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Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile

2013; Duke University Press; Volume: 93; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-2210948

1527-1900

Eve E. Buckley,

Information Systems Theories and Implementation

In this thoroughly researched and theoretically rich work, Eden Medina examines the adoption of cybernetic technology by Salvador Allende’s short-lived Chilean revolutionary government. Cybernetics, in the words of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology mathematician Norbert Wiener, is “the study of ‘control and communication in the animal and the machine’” (p. 8). In the Chilean case, cybernetics involved a network made up primarily of telex machines that could record economic production data on punch cards, providing a picture of the national industrial economy to Allende’s senior staff. This was intended to guide policymaking and, when necessary, state interventions into factory output and resource distribution. Medina analyzes Chile’s Project Cybersyn as a sociotechnical system designed to further a revolutionary, perhaps utopian, political project. She argues that the Cybersyn team’s political values were built into both the technologies they employed and the organization of these technologies. Medina concludes that “it is very difficult to make technologies that are capable of creating and enforcing desired configurations of power and authority, especially if those configurations are radically different from those that preceded them” (p. 217). Her research relies on publicly available and privately owned archival documents and interviews with several of the “technologists” (her preferred term) involved with Cybersyn.At the center of this history, along with several key figures in Allende’s administration, is the eccentric British cybernetician Stafford Beer. Medina interviewed Beer in 2001, shortly before his death, and she provides an extensive analysis of that conversation in an epilogue. Beer’s approach to cybernetics as a flexible and adaptive system for managing complex dynamics (particularly in business) came to the attention of Fernando Flores, a young manager in Allende’s State Development Corporation (CORFO). Flores saw Beer’s vision for the new and somewhat marginal science of cybernetics as ideologically aligned with Chile’s distinctive road to socialism, since cybernetics could guide social reform without necessitating centralized state control. In theory, Chile’s Cybersyn system was designed to allow information and decision making to travel both out from the center and up from the factory floor. In practice, as Medina convincingly illustrates, the centralization of data in an operations room within the presidential palace often disempowered factory workers and managers, who did not have access to the full technological capacity that guided the Allende administration’s decisions.Among the book’s most engaging sections is a detailed analysis of the operations room’s design and the technologies built into it. Replete with photographs and schematic images, chapter 4 portrays a “vision of socialist modernity” (p. 124) reminiscent of the futuristic world portrayed in Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Medina notes that despite the revolutionary social values theoretically embedded into its design and purpose, the room was a highly gendered space, implicitly masculine in its furnishings and staff hierarchy.Much of this book addresses and expands on scholarship in the history and sociology of technology, particularly questions about the political commitments implicit in technological design and use. For Latin American historians, the most revealing chapters will be those dealing with the effectiveness of Cybersyn in enabling Allende’s administration to withstand turmoil brought on by both the US-led economic blockade of Chile and political fractures within the country. Medina devotes chapter 5 to Cybersyn’s role in the government’s defeat of a national truckers’ strike in October 1972. The production and distribution data provided to Allende’s staff during the strike by thousands of daily telex messages helped them to thwart the bourgeois strikers’ goal of demobilizing the national economy.Interestingly, Stafford Beer embraced a more utopian vision of the revolutionary aims of Chilean cybernetics than did many of his more pragmatic Chilean colleagues. During his months in Chile, Beer expressed frustration with the unwillingness of some in Allende’s government to maximize the impact of Cybersyn as an instrument for national economic management. Medina surmises that Allende’s CORFO managers were more attuned than Beer to the practical limits of social change within Chile. Nevertheless, in memoirs and interviews recorded long after the violent overthrow of Allende’s government, many of the former Cybersyn staff felt that they, too, had been naive about the capacity of a technological system to drive a social revolution.Cybernetic Revolutionaries brings together scholarly fields that still rarely overlap — although the history and sociology of Latin American technology is an expanding area of research. No doubt readers will focus on the chapters that speak most directly to their own interest in either the social history of technology or modern Chilean history. Nevertheless, Medina’s work makes a compelling case for the rewards of expanding the history of technology beyond its more common regional foci. Her work also emphasizes the central role played by technical personnel in the modern governance of many Latin American countries. This book will provoke engaging discussion among graduate students in several scholarly fields and is sure to inspire new investigations into Latin American sociotechnical systems.