Chile is home to the most famous attempt ever made to apply cybernetics to a whole society, and to one of the most influential schools of second-order thought. Remarkably, the two stories unfold in the same city at the same time: Santiago, in the early 1970s. Let us take them in turn.
The setting
Salvador Allende was elected president in 1970 on a programme of democratic socialism. His government nationalised hundreds of companies, which then needed to be managed by a state with little experience and less information.
In July 1971 Fernando Flores, a young engineer working for the state development agency (CORFO), wrote to Stafford Beer, a British management cybernetician whose Brain of the Firm he had read. Beer flew to Santiago within months.
What they built
Beer proposed applying his Viable System Model to the national economy. The project, named Cybersyn (cybernetics plus synergy), had four parts:
- Cybernet: a network of telex machines linking factories to Santiago, so production data could be sent daily.
- Cyberstride: software to detect significant changes in the data and send alerts.
- CHECO: an economic simulator for testing policy.
- The Opsroom: an operations room with seven swivel chairs and wall displays, designed by a team under the German designer Gui Bonsiepe, where decision-makers could see the state of the economy.
A key principle was autonomy. Problems were to be handled at the lowest possible level. Only when a factory failed to correct an issue within a set time would an alert go up the hierarchy. Beer also designed an “algedonic” (pain and pleasure) signal so workers could send messages of distress or satisfaction directly upward.
The test
In October 1972, about forty thousand truck owners went on strike, backed by opposition groups and foreign money, and threatened to paralyse the country. The government set up command centres linked by the Cybersyn telex machines, which carried around two thousand messages a day. One CORFO official later recalled that this let them keep food and fuel moving into the cities with only about 200 trucks. The strike ended on 2 November. Supporters of Cybersyn count this as its proof of concept.
The end
On 11 September 1973 the military, led by Augusto Pinochet, overthrew Allende, who died in the presidential palace. The military stopped the project, and one officer stabbed each of the slides made for the Opsroom screens. Flores was imprisoned. Beer, who was in London, spent years helping exiled colleagues.
The Santiago school
At the same time, at the University of Chile, Humberto Maturana and his student Francisco Varela were developing the theory of autopoiesis. Their 1972 book De máquinas y seres vivos (Of Machines and Living Beings) appeared in the same year Cybersyn was running. Varela left Chile after the coup. Maturana stayed and continued teaching for decades.
The two strands never fully merged, but together they give Chile a distinct place in cybernetic history: an applied, political cybernetics and a biological, philosophical one, side by side.
Why it matters
Cybersyn remains a reference point in debates about technology and democracy. Critics see a technocratic control room. Beer saw it differently. In his eyes the system was designed to increase the autonomy of workers and factories, and its information was meant to help them manage themselves. Eden Medina’s history Cybernetic Revolutionaries (2011) brought the project back into view, and it has since inspired artists, designers, and people thinking about how data could serve public planning.
Further reading
- Eden Medina, Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile (2011)
- Stafford Beer, Brain of the Firm (2nd ed., 1981), which includes his account of the Chile project
- Stafford Beer, Designing Freedom (1974)