8 ms·

Project Cybersyn: Socialism Through Cybernetics

63 points by misnamed 10y ago

davedx 10y ago
"The Dream Machine" [1] also covers a lot of the history and vision of cybernetics. Well worth a read. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Dream-Machine-Licklider-Revolution-Computing/dp/014200135X https://www.amazon.com/Dream-Machine-Licklider-Revolution-Co...
gtt 10y ago
The insightful overview of Cybersyn in The New Yorker http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/10/13/planning-machine http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/10/13/planning-machin...
partycoder 10y ago
With Cybersyn, the Allende administration hoped to solve the problems they created by intervening companies. Unfortunately, to replace a capable business owner with a politically loaded government interventor will punish the company productivity. No matter how good the intentions are (e.g: wealth distribution), political meritocracy does not translate into entrepreneurial competence. Under Allende's administration, Chile economically became similar to what Venezuela is today, with ineffective resource distribution and widespread chaos. In part, the Chilean economy collapsed with the help of foreign sabotage driven by concerns about the growth of Soviet influence and local allies that later supported the 1973 coup, part of a series of Latin American coups now known as Operation Condor. The military junta focused in reverting the policies that Allende impulsed, notably the confiscation of foreign owned mining assets. To achieve that, they abolished the congress, wrote a new constitution with specific provisions to protect investors from Communist-style confiscations.
- guard-of-terra 10y ago
  To achieve that, they ...tortured people by thousands, threw the least desirable into the sea from helicopters. That's not becoming cool irregardless of how many positively sounding weasel words you put around "coup" and negatively sounding ones around "Allende".
  - eli_gottlieb 10y ago
    "Capitalism: the system you're dying to try!"
  - partycoder 10y ago
    That was done for other reasons. The economic reforms were implemented as a part of a shorter term plan. The human rights related crimes in Chile and all countries affected by Operation Condor had the high-level objective of eradicating socialists/communists, and that was a part of a long term plan of ensuring that the policies the juntas created would not be reverted. Do I agree with using violence to support a economic/political system? no. But that was what happened.
- alvarosm 10y ago
  The more truths you say, the more you'll be downvoted to oblivion by the socialist wannabes, SJW and so on. Allende was a fanatic, and that ridiculous James Bond control room for a centrally planned economy gives you an idea of the kind of idiots they were.
  - GFK_of_xmaspast 10y ago
    How many people did he have thrown our of helicopters?
  - partycoder 10y ago
    I think they cannot see past the violence. Not that violence wasn't planned, or wasn't inhuman, etc. But the violence wasn't their high level objective. The only way to understand what happened is to see past the violence and understand what they really wanted to achieve, and in that sense you will understand the junta were just mercenaries.
fixxer 10y ago
Allende won the Presidency with 36% of the vote in a three horse race.
- Frompo 10y ago
  Allende won with 37% and a 83% turnout, Nixon won with 43% and a 62% turnout, giving Allende 30% of the popular vote and Nixon 27 %. I'm not sure what this tells us about Nixons right to have Allende deposed though.
  - fixxer 10y ago
    I'm not defending Nixon; fuck that guy. I will, however, say that Allende is oft depicted by the left as some universally beloved leader that only the aristocracy despised. I have not heard this from my (many) Chilean friends (and they aren't part of that aristocracy). Also, it is hard to overthrow a leader when they actually are universally beloved. It happens because the people let it.
fixxer 10y ago
The idea of trading individual control of companies for a cabal in a James Bond villain esque room sipping whisky and smoking cigars sounds idiotic. I suppose todays equivalent would ditch the cabal for a computer. Would you trust a computer to map out every dependency in the economy, down to the factory floor? Would you want to live in that world?
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- captainmuon 10y ago
