Most of Project Cybersyn never materialized, especially the high-technology aspects, because the whole idea was rather abstract. They hired the guy who literall

Most of Project Cybersyn never materialized, especially the high-technology aspects, because the whole idea was rather abstract. They hired the guy who literally wrote the book on cybernetics, and he was mostly inventing and writing software on-the-fly. There's a reason the cybernetic revolution never materialized--it was mostly fluff. Not pseudo-science, per se, but unchastened by the real world. There's only so much mileage you can get out of, e.g., analogizing the machinations of the human economy to a PID controller. As the thread article says, > the second serious issue with a centrally planned economy was data quality: Central planners’ knowledge about the input requirements and output capabilities of individual factories was simply not as good as the people actually working in the factory. Solutions to that aspect of the problem constituted most of Cybersyn's real-world achievements. But they're sort of boring. They