is easy to sympathize with
+    Beer’s lament: “You can see what a false position I am in.” 46 Beer was
+    understandably frustrated with these international misinterpretations of his
+    cybernetic work.
+
+    However, it took little political imagination to see how putting Cybersyn in a differ-
+    ent social, political, and organizational context could make the system an instrument
+    of centralized control. Beer had tried to embed political values in Cybersyn’s design,
+    but he engineered them in the social and organizational aspects of the Cybersyn sys-
+    tem, in addition to the technology itself. As safeguards, these social and organizational
+    arrangements were not very strong. Archived telexes from the project team show that if
+    the Cyberstride software detected a production indicator outside the accepted range of
+    values, a member of the National Computer Corporation (ECOM) alerted the affected
+    enterprise, those in the central telex room in CORFO, and Espejo in the CORFO infor-
+    matics directorate—all at the same time.
+
+    -- 183-184
+
+## Feasibility
+
+    Grosch’s letter to the editor underlines the assumption that industrialized nations,
+    such as the United States and the nations of Western Europe, pioneered modern com-
+    puter capabilities; nations of the developing world, such as Chile, did not. In his let-
+    ter Grosch wrote that Project Cybersyn could not be built in a “strange and primitive
+    hardware and software environment,” such as that found in Chile, and in such a short
+    time.
+
+    -- 186-187
+
+    For the system to function, human beings also needed to be disciplined and brought
+    into line. In the case of Cybersyn, integrating human beings into the system, and thus
+    changing their behavior, proved just as difficult as building the telex network or pro-
+    gramming the software—or perhaps even more difficult. While the Cybersyn team could
+    exert some degree of control over the computer resources, construction of the operations
+    room, or installation of a telex machine, they had very little control over what was tak-
+    ing place within the factories, including levels of management participation or whether
+    Cybersyn would be integrated into existing management practices. Espejo and Benadof
+    lacked the authority to force the state- run factories to implement Cybersyn, and indus-
+    trial managers remained unconvinced that it warranted their total compliance.
+
+    -- 190
+
+## Conclusions
+
+    This history is a case study for better understanding the multifaceted relationship
+    of technology and politics. In particular, I have used this history to address (1) how
+    governments have envisioned using computer and communications technologies to
+    bring about structural change in society; (2) the ways technologists have tried to em-
+    bed political values in the design of technical systems; (3) the challenges associated
+    with such efforts; and (4) how studying the relationship of technology and politics
+    can reveal the important but often hidden role of technology in history and enhance
+    our understanding of historical processes. Forty years later, this little- known story also
+    has much to say about the importance of transnational collaboration, technological
+    innovation, and the ways in which geopolitics influences technology.
+
+    Computer and communications technologies have often been linked to processes
+    of political, economic, and social transformation. But claims that these technologies
+    can bring about structural change in society—like the frequent assertion that comput-
+    ers will bring democracy or greater social equality—are often made in the absence
+    of historical analysis.
+
+    -- 212
+
+    Project Cybersyn is an example of the difficulty of creating a sociotechnical system
+    designed to change existing social relationships and power configurations and then
+    enforce the new patterns over time. Scientific techniques may conceal biases with a
+    veneer of neutrality and thus lead to undesirable results. For example, Allende charged
+    the Project Cybersyn team with building a system that supported worker participation.
+    Yet the scientific techniques Chilean engineers used to model the state- controlled fac-
+    tories resembled Taylorism, a rationalized approach to factory production that disem-
+    powered workers and gave management greater control over labor. Time analysis, for
+    example, emerged in the context of capitalist production, prioritizing efficiency and
+    productivity over other values, such as the quality of shop floor life. By using time-
+    analysis techniques, Cybersyn engineers could have inadvertently created production
+    relationships that were counter to the Popular Unity platform and then solidified them
+    in the form of a computer model.
+
+    Sociotechnical relationships must also remain intact for the system to maintain the
+    desired configuration of power. Changing these technical, social, and organizational
+    relationships may also change the distribution of power within the system. As I have
+    shown, in some cases it is much easier to change a sociotechnical system than to hold it
+    static. The history of Project Cybersyn suggests that the interpretation of sociotechnical
+    relationships is especially malleable when a system is new, forms part of a controversial
+    political project, or requires existing social, technical, and organizational relationships
+    to change in substantial ways.