  > Would you want to live in that world? Depends... if that amounts to a central agency micromanaging every aspect of economy, then certainly not. We all know how that ends. But if it means there is a central intelligence (democraticly controlled, like by a parliament and not a dictatorship!) that can override individual business decisions in important corporations, then sure. It is well known in economics that decisions that make sense for individuals (corporations, persons) can be detrimental to society as a whole. A pareto-optimum by no means has to be the "best" or "most desirable" optimum. It would be nice if someone could say, after appropriate research and debate, "Hello Amazon, it is great that you are running so well and expanding so much. But we as a society have decided that we can live without further delivery speed improvements in this year. OTOH, we think your workers deserve a bit more money. Please reallocate $N to their salaries." Or, "Dear energy companies, after reviewing all the facts, we have decided that technology X (nuclear, fracking, ...) is not worth the risk to us. We'd rather accept a loss of 3% or stagnation for N years in wealth. Please reallocate resources to build more Y (solar, wind power, ...)"
  - queirozfcom 10y ago
    Would you invest in a country that could overrule your decisions based on its political priorities? I wouldn't.
  - blahi 10y ago
    >But if it means there is a central intelligence (democraticly controlled, like by a parliament and not a dictatorship!) that can override individual business decisions in important corporations, then sure We have that. It's just corrupt. Like everything humans do is doomed to be. So please, enough centralization already.
queirozfcom 10y ago
I just hope this website keeps its up to date reporting on projects like this so that we have time to leave the country before this "new brand of socialism" starts working its "magic" in the country. We've seen this before.
- guard-of-terra 10y ago
  In the Memorial in Santiago de Chile there's a stand about people who had to flee to other countries after the coup. They're all over the map.
  - queirozfcom 10y ago
    This technique you just used. It's called a 'straw man'.
    - guard-of-terra 10y ago
      Isn't fighting socialism (in 2016) a huge straw man by itself? Socialist countries has all kinds of trajectories, as capitalist ones do. Moreover there's no capitalist and socialist countries anymore but a spectrum of economic regimes.
      - PerfectDlite 10y ago
        > Socialist countries has all kinds of trajectories All of them pointing to the ground, though.
        guard-of-terra 10y ago
        Norway and China beg to differ. People argue that whole EU is socialist these days, and some of countries are quite successful.
        alvarosm 10y ago
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
norea-armozel 10y ago
I'll never understand the fascination that governments and companies have with top-down modeling of demand. It just doesn't work when you really get down to it. You get gluts or shortages when chasing demand which leads to waste like what we have in clothing and electronics. Also, it's built around the idea that everyone should act like rabid consumers all the time (leading to the problems I mentioned). Ultimately, the right answer is to not have the kind of global market but rather multiple markets where some global trade does occur to cover shortages or to allow specialization in production. Things like Cybersyn and it's modern corporate equivalents just promote booms and busts and other nasty things like pollution.
- blahi 10y ago
  >I'll never understand the fascination that governments and companies have with top-down modeling of demand. Because that's the only way to manage an organization that consists of more than a dozen hackers. >You get gluts or shortages when chasing demand which leads to waste like what we have in clothing Yeah, you should tell that to Zara because they did not receive the memo.
  - queirozfcom 10y ago
    I find it funny that people on the internet, of all places, say that top-down anything is the way to manage an organization. Do you use linux? apache? http? run git? use python? PHP?
    - eli_gottlieb 10y ago
      Don't people always talk about how the best open-source projects are run by "benevolent dictators"? Free entry and exit are rather different things from an organization that just never plans ahead "because freedom".
    - blahi 10y ago
      It's totally the same. USPS should adopt flat structure because Valve does it.
Symmetry 10y ago
It was interesting as a historical artifact but the whole approach just seems so painfully naive. Starting with putting 7 people in a room to command things and calling that approach 'non-hierarchical' because that was the buzzword du jour at the time.
tumbas 10y ago
title sound like something coming out of filthy mouth of russian genocidical free masons communist whose familiy tree did genocide
sctb 10y ago
Lots of previous threads for those interested: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Cybersyn%20points%3E5&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0 https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Cybersyn%20points%3E5&sort=byD...

