2023-08-11 10:00:03
On November 3, 1970, Chile took a historic turn. After two decades of political activity, Salvador Allende was proclaimed president of the republic, a milestone that opened the doors to the construction of a State socialist in the heart of Latin America. However, in the middle of the following year the inflation it was around 45% and social unrest threatened the stability of the Popular Unity Government. It was then that, in an unexpected script twist, the Chilean left turned to the English scientist Stafford Beerconsidered the father of cybernetics, to help them design a revolutionary technological method that would manage to channel the national economy.
From Santiago, Beer and a group of young Chilean engineers secretly shaped the ambitious project Cybersyn. An extensive network of machines telex —electronically written teletypes— would connect the more than 80 factories and state companies with Corfo, the government agency in charge of promoting economic growth and the nationalization of strategic sectors such as energy, mining or telecommunications. The constant flow of data it would allow the socialist government to know the health of the national economy almost instantly and streamline its management to make it more effective. The “battle for production,” as they called it, was crucial to ensure the success of the socialist experiment in Chile.
Allende’s dream was violently cut short on September 11, 1973, when the bloodthirsty coup perpetrated by Augusto Pinochet he induced the country into a dictatorial coma that lasted 17 years. Although Cybersyn never became operational, the Belarusian writer and researcher Evgeny Morozov analyzes the origins and development of this technological utopia in an exhaustive podcast nine-episode documentary that premiered two months before the 50th anniversary of the military insurrection that ended the democratic socialism in Chile. This dive into the past is titled ‘The Santiago Boys‘, in reference to the engineers who promoted this “democratic development alternative” and in opposition to the Chicago Boysideologues of the neoliberal economic reforms imposed under the yoke of Pinochet.
“Socialist AI”
The project, a pioneering exercise in democratic governance that sought to connect the workers of Chile with their Government, was known as the “socialist internet“. However, Morozov believes that the fairer term would be “artificial intelligence socialist”, since “the most important aspect of the project was to automate the management process” and “improve decision-making”. The data had to reach a futuristic design operations room that was never installed in the presidential palace of La Currency, in Santiago.
A photograph of the Operations Room, Project Cybersyn, in Chile, 1971-3 from the Stafford Beer Archive #InternationalArchives #ExploreArchives pic.twitter.com/vfJxx1S6s5
— LJMU Special Collections & Archives (@LJMU_SCA) November 25, 2018
During his two years of research, Morozov has interviewed more than 200 people who lead us into a historical episode that is as fascinating as it is turbulent. “I was attracted by the myth that had formed around the project (…) I wanted to examine it again and understand its relevance in the current economic and technological context,” he explains in a telephone conversation with EL PERIÓDICO.
America’s dirty war
During those years, Chile was the epicenter of one of the harshest battles of the Cold War. In United States, Richard Nixon he saw the rise of Allende—whom he privately referred to as a “son of a bitch”—and of socialism as a threat to his national interests. ‘The Santiago Boys’ also delves into this geopolitical perspective and explains how the Government and the CIA maneuvered to destabilize the country and eventually overthrow the democratically elected leftist government through the violence. “Make Your Economy Scream” came to order Nixon, who feared that the Chilean president was a new Fidel Castro.
Allende’s radical ideas angered many powerful people and earned him many enemies, but his mistake was underestimating them. “They were extremely naive about how well-prepared and how smart his enemies were,” Morozov notes. Among them was the US technology giant ITT, which controlled about 70% of the Chilean telephone company and feared the expropriation of your assets. That led her to operate alongside US intelligence to torpedo the president’s mandate. Seen through the glasses of the present, the podcast seems to warn us of how big companies can boycott the democracy if that favors your pocket.
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Allende and his dream were realized, but the technology of the Cybersyn project was reappropriated with a radically opposite objective. ‘The Santiago Boys’ also narrates how the call Operation Condora US-backed alliance of right-wing Latin American regimes, used telexes and computers “to store information on left-wing dissidents and build an apparatus of repression“, says the Belarusian researcher. Between 60,000 and 400,000 people were victims of this network.
Still, Morozov hopes the podcast holds lessons for the future. “The legacy of cybernetics is that we should learn from its emphasis on the progressive and democratic use of technology to improve collective governance. This is in contrast to the neoliberal approach, which delegates everything to the market and neglects the complexities of human civilization.”
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