+
+    This malleability makes it extremely difficult to marry a sociotechnical system to a
+    specific set of political values, especially if the goal is to create dramatic changes in the
+    status quo. In the case of Cybersyn, journalists, scientists, and government officials all
+
+    [...]
+
+    Once separated from the social and organizational relations that Beer imagined,
+    the technology of Project Cybersyn could support many different forms of
+    government, including totalitarianism. If Project Cybersyn had been implemented
+    as Beer imagined, it might have become a system that supported such values as
+    democracy, participation, and autonomy. But as its critics perceived, it would
+    have been easy to circumvent the technological and organizational safeguards
+    the team designed; therefore, it would have been easy for the system to support
+    a different set of political values, especially in different social,
+    organizational, and geographic settings.  Value- centered design is a
+    complicated and challenging endeavor. Even if technolo-
+
+    [...]
+
+    Even if technologists attempt to build certain relationships into the design
+    of a technological system, which itself is a fraught and socially negotiated
+    process, they have no guarantee that others will adopt the system in the
+    desired way—or that they will adopt the system at all.
+
+    -- 215-216
+
+    This history further reveals that different nations have very different experiences
+    with computer technology and that these experiences are connected to the political,
+    economic, and geographic contexts of these nations. Chilean democratic socialism
+    prompted the creation of a computer technology that furthered the specific aims of
+    the Chilean revolution and would not have made sense in the United States. The Chil-
+    ean context also differed from that of the Soviet Union in fundamental ways. Because
+    Chile was significantly smaller than the Soviet Union in its geography, population, and
+    industrial output, building a computer system to help regulate the Chilean economy
+    was a more manageable affair. In addition, the Soviet solution used computers for cen-
+    tralized top- down control and collected a wealth of data about industrial production
+    activities with the goal of improving state planning. In contrast, the Cybersyn team
+    used Beer’s view of management cybernetics to create a system that emphasized action
+    as well as planning; and the system sent limited quantities of information up the gov-
+    ernment hierarchy, and tried to maximize factory self- management without sacrificing
+    the health of the entire economy. As this contrast shows, technologies are the product
+    of the people involved in their creation and the political and economic moments in
+    which they are built.
+
+    -- 218
+
+    This particular transnational collaboration sheds light on processes of technologi-
+    cal innovation in differently situated world contexts. Project Cybersyn, a case study
+    of technological innovation, was a cutting- edge system using technologies that were
+    far from the most technologically sophisticated. A network of telex machines trans-
+    formed a middle- of- the- road mainframe computer into a new form of economic com-
+    munication. Slide projectors presented new visual representations of economic data.
+    Hand- drawn graphs showing data collected on a daily basis gave the government a
+    macroscopic view of economic activity and identified the areas of the economy most
+    in need of attention. Project Cybersyn thus challenges the assumption that advanced
+    technologies need to be complex. Sophisticated systems can be built using simple tech-
+    nologies, provided that particular attention is paid to how humans interact and the
+    ways that technology can change the dynamics of these interactions. Project Cybersyn
+    may be a useful example for thinking about sustainable design or the creation of tech-
+    nologies for regions of the world with limited resources. 3
+
+    This story of technological innovation also challenges the assumption that innova-
+    tion results from private- sector competition in an open marketplace. Disconnection
+    from the global marketplace, as occurred in Chile, can also lead to technological in-
+    novation and even make it a necessity. This history has shown that the state, as well
+    as the private sector, can support innovation. The history of technology also backs this
+    finding; for example, in the United States the state played a central role in funding
+    high- risk research in important areas such as computing and aviation. However, this
+    lesson is often forgotten. As we recover from the effects of a financial crisis, brought
+    on in large part by our extraordinary faith in the logic of the free market, it is a lesson
+    that is worth remembering.