63 points by misnamed 10y ago

"The Dream Machine" [1] also covers a lot of the history and vision of cybernetics. Well worth a read. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Dream-Machine-Licklider-Revolution-Computing/dp/014200135X https://www.amazon.com/Dream-Machine-Licklider-Revolution-Co...

gtt 10y ago

The insightful overview of Cybersyn in The New Yorker http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/10/13/planning-machine http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/10/13/planning-machin...

partycoder 10y ago

With Cybersyn, the Allende administration hoped to solve the problems they created by intervening companies. Unfortunately, to replace a capable business owner with a politically loaded government interventor will punish the company productivity. No matter how good the intentions are (e.g: wealth distribution), political meritocracy does not translate into entrepreneurial competence. Under Allende's administration, Chile economically became similar to what Venezuela is today, with ineffective resource distribution and widespread chaos. In part, the Chilean economy collapsed with the help of foreign sabotage driven by concerns about the growth of Soviet influence and local allies that later supported the 1973 coup, part of a series of Latin American coups now known as Operation Condor. The military junta focused in reverting the policies that Allende impulsed, notably the confiscation of foreign owned mining assets. To achieve that, they abolished the congress, wrote a new constitution with specific provisions to protect investors from Communist-style confiscations.

guard-of-terra 10y ago
To achieve that, they ...tortured people by thousands, threw the least desirable into the sea from helicopters. That's not becoming cool irregardless of how many positively sounding weasel words you put around "coup" and negatively sounding ones around "Allende".
- eli_gottlieb 10y ago
  "Capitalism: the system you're dying to try!"
- partycoder 10y ago
  That was done for other reasons. The economic reforms were implemented as a part of a shorter term plan. The human rights related crimes in Chile and all countries affected by Operation Condor had the high-level objective of eradicating socialists/communists, and that was a part of a long term plan of ensuring that the policies the juntas created would not be reverted. Do I agree with using violence to support a economic/political system? no. But that was what happened.
alvarosm 10y ago
The more truths you say, the more you'll be downvoted to oblivion by the socialist wannabes, SJW and so on. Allende was a fanatic, and that ridiculous James Bond control room for a centrally planned economy gives you an idea of the kind of idiots they were.
- GFK_of_xmaspast 10y ago
  How many people did he have thrown our of helicopters?
- partycoder 10y ago
  I think they cannot see past the violence. Not that violence wasn't planned, or wasn't inhuman, etc. But the violence wasn't their high level objective. The only way to understand what happened is to see past the violence and understand what they really wanted to achieve, and in that sense you will understand the junta were just mercenaries.

fixxer 10y ago

Allende won the Presidency with 36% of the vote in a three horse race.

Frompo 10y ago
Allende won with 37% and a 83% turnout, Nixon won with 43% and a 62% turnout, giving Allende 30% of the popular vote and Nixon 27 %. I'm not sure what this tells us about Nixons right to have Allende deposed though.
- fixxer 10y ago
  I'm not defending Nixon; fuck that guy. I will, however, say that Allende is oft depicted by the left as some universally beloved leader that only the aristocracy despised. I have not heard this from my (many) Chilean friends (and they aren't part of that aristocracy). Also, it is hard to overthrow a leader when they actually are universally beloved. It happens because the people let it.

fixxer 10y ago

The idea of trading individual control of companies for a cabal in a James Bond villain esque room sipping whisky and smoking cigars sounds idiotic. I suppose todays equivalent would ditch the cabal for a computer. Would you trust a computer to map out every dependency in the economy, down to the factory floor? Would you want to live in that world?

