Project Cybersyn

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Project Cybersyn was a Chilean project from 1971 to 1973 during the presidency of Salvador Allende aimed at constructing a distributed decision support system to manage the national economy along a socialist basis.

The CIA-backed military coup against the socialist government ended the project on September 11, 1973.

History

The name is a portmanteu of the words cybernetics and synergy. In Spanish, the project was instead called Synco, both an initialism for Sistema de INformación y COntrol, ('system of information and control'), and a pun on the Spanish cinco, the number five, alluding to the five levels of Beer's viable system model

Stafford Beer was a British consultant in management cybernetics who also sympathized with the ideals of Chilean socialism.

The system was most useful in breaking a reactionary strike which was organized by the fascist Patria y Libertad group and partially financed by private donors who had received money from the CIA.

System

Telex machines were put in factories, which would report information back to the planning office in Santiago.

There were 500 unused telex machines bought by the previous government. Each was put into a factory. In the control centre in Santiago, each day data coming from each factory (several numbers, such as raw material input, production output and number of absentees) were put into a computer, which made short-term predictions and necessary adjustments. There were four levels of control (firm, branch, sector, total), with algedonic feedback. If one level of control did not remedy a problem in a certain interval, the higher level was notified. The results were discussed in the operations room and a top-level plan was made. The network of telex machines, called Cybernet, was the first operational component of Cybersyn, and the only one regularly used by the Allende government.

The software for Cybersyn was called Cyberstride, and used Bayesian filtering and Bayesian control. It was written by Chilean engineers in consultation with a team of 12 British programmers. Cybersyn first ran on an IBM 360/50, but later was transferred to a less heavily used Burroughs 3500 mainframe.

The vision had been distribution of control and involvement of workers in business planning. The design looked more like bureaucratic centralisation of control via bottom up reporting and top-down direction. Workers were expected to perform processes and use resources in the ways that had been modelled and planned. Any significant deviation from was to be reported upwards, and corrective directives were to be cascaded downwards. Cybersyn project was very similar to the proposed OGAS drawn up by Victor Glushkov in the USSR.

A related development was known as the Project Cyberfolk, which allowed citizens to send information about their moods to the Project organizers.

Legacy

Computer scientist Paul Cockshott and economist Allin Cottrell referenced Project Cybersyn in their 1993 book Towards a New Socialism, citing it as an inspiration for their own proposed model of computer-managed socialist planned economy.

Authors Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski also dedicated a chapter on the project in their 2019 book, The People's Republic of Walmart. The authors presented a case to defend the feasibility of a planned economy aided by contemporary processing power used by large organizations such as Amazon, Walmart and the Pentagon. The authors, however, question whether much can be built on Project Cybersyn in particular, specifically, "whether a system used in emergency, near–civil war conditions in a single country—covering a limited number of enterprises and, admittedly, only partially ameliorating a dire situation—can be applied in times of peace and at a global scale" especially as the project was never completed due to the fascist military coup in 1973, which was followed by pro-capitalist shock therapy by the Chicago Boys.

Chilean science fiction author Jorge Baradit published a Spanish-language science fiction novel Synco in 2008. It is an alternate history science fantasy novel set in a 1979, of which he said: "It stops the military coup, the socialist government consolidates and creates the first cybernetic state, a universal example, the true third way, a miracle."

In October 2016, 99% Invisible produced a podcast about the project. The Radio Ambulante podcast covered some history of Allende and the Cybersyn project in their 2019 episode "The Room That Was A Brain".

The Guardian called the project "a sort of socialist internet, decades ahead of its time".

See also

• Economic calculation debate
• Material balance planning
• OGAS
• Planned economy
• Socialist economy