+
+    -- 219-220
+
+    Geopolitics also shapes our understandings of technological development and tech-
+    nological change. If historians, technologists, designers, educators, and policy makers
+    continue to give substantial and disproportionate attention to the technologies that
+    triumph, a disproportionate number of which were built in the industrial centers of the
+    world, they miss seeing the richness of the transnational cross- fertilization that occurs
+    outside the industrial centers and the complex ways that people, ideas, and artifacts
+    move and evolve in the course of their travels. Technological innovation is the result
+    of complex social, political, and economic relationships that span nations and cultures.
+    To understand the dynamics of technological development—and perhaps thereby do
+    a better job of encouraging it—we must broaden our view of where technological in-
+    novation occurs and give greater attention to the areas of the world marginalized by
+    these studies in the past.
+
+    -- 221
+
+## Epilogue
+
+    While on Dawson Island, Flores and the other prisoners reflected on their experi-
+    ences during the previous three years and, as a group, tried to understand the com-
+    plexities of Chilean socialism and what had gone wrong. Flores offered the group a
+    cybernetic interpretation of events, which resonated with Allende’s former minister of
+    mining, Sergio Bitar. When Bitar published a detailed history of the Allende govern-
+    ment in 1986, he used cybernetics to explain in part what happened during Allende’s
+    presidency. Bitar writes, “In the present case [the Allende government], systemic variety
+    grew because of structural alterations and disturbance of the existing self- regulatory
+    mechanisms (principally those of the market). But the directing center (the govern-
+    ment) did not expand its variety controls with the necessary speed; nor could it replace
+    the existing self- regulatory mechanism with new ones.” Bitar concludes that “when
+    a complex system [the Chilean nation] is subject to transformation it is essential to
+    master systemic variety at every moment.” 17 This choice of language, seemingly out of
+    place in a study of political history, shows that Chile’s encounter with cybernetics not
+    only led to the creation of Project Cybersyn but also shaped how some members of the
+    Allende government made sense of the history they had lived.
+
+    -- 229
+
+    But the more Flores read, the more he began to see the limitations of cybernetic
+    thinking. While Flores still felt that the Law of Requisite Variety and the Viable System
+    Model were useful concepts, he believed they were insufficient for the situations he had
+    encountered while in Allende’s cabinet. “My problem [in Allende’s cabinet] was not
+    variety; my problem was the configuration of reality, persuading other people,” Flores
+    said. 20 Understanding the configuration of reality became a driving intellectual pursuit
+    for Flores, and he found the work of the Chilean biologists Maturana and Varela espe-
+    cially useful toward this end. In addition to developing the theory of autopoiesis with
+    Varela, Maturana had conducted extensive work on optics. His 1959 work with Jerry
+    Lettvin, Warren McCulloch, and Walter Pitts analyzed the frog’s optical system and
+    concluded that what a frog sees is not reality per se but rather a construction assembled
+    by the frog’s visual system. What the frog sees is therefore a product of its biological
+    structure. This distinction formed the foundation for much of Maturana and Varela’s
+    later work in biology and cognition during the 1960s and 1970s, and later inspired the
+    two biologists to break with traditional claims of scientific objectivity and emphasize
+    the role of the observer. One of Maturana’s best- known claims—“Anything said is said
+    by an observer”—illustrates this point. 21
+
+    Flores’s dissatisfaction with cybernetics paralleled a similar dissatisfaction within
+    the cybernetics community. Heinz von Foerster, who had worked with Maturana, Va-
+    rela, and the Group of 14 in Chile, found it problematic that cybernetics claimed to
+    create objective representations of real- world phenomena that were independent of
+    an observer. 22 Von Foerster described this approach as “first- order cybernetics,” which
+    he defined as “the cybernetics of observed systems.” However, von Foerster was influ-
+    enced by Maturana’s work and, like Maturana, became convinced that the observer
+    plays a central role in the construction of cybernetic models. In the fall of 1973 von
+    Foerester taught a yearlong course at the University of Illinois on the “cybernetics of
+    cybernetics,” or what became known as second- order cybernetics, “the cybernetics of
+    observing systems.” 23 Although von Foerster was not the only person involved in the
+    development of second- order cybernetics, studies of this intellectual transition have
+    credited von Foerster for bridging the gap between first- order and second- order cyber-
+    netic thinking. 24 Not surprisingly, Flores also took to the idea of second- order cybernet-
+    ics, and in his later writing he would cite von Foerster’s edited volume Cybernetics of
+    Cybernetics . 25
+
+    [...]
