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Not many people know that instead another socialist country did try to build such a network: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn https://en.wikipedia

Not many people know that instead another socialist country did try to build such a network: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn The project was probably overly ambitious and anyway could not last for more than 2 years given the suicide of Allende just after the coup, but it is still fairly fascinating.

Filligree 9y ago
Well, maybe if the USA hadn't couped them?
- k__ 9y ago
  Didn't their economy plummet because of their president?
  - gandhium 9y ago
    Looks like there's a golden rule - blame US for everything.
    - dotancohen 9y ago
      Actually, a US Senate committee has this to say on the topic two years later: > The CIA attempted, directly, to foment a military coup in Chile. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Committee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Committee
    - ionised 9y ago
      Think about why that is.
      - i_am_nomad 9y ago
        Because that’s way easier than taking responsibility for your own mistakes? Based on my observations of human nature, that would be my bet.
        smcl 9y ago
        This thread is downvote hell but I'll bite - blaming the US's extremely well known efforts in destabilizing the Middle East and Latin America for unrest, unstable government and stunted economic development in those regions is very fair. The "mistakes" many of these countries made were often along the lines of electing a left-leaning government or simply becoming stable regional power and interrupting Henry Kissinger's bizarre worldview about the balance of power. After the initial few "interventions" the chaos can feed itself for a few decades.
        ionised 9y ago
        Oh the irony.
    - CapacitorSet 9y ago
      We should really stop blaming the US for backing coups in foreign countries, indeed.
    - sctb 9y ago
      It looks like you've been using Hacker News mostly against the guidelines. Could you please take a read and starting posting more substantively? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- winterismute 9y ago
  They also had a strong embargo enforced by different countries that prevented them from signing any deals involving mainframes, it must be said.
  - osullivj 9y ago
    There was always a work around for those embargos during the Cold War. I know someone who did time in the 80s for sending DEC kit to Bulgaria in crates marked "tractor parts".
- jrs95 9y ago
  My understanding is that it wasn't working particularly well anyways. The concept may have been ahead of it's time.
drzaiusapelord 9y ago
Socialist =! communist. Allende's government doesn't have much in common with Soviet Unions brutal authoritarian communism, which is the only practical form of large scale communism as per history. Allende socialized some small parts of his economy (only coal?), but it was mostly a market economy even during his height of popularity. Also, there's a lot to say about cybernetics and how a lot of it is pretty dead and for good reasons. I imagine most people see the cool Star Trek-like control room and enjoy Cybersyn on a visual design level than a "this was a good idea for government" level. I think its obvious that authoritarian governments do poorly with information technology, outside of whats needed for military dominance, due to its democratizing effects. The SU couldn't have a Western-style internet because it would have become a political threat to the SU and strangled in the cradle. Allende was a little left of, say, France, who had a system like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel France's Minitel network doesn't get enough ink, imo. Its impressive this proto-web network took off. We're talking nearly 10m sales in a country that had about 50m people at the time. France Telecom estimates 25m people had access to Minitels, so half the population. 50% wired in 1980s is very, very impressive.
- vkou 9y ago
  > I think its obvious that authoritarian governments do poorly with information technology, outside of whats needed for military dominance, due to its democratizing effects. Citation needed. Information technology has not done one whit to democratize China.
  - losteric 9y ago
    Uh, what about the Arab Spring? Modern communication technology is what enabled those revolutions. In China, policies like the great firewall exist because the internet does challenge the central government. China is stable because 1.) people are happy with the CCP's economic results, 2.) the state controls large Chinese tech companies, and 3.) the government regularly "disappears" vocal dissenters. Expect a state crackdown if their economy starts crumbling.
    - 9y ago
theoh 9y ago
It's an interesting part of Stafford Beer's life story all right. But as somebody recently said on twitter, Uber has solved the calculation problem (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem) but certain parties on the left are still going on about Cybersyn, apparently mostly because of its retro-stylish control room. There's even a trendy cybernetics-inspired conference in New York this month: cybernetics.social Gerovitch seems as good a guide as there is to the topic, speaking as someone who's been hearing about it and reading bits and pieces for over 10 years (of course it's never mentioned in CS programmes). Eden Medina's 2011 book about Cybersyn was well received and tends to crop up in trendy bookstores. I don't mean to disparage all this but there are good reasons why the notions of cybernetics are not central to pedagogy in any field these days.
- narrator 9y ago
  Uber has solved the economic calculation problem except for that little detail that it loses billions of dollars ever year. In fact, any business that can make a profit without subsidies has solved the economic calculation problem, at least on a smaller than nationwide scale. Maybe if Amazon in 20 years has vertically integrated enough that it is the only business operating in the country and it replaces money with just telling everyone what to do and the whole thing operating on pure faith in Amazon's benevolence it would have solved the economic calculation problem.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - Animats 9y ago
    Arguably, Wal-Mart solved this years ago. Wal-Mart is very centralized. It's so centralized that store thermostats are controlled from Master Control in Bentonville, Arkansas. One of Sam Walton's big points is that Wal-Mart's success was not due to scale. It was because they were moving data around instead of inventory. Retail used to involve lots of product taking up space in warehouses, store back rooms, and shelves in the store. All that costs the retailer money. Wal-Mart was the first big chain to get this under control, so that product flow followed sales flow very closely. This has an enormous financial benefit. Big retailers typically pay 30 days behind shipments. Wal-Mart (and presumably Amazon) usually have sold the product before they even have paid their supplier. So their inventory cost is negative. Now that's cash flow management. Wal-Mart was one of the first retailers to bar-code everything. They meant everything. Wal-Mart has a buying center in Bentonville, known in retail as the Corridor of Doom. They put up signs along the line of "If your product isn't bar-coded, don't bother coming in". In typical Wal-Mart fashion, they made the suppliers apply the bar codes, both at the retail item and case level. (They've been trying to move to RFID, but it hasn't worked out as well.) Gosplan was always very slow. They had a monthly information cycle and an annual decision cycle. Wal-Mart had a daily information cycle and a weekly decision cycle years ago, and it's probably faster now. If Gosplan had made it to the bar-code era, they might have been able to make centralized planning work.
PeachPlum 9y ago
The Brain of the Firm and Cybernetics in general was certainly before its time, it needed far for giant shoulders to stand on. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viable_system_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viable_system_model
desireco42 9y ago
Yeah that was really excellent application and it is a shame it didn't have time to show all the benefits it can provide. Centrally planned economies had most to benefit from such systems as it could create feedback loops based on economic indicators, how to optimally scale up economy.
dtornabene 9y ago
A decent overview of Cybersyn by a socialist publication. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/04/allende-chile-beer-medina-cybersyn https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/04/allende-chile-beer-medina...

