Cybernetic Revolutionaries ─ Technology and Politics in Allende's Chile

In Cybernetic Revolutionaries, Eden Medina tells the history of two intersectingutopian visions, one political and one technological. The first was Chile's experiment with peacefulsocialist change under Salvador Allende; the second was the simultaneous attempt to build a computersystem that would manage Chile's economy. Neither vision was fully realized--Allende's governmentended with a violent military coup; the system, known as Project Cybersyn, was never completelyimplemented--but they hold lessons for today about the relationship between technology and politics.Drawing on extensive archival material and interviews, Medina examines the cybernetic systemenvisioned by the Chilean government--which was to feature holistic system design, decentralizedmanagement, human-computer interaction, a national telex network, near real-time control of thegrowing industrial sector, and modeling the behavior of dynamic systems. She also describes, anddocuments with photographs, the network's Star Trek-like operations room, which featured swivelchairs with armrest control panels, a wall of screens displaying data, and flashing red lights toindicate economic emergencies. Studying project Cybersyn today helps us understand not only thetechnological ambitions of a government in the midst of political change but also the limitations ofthe Chilean revolution. This history further shows how human attempts to combine the political andthe technological with the goal of creating a more just society can open new technological,intellectual, and political possibilities. Technologies, Medina writes, are historical texts; whenwe read them we are reading history.

Eden Medina is Assistant Professor in the School of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University Bloomington. She received the IEEE Life Member's Prize in Electrical History in 2007 for her work on Chile's experiments with cybernetics and socialism.