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
captainmuon 10y ago
> Would you want to live in that world? Depends... if that amounts to a central agency micromanaging every aspect of economy, then certainly not. We all know how that ends. But if it means there is a central intelligence (democraticly controlled, like by a parliament and not a dictatorship!) that can override individual business decisions in important corporations, then sure. It is well known in economics that decisions that make sense for individuals (corporations, persons) can be detrimental to society as a whole. A pareto-optimum by no means has to be the "best" or "most desirable" optimum. It would be nice if someone could say, after appropriate research and debate, "Hello Amazon, it is great that you are running so well and expanding so much. But we as a society have decided that we can live without further delivery speed improvements in this year. OTOH, we think your workers deserve a bit more money. Please reallocate $N to their salaries." Or, "Dear energy companies, after reviewing all the facts, we have decided that technology X (nuclear, fracking, ...) is not worth the risk to us. We'd rather accept a loss of 3% or stagnation for N years in wealth. Please reallocate resources to build more Y (solar, wind power, ...)"
- queirozfcom 10y ago
  Would you invest in a country that could overrule your decisions based on its political priorities? I wouldn't.
- blahi 10y ago
  >But if it means there is a central intelligence (democraticly controlled, like by a parliament and not a dictatorship!) that can override individual business decisions in important corporations, then sure We have that. It's just corrupt. Like everything humans do is doomed to be. So please, enough centralization already.

queirozfcom 10y ago

I just hope this website keeps its up to date reporting on projects like this so that we have time to leave the country before this "new brand of socialism" starts working its "magic" in the country. We've seen this before.

guard-of-terra 10y ago
In the Memorial in Santiago de Chile there's a stand about people who had to flee to other countries after the coup. They're all over the map.
- queirozfcom 10y ago
  This technique you just used. It's called a 'straw man'.
  - guard-of-terra 10y ago
    Isn't fighting socialism (in 2016) a huge straw man by itself? Socialist countries has all kinds of trajectories, as capitalist ones do. Moreover there's no capitalist and socialist countries anymore but a spectrum of economic regimes.
    - PerfectDlite 10y ago
      > Socialist countries has all kinds of trajectories All of them pointing to the ground, though.
      - guard-of-terra 10y ago
        Norway and China beg to differ. People argue that whole EU is socialist these days, and some of countries are quite successful.
        alvarosm 10y ago

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

norea-armozel 10y ago

I'll never understand the fascination that governments and companies have with top-down modeling of demand. It just doesn't work when you really get down to it. You get gluts or shortages when chasing demand which leads to waste like what we have in clothing and electronics. Also, it's built around the idea that everyone should act like rabid consumers all the time (leading to the problems I mentioned). Ultimately, the right answer is to not have the kind of global market but rather multiple markets where some global trade does occur to cover shortages or to allow specialization in production. Things like Cybersyn and it's modern corporate equivalents just promote booms and busts and other nasty things like pollution.

blahi 10y ago
>I'll never understand the fascination that governments and companies have with top-down modeling of demand. Because that's the only way to manage an organization that consists of more than a dozen hackers. >You get gluts or shortages when chasing demand which leads to waste like what we have in clothing Yeah, you should tell that to Zara because they did not receive the memo.
- queirozfcom 10y ago
  I find it funny that people on the internet, of all places, say that top-down anything is the way to manage an organization. Do you use linux? apache? http? run git? use python? PHP?
  - eli_gottlieb 10y ago
    Don't people always talk about how the best open-source projects are run by "benevolent dictators"? Free entry and exit are rather different things from an organization that just never plans ahead "because freedom".
  - blahi 10y ago
    It's totally the same. USPS should adopt flat structure because Valve does it.

Symmetry 10y ago

It was interesting as a historical artifact but the whole approach just seems so painfully naive. Starting with putting 7 people in a room to command things and calling that approach 'non-hierarchical' because that was the buzzword du jour at the time.

tumbas 10y ago

title sound like something coming out of filthy mouth of russian genocidical free masons communist whose familiy tree did genocide

sctb 10y ago

Lots of previous threads for those interested: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Cybersyn%20points%3E5&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0 https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Cybersyn%20points%3E5&sort=byD...