2023-09-11 17:00:09
Born in 1984, Evgeny Morozov is a journalist and essayist of Belarusian origin. A careful observer of the impact of new technologies, he is interested in the history of digital technology and IT tools other than those coming from Silicon Valley. He is notably the author of To solve everything, click here! The aberration of technological solutionism (FYP, 2014). Fifty years following the coup d’état of September 11, 1973, Evgeny Morozov has just published a podcast on Salvador Allende’s Chile, entitled “The Santiago Boys” (in English, free, available on major streaming platforms and on the site The-santiago-boys.com). In this investigation which interweaves cybernetics and espionage, the journalist describes the project developed in Chile in the early 1970s to manage the national economy thanks to a network of telex and computers, and to escape a relationship of dependence technology vis-à-vis the United States.
In your podcast, you return to a little-known aspect of Salvadore Allende’s project to transform Chile and take it on the path to socialism: new technologies were developed locally to modernize the economy. Can you explain to us what the computer network then imagined consisted of?
After his election to the presidency in 1970, Salvador Allende relied on a team of around fifteen engineers who launched the Cybersyn project (cybernetics and synergy). But more than a hundred people participated in this project, some came from abroad, from the United Kingdom, Argentina, Brazil. The ambition was to monitor the production of the country’s companies in real time using a telex network and ad hoc computer programs. Driven by necessity, the country had to make the choice of innovation.
In 1971, quickly following Allende’s election, the country faced a crisis due to the lack of managerial resources to administer the hundreds of nationalized companies. The United States is aware of this and is doing everything to encourage Chilean managers to settle in North America. The situation is made even more difficult by the “invisible blockade”, as they said at the time, which Washington is engaging in, which prevents the delivery of new technologies or the parts necessary for their maintenance.
It is this context of crisis which led Fernando Flores, a young technocrat in the Chilean administration, to set out in search of a solution. He then turned to a British consultant and theorist, Stafford Beer (1926-2002), a pioneer of cybernetic management of organizations. Together, Stafford Beer and Fernando Flores designed this project. Ten criteria, or ten variables, had to be followed in each factory, and the data had to be sent by telex to a central computer, which was located in Santiago, to be processed by software created by Stafford.
You have 71.3% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.
1694458581
#Allendes #Chile #reminds #extent #control #technology #geopolitical #issue