+
+    Flores credits Maturana for leading him to the work of Martin Heidegger. Like Ma-
+    turana, Heidegger rejected the existence of an objective external world and saw objects/
+    texts as coexisting with their observers/interpreters. Heidegger’s idea of “thrownness”
+    also resonated with Flores—the idea that in everyday life we are thrown into the world
+    and forced to act without the benefit of reflection, rational planning, or objective as-
+    sessment. Looking back, Flores saw his time in the Allende cabinet as an example of
+    thrownness rather than rational decision making. “My job was so demanding that I did
+    not have the time to perfect [what I was doing]. I only had time to feel it. It was some-
+    thing I felt.” 29 In the context of emergency, he had no time to study the laws of control
+    laid down by cybernetics in order to determine how best to resolve government crises.
+    Flores often had to lead with his gut, and his previous experiences and the traditions of
+    Chilean society implicitly shaped his decisions. Flores also realized that “when you are
+    minister and you say something, no matter what you say, it has consequences.” 30 It was
+    therefore important to use words deliberately. Flores found that management through
+    variety control did not allow intuitive forms of decision making, nor did it account for
+    the previous experiences and cultural situation of decision makers or accommodate the
+    importance of communicating effectively and with intention.
+
+    [...]
+
+    Understanding Computers and Cognition begins by critiquing the rationalist assump-
+    tion that an objective, external world exists. The critique builds on the ideas of Hei-
+    degger, Searle, Maturana, J. L. Austin, and Hans- Georg Gadamer to show that knowledge
+    is the result of interpretation and depends on the past experiences of the interpreter
+    and his or her situatedness in tradition. Winograd and Flores then argue that because
+    computers lack such experiences and traditions, they cannot replace human beings as
+    knowledge makers. “The ideal of an objectively knowledgeable expert must be replaced
+    with a recognition of the importance of background,” Winograd and Flores write. “This
+    can lead to the design of tools that facilitate a dialog of evolving understanding among
+    a knowledgeable community.” 32 Building on this observation, the authors propose that
+    computers should not make decisions for us but rather should assist human actions,
+    especially human “communicative acts that create requests and commitments that
+    serve to link us to others.” 33 Moreover, computer designers should not focus on creating
+    an artifact but should view their labors as a form of “ontological design.” Computers
+    should reflect who we are and how we interact in the world, as well as shape what we
+    can do and who we will become. The American Society for Information Science named
+
+    -- 230-231
+
+    To some he was brusque, intimidating, direct to the point of rudeness, and off-
+    putting. Yet his message and his success in both the academic and business
+    communities transformed him into a cult figure for others.
+
+    [...]
+
+    “A civil democracy with a market economy is the best political construction so
+    far because it allows people to be history makers,” the authors declare. 41
+    Flores’s transformation from socialist minister was now complete: he had wholly
+    remade himself in the image of neoliberalism.
+
+    Thus, by the end of the 1990s, Flores and Beer had switched places. Flores had
+    morphed into a wealthy international consultant driven by the conviction that orga-
+    nization, communication, and action all were central to making businesses successful.
+    Meanwhile, Beer had become increasingly interested in societal problems and chang-
+    ing the world for the better. His last book, Beyond Dispute (1994), proposed a new
+    method for problem solving based on the geometric configurations of the icosahedron,
+    a polygon with twenty equilateral triangle faces. He called this new method “synteg-
+    rity” and argued that it could serve as a new approach to conflict resolution in areas of
+    the world such as the Middle East.
+
+    -- 232-233
diff --git a/books/technology/maciunas-learning-machines.md b/books/technology/maciunas-learning-machines.md
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..3d6dd0c
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+++ b/books/technology/maciunas-learning-machines.md
@@ -0,0 +1,103 @@
+[[!meta title="Maciunas Learning Machines"]]
+
+[Maciunas’s Learning Machine](http://georgemaciunas.com/exhibitions/knowledge-as-art-chance-computability-and-improving-education-thomas-bayes-alan-turing-george-maciunas/george-maciunas/maciunas-learning-machine/).
