GoKawiilProject Cybersyn
Initial notes, January 2022
An early attempt at using networked computers for economic management in Allende's Chile, with the involvement of the British cyberneticist Stafford Beer. This has something of a cult following among contemporary socialists, in no small part, I suspect, because of the period glamour of the photographs of the control room, and because of the aura of righteous martyrdom given the fate of Allende and his government. Considering my interests in the possibilities and limits of economic planning, however, what I want to get very clear on are:
What the various participants (Beer, the various groups among the Chileans) hoped to achieve with Cybersyn; What the system as implemented actually achieved; and What a similar system might do with modern, or reasonably-foreseeable, technology.
The main source on all this is Medina's book, which I need to actually finish. (Honestly it's been so long since I started it that I should just re-read from scratch.) But I should also try to see what's been done, in terms of historical research, since her book.
Update, 18 October 2023
Attention conservation notice: 1500+ words of book report.
Having just finished Medina's book (which seems to have no successors), and the papers from the 1970s she cites as the technical sources, a few more notes. (All page numbers are references to her book.)
Cybersyn was to have four main components:
"Cybernet": A network of telex machines linking factories to the government agency that ran the nationalized sector of the economy (Corporación de Fomento de la Producción, CORFO), and thence to the one (!) mainframe computer available to the project. (My reference to networked computers, plural, in the opening paragraph to this notebook was thus dead wrong, though I think it's a common misunderstanding.) The idea was that factories would send regular (ideally, daily) measurements of what we'd now call key performance indicators or metrics to the central computer, which would process them and communicate back to each factory what it had learned. "Cyberstride": A central program running on that mainframe which was essentially doing anomaly / change-point detection on the time series coming in from the periphery . This was basically implementing the method of Harrison and Stevens (1971), per Medina (p. 267n33). As Dan Davies puts it, the content of the signals it output would have amounted to basically either "situation nominal" or "there's something up at the mill".
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