Project Cybersyn
Notebooks
Project Cybersyn
Last update: 01 Aug 2026 00:32
First version: 30 January 2022
Initial notes, January 2022
An early attempt at using networked computers for economic management in<br>Allende's Chile, with the involvement of the<br>British cyberneticist Stafford Beer. This has<br>something of a cult following among<br>contemporary socialists, in no small part, I<br>suspect, because of the period glamour of the photographs of the control room,<br>and because of the aura of righteous martyrdom given the fate of Allende and<br>his government. Considering my interests in the possibilities and limits<br>of economic planning, however, what I want<br>to get very clear on are:
What the various participants (Beer, the various groups among the Chileans) hoped to achieve with Cybersyn;<br>What the system as implemented actually achieved; and<br>What a similar system might do with modern, or reasonably-foreseeable,<br>technology.
The main source on all this is Medina's book, which I need to actually<br>finish. (Honestly it's been so long since I started it that I should just<br>re-read from scratch.) But I should also try to see what's been done, in terms<br>of historical research, since her book.
Update, 18 October 2023
Attention<br>conservation notice: 1500+ words of book report.
Having just finished Medina's book (which seems to have no successors), and the<br>papers from the 1970s she cites as the technical sources, a few more notes.<br>(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<br>government agency that ran the nationalized sector of the economy<br>(Corporación de Fomento de la Producción, CORFO), and<br>thence to the one (!) mainframe computer available to the project.<br>(My reference to networked computers, plural, in the opening<br>paragraph to this notebook was thus dead wrong, though I think it's a<br>common misunderstanding.) The idea was that factories would send<br>regular (ideally, daily) measurements of what we'd now call key<br>performance indicators or metrics to the central computer, which would<br>process them and communicate back to each factory what it had learned.<br>"Cyberstride": A central program running on that mainframe which was<br>essentially doing anomaly<br>/ change-point detection on<br>the time series coming in from the<br>periphery . This was basically implementing the method of Harrison<br>and Stevens (1971), per Medina (p. 267n33). As Dan Davies<br>puts<br>it, the content of the signals it output would have amounted to<br>basically either "situation nominal" or "there's something up at the<br>mill".
An important part of the design here was that when Cyberstride<br>did raise a warning, it was supposed to go back to the<br>relevant factory, which would get a chance to deal with the matter on<br>its own, thus preserving a certain measure of firm-level autonomy.<br>"CHECO": A simulation model of the Chilean macroeconomy, which was<br>supposed to let policy-makers do what-if exercises.<br>The fabulous control room or operations room, which was supposed to<br>display information from Cyberstride and CHECO to<br>decision-makers. Medina says (pp. 121, 123) that the designers of the<br>room swear up and down they weren't influenced by<br>2001 or Star Trek or the like. If that's<br>true, the Chileans and the Hollywood set-designers must've both drawn<br>drawn on some common sources for their visual style of The Future.
(Beer was also very taken with his thoughts about "algedonic"<br>[=pain-pleasure] meters which The People could twist back and forth to indicate<br>how satisfied or dis-satisfied they were, with a central read-out, but that<br>was, if not literally vaporware because a handful of prototypes were built,<br>then very clearly never going to be a thing.)
I have listed the four parts in order of decreasing completion and<br>utility.
The telex network was the only piece that seems to have been actually<br>useful to the Allende administration --- and that not in the<br>way intended. In October 1972, the mostly-conservative,<br>mostly-small-business-owner trucking industry staged a nation-wide<br>strike against Allende. The administration used the telex network to<br>coordinate the trucks they had control, to try to keep the economy<br>from completely grinding to a halt. This coordination seems to have<br>made no use at all of Cyberstride, or the control room, or any<br>cybernetic principles. The main advantage of the telex over phone<br>calls was creating written records without the need for note-taking.<br>(Telegrams would have worked as well!) Some tertiary sources make it<br>sound like the government broke the strike in this way. In fact, as<br>Medina makes clear, the strike ended with a political compromise,<br>viz., Allende brought top generals into his cabinet, and otherwise<br>temporarily appeased the conservatives, though without fully<br>abandoning his program. It does seem that the telex network<br>bought the government more time and a better bargaining position than<br>it would otherwise have had.<br>Cyberstride was...