Designing Freedom, Regulating a Nation: Socialist Cybernetics in Allende’s Chile*

[Ichingcarpenter]

November 1971 British cybernetician Stafford Beer met Chilean President Salvador Allende to discuss constructing an unprecedented tool for economic management. For Beer the meeting was of the utmost im- portance; the project required the president’s support. During the previous ten days Beer and a small Chilean team had worked frantically to develop a plan for a new technological system capable of regulating Chile’s economic transition in a manner consistent with the socialist principles of Allende’s presidency. The project, later referred to as ‘Cybersyn’ in English and


Synco’ in Spanish,1 would network every firm in the expanding nationalised sector of the economy to a central computer in Santiago, enabling the government to grasp the status of production quickly and respond to econ- omic crises in real time. Although Allende had been briefed on the project ahead of time, Beer was charged with the task of explaining the system to the President and convincing him that the project warranted government support.


Accompanied only by his translator, a former Chilean Navy officer named Roberto Can ̃ete, Beer walked to the presidential palace in La Moneda while the rest of his team waited anxiously at a hotel bar across the street. ‘ A cynic could declare that I was left to sink or swim, ’ Beer later remarked. ‘ I received this arrangement as one of the greatest gestures of confidence that I ever received; because it was open to me to say anything at all.’2 The meeting went quite well. Once they were sitting face to face (with Can ̃ete in the middle, discreetly whispering translations in each man’s ear), Beer began to explain his work in ‘ management cybernetics, ’ a field he founded in the early 1950s and cultivated in his subsequent publications.3 At the heart of Beer’s work stood the ‘viable system model’, a five-tier structure based on the which Beer believed existed in all stable organis- ations – biological, mechanical and social. Allende, having trained previously as a pathologist, immediately grasped the biological inspiration behind Beer’s cybernetic model and knowingly nodded throughout the explanation. This reaction left quite an impression on the cybernetician. ‘ I explained the whole damned plan and the whole viable system model in one single sitting _ and I’ve never worked with anybody at the high level who understood a thing I was saying.’4



Beer acknowledged the difficulties of achieving real-time economic control, but emphasised that a system based on a firm understanding of cybernetic principles could accomplish technical feats deemed impossible in the developed world, even with Chile’s limited technological resources. Once Allende gained a familiarity with the mechanics of Beer’s model, he began to reinforce the political aspects of the project and insisted that the system behave in a ‘decentralising, worker-participative, and anti- bureaucratic manner ’.5










http://www.informatics.indiana.edu/edenm/EdenMedinaJLASAugust2006.pdf