+
+## Snippets
+
+    The declared aim was “to learn as if mechanically and without having to think
+    too much.” 38
+
+    [...]
+
+    The idea of the interactive user was born. George Maciunas is one of them.
+
+    [...]
+
+    This interest in graphic forms of communi- cation can in turn be traced back to
+    Maciunas’ profound aversion to books. Instead of spending hours of his time
+    reading, he preferred to learn by taking in as much informa- tion as possible
+    at a glance. This explains his fascination with diagrams, charts, maps, tables,
+    systems of coordinates, and graphs. The charting of history, moreover, was but
+    one facet of the visual information which was to preoccupy him throughout his
+    life, not just as an architect, but as a knowledge worker.
+
+    [...]
+
+    Thus the Atlas of Russian History ranks among those forms of knowledge-driven
+    visualization systems that can be grouped together under the term “operative
+    pictoriality.” 51
+
+    One key feature of “operative pictoriality” is the interaction on a map of the
+    visual and the discursive. The latter takes the form of keywords used to
+    chronicle historical events—trans- formative processes of which each map can
+    provide no more than a snapshot showing them at a certain point in time, or at
+    a particular stage in their unfolding. The Atlas of Russian His- tory is
+    remarkable for another quality as well, namely in the way it uses recurring
+    terminol- ogy. As a kind of hyperlink, this terminology facilitates navigation
+    through the Atlas, which after all works on the principle of anticipation.
+
+    [...]
+
+    The cartography ends more or less abruptly in the late nineteenth century. The
+    heroic phase of Soviet history that was to follow in the early twentieth
+    century was too complex to be contained, let alone mapped, in the traditional
+    atlas format. To a certain extent, therefore, Maciunas can be said to have
+    reached the limits of what the charting and mapping of his- tory could achieve.
+    The limit he had reached was systemic, of the kind Gregory Bateson examined in
+    his book Mind and Nature (1979): “All description, explanation, or representa-
+    tion is necessarily in some sense a mapping of derivatives from the phenomena
+    to be de- scribed onto some surface or matrix or system of coordinates. In the
+    case of an actual map, the receiving matrix is commonly a flat sheet of paper
+    of finite extent, and difficulties occur when that which is to be mapped is too
+    big or, for example, spherical. . . . Every receiving matrix,” Bateson
+    concluded, “will have its formal characteristics which will in principle be
+    distortive of the phenomena to be mapped onto it.” 59
+
+    [...]
+
+    The distortion of phenomena in the Atlas of Russian History consisted in its
+    gross simplifica- tion of complex geohistorical processes as factographic
+    fallout. To be able to capture that “hot” phase in a chronology which, owing to
+    the large number of fast-moving events that have to be taken into account, has
+    the character of “differential elements”—to borrow Claude Lévi-Strauss’
+    definition for the study of anthropology—Maciunas had no choice but to change
+    his mode of presentation. He therefore switched from two-dimensional mapping of
+    history to the historiogram, which could be expanded in three dimensions
+    without any major structural changes and thus lent itself more readily to the
+    ever greater factual density Maciunas now grappled with.
+
+    [...]
+
+    Usually, geographical maps are static representations. The snapshots of history
+    they pro- vide have no room for the dynamic dimension of historical processes.
+    The arrows Maciunas used in the Atlas of Russian History are an attempt to
+    restore a sense of dynamism. The vectors are necessary to the mental animation
+    of systems, and signify large-scale move- ments such as migrations or
+    invasions. Yet they can only ever mark out the general direc- tion, never the
+    exact route taken. It is the arrows, moreover, which lend the charts the dia-
+    grammatic character that appeals so strongly to non-cartographers such as
+    Maciunas. The rudimentary nature of the cartographic information provided on
+    the various sheets also belongs in this category. Because Maciunas dispenses
+    with a frame, a grid, and a specifica- tion of scale, the representational
+    space of his history charts tends to resemble pictures rather than maps. 61
+
+    [...]