Filligree 9y ago

Well, maybe if the USA hadn't couped them?

k__ 9y ago
Didn't their economy plummet because of their president?
- gandhium 9y ago
  Looks like there's a golden rule - blame US for everything.
  - dotancohen 9y ago
    Actually, a US Senate committee has this to say on the topic two years later: > The CIA attempted, directly, to foment a military coup in Chile. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Committee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Committee
  - ionised 9y ago
    Think about why that is.
    - i_am_nomad 9y ago
      Because that’s way easier than taking responsibility for your own mistakes? Based on my observations of human nature, that would be my bet.
      - smcl 9y ago
        This thread is downvote hell but I'll bite - blaming the US's extremely well known efforts in destabilizing the Middle East and Latin America for unrest, unstable government and stunted economic development in those regions is very fair. The "mistakes" many of these countries made were often along the lines of electing a left-leaning government or simply becoming stable regional power and interrupting Henry Kissinger's bizarre worldview about the balance of power. After the initial few "interventions" the chaos can feed itself for a few decades.
      - ionised 9y ago
        Oh the irony.
  - CapacitorSet 9y ago
    We should really stop blaming the US for backing coups in foreign countries, indeed.
  - sctb 9y ago
    It looks like you've been using Hacker News mostly against the guidelines. Could you please take a read and starting posting more substantively? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
winterismute 9y ago
They also had a strong embargo enforced by different countries that prevented them from signing any deals involving mainframes, it must be said.
- osullivj 9y ago
  There was always a work around for those embargos during the Cold War. I know someone who did time in the 80s for sending DEC kit to Bulgaria in crates marked "tractor parts".
jrs95 9y ago
My understanding is that it wasn't working particularly well anyways. The concept may have been ahead of it's time.

