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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