+
+    The history of the empire was to inform maps of the empire. The political
+    function of the atlas of history was thus very similar to that of history
+    painting. Its purpose was not so much to deliver comfort and relief—which was
+    what history paintings had to do—as to nurture historical awareness. Such
+    awareness as the basis for social development, however, was to be found only at
+    the top of the learning curve that was preceded and facilitated by the
+    positivistic acquisition of facts. To para- phrase Jürgen Habermas, social
+    evolution is driven by changes in the knowledge poten- tial. 69 The historical
+    sources show a milieu which believed in the reformation—meaning the
+    improvement—of the world by education. Maciunas’ maps are of a piece with this
+    en- lightenment ideology. As an imaginative matrix, they do not deliver an
+    abstract model of history, but rather generate their own history—one whose
+    narrative strategies elude any direct empirical verification. This metahistory
+    is ideologically motivated. As the factual density increases, so the process of
+    historical change picks up speed, culminating in the Russian Revolution.
+    Maciunas’ mapping project was focused on that one event, an event which
+    exemplifies most vividly the feasibility of history, which in turn allows for
+    the idea that society can indeed be modeled.
diff --git a/books/technology/manifesto-contrassexual.md b/books/technology/manifesto-contrassexual.md
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+[[!meta title="Manifesto Contrassexual"]]
+
+Por Beatriz Preciado.
+
+## Trechos
+
+[[!img 2018-03-03-17:01:45_660x638.png link="no"]]
+[[!img 2018-03-04-02:33:43_533x291.png link="no"]]
+[[!img 2018-03-04-02:38:12_569x683.png link="no"]]
+[[!img 2018-03-04-08:45:50_521x709.png link="no"]]
+[[!img 2018-03-04-15:01:41_427x719.png link="no"]]
+[[!img 2018-03-04-15:02:04_419x584.png link="no"]]
+[[!img 2018-03-04-15:02:29_419x543.png link="no"]]
+[[!img 2018-03-04-15:02:42_441x731.png link="no"]]
+[[!img 2018-03-04-15:02:55_424x733.png link="no"]]
+[[!img 2018-03-04-15:03:16_430x733.png link="no"]]
+[[!img 2018-03-04-15:37:55_606x562.png link="no"]]
diff --git a/books/technology/manifesto-contrassexual/2018-03-03-17:01:45_660x638.png b/books/technology/manifesto-contrassexual/2018-03-03-17:01:45_660x638.png
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diff --git a/books/technology/manifesto-contrassexual/2018-03-04-15:37:55_606x562.png b/books/technology/manifesto-contrassexual/2018-03-04-15:37:55_606x562.png
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diff --git a/books/technology/spaceship-earth.md b/books/technology/spaceship-earth.md
new file mode 100644
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--- /dev/null
+++ b/books/technology/spaceship-earth.md
@@ -0,0 +1,26 @@
+[[!meta title="Manual da Espaçonave Terra"]]
+
+[Manual De Instruções Para Espaçonave Terra](https://archive.org/details/86522184RBuckminsterFullerManualDeInstrucoesParaANaveEspacialTerraViaOptima1998).
+
+    Contudo, e de súbito, e sem que na sociedade ninguém se apercebesse, surgiu o
+    anti-corpo evolucionário contra a extinção na forma do computador e da sua
+    automatização globalmente orientada, que tornou o homem obsoleto como
+    especialista da produção e controle físicos -- mesmo em cima da hora.
+ 
+    Como superespecialista, o computador pode perseverar dia e noite, separando o
+    preto do branco a velocidades sobrehumanas. O computador pode também operar em
+    graus de frio ou calor nos quais o homem pereceria. Como especialista, o homem
+    vai ser completamente afastado pelo computador. O homem vai ser obrigado a
+    reestabelecer, usar e disfrutar sua "globalidade" inata. O que se nos depara é
+    lidar com a totalidades da Nave Espacial Terra e do universo. A evolução parece
+    estar apostada em fazer o homem cumprir um destino muito mais elevado que ser
+    apenas uma simples máquina muscular e reflexa -- um autómato escravo -- a
+    automatização afasta os autómatos.
+
+    -- 24 e 25
+
+    Todas as nossas camas de hotel em todo o mundo encontram-se desocupadas dois
+    terços do tempo.  As nossas salas de estar encontram-se vazias sete oitavos do
+    tempo.
+
+    --- 80