drzaiusapelord 9y ago

Socialist =! communist. Allende's government doesn't have much in common with Soviet Unions brutal authoritarian communism, which is the only practical form of large scale communism as per history. Allende socialized some small parts of his economy (only coal?), but it was mostly a market economy even during his height of popularity. Also, there's a lot to say about cybernetics and how a lot of it is pretty dead and for good reasons. I imagine most people see the cool Star Trek-like control room and enjoy Cybersyn on a visual design level than a "this was a good idea for government" level. I think its obvious that authoritarian governments do poorly with information technology, outside of whats needed for military dominance, due to its democratizing effects. The SU couldn't have a Western-style internet because it would have become a political threat to the SU and strangled in the cradle. Allende was a little left of, say, France, who had a system like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel France's Minitel network doesn't get enough ink, imo. Its impressive this proto-web network took off. We're talking nearly 10m sales in a country that had about 50m people at the time. France Telecom estimates 25m people had access to Minitels, so half the population. 50% wired in 1980s is very, very impressive.

vkou 9y ago
> I think its obvious that authoritarian governments do poorly with information technology, outside of whats needed for military dominance, due to its democratizing effects. Citation needed. Information technology has not done one whit to democratize China.
- losteric 9y ago
  Uh, what about the Arab Spring? Modern communication technology is what enabled those revolutions. In China, policies like the great firewall exist because the internet does challenge the central government. China is stable because 1.) people are happy with the CCP's economic results, 2.) the state controls large Chinese tech companies, and 3.) the government regularly "disappears" vocal dissenters. Expect a state crackdown if their economy starts crumbling.
  - 9y ago

theoh 9y ago

It's an interesting part of Stafford Beer's life story all right. But as somebody recently said on twitter, Uber has solved the calculation problem (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem) but certain parties on the left are still going on about Cybersyn, apparently mostly because of its retro-stylish control room. There's even a trendy cybernetics-inspired conference in New York this month: cybernetics.social Gerovitch seems as good a guide as there is to the topic, speaking as someone who's been hearing about it and reading bits and pieces for over 10 years (of course it's never mentioned in CS programmes). Eden Medina's 2011 book about Cybersyn was well received and tends to crop up in trendy bookstores. I don't mean to disparage all this but there are good reasons why the notions of cybernetics are not central to pedagogy in any field these days.

narrator 9y ago
Uber has solved the economic calculation problem except for that little detail that it loses billions of dollars ever year. In fact, any business that can make a profit without subsidies has solved the economic calculation problem, at least on a smaller than nationwide scale. Maybe if Amazon in 20 years has vertically integrated enough that it is the only business operating in the country and it replaces money with just telling everyone what to do and the whole thing operating on pure faith in Amazon's benevolence it would have solved the economic calculation problem.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- Animats 9y ago
  Arguably, Wal-Mart solved this years ago. Wal-Mart is very centralized. It's so centralized that store thermostats are controlled from Master Control in Bentonville, Arkansas. One of Sam Walton's big points is that Wal-Mart's success was not due to scale. It was because they were moving data around instead of inventory. Retail used to involve lots of product taking up space in warehouses, store back rooms, and shelves in the store. All that costs the retailer money. Wal-Mart was the first big chain to get this under control, so that product flow followed sales flow very closely. This has an enormous financial benefit. Big retailers typically pay 30 days behind shipments. Wal-Mart (and presumably Amazon) usually have sold the product before they even have paid their supplier. So their inventory cost is negative. Now that's cash flow management. Wal-Mart was one of the first retailers to bar-code everything. They meant everything. Wal-Mart has a buying center in Bentonville, known in retail as the Corridor of Doom. They put up signs along the line of "If your product isn't bar-coded, don't bother coming in". In typical Wal-Mart fashion, they made the suppliers apply the bar codes, both at the retail item and case level. (They've been trying to move to RFID, but it hasn't worked out as well.) Gosplan was always very slow. They had a monthly information cycle and an annual decision cycle. Wal-Mart had a daily information cycle and a weekly decision cycle years ago, and it's probably faster now. If Gosplan had made it to the bar-code era, they might have been able to make centralized planning work.

PeachPlum 9y ago

The Brain of the Firm and Cybernetics in general was certainly before its time, it needed far for giant shoulders to stand on. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viable_system_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viable_system_model

desireco42 9y ago

Yeah that was really excellent application and it is a shame it didn't have time to show all the benefits it can provide. Centrally planned economies had most to benefit from such systems as it could create feedback loops based on economic indicators, how to optimally scale up economy.

dtornabene 9y ago

A decent overview of Cybersyn by a socialist publication. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/04/allende-chile-beer-medina-cybersyn https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/04/allende-chile-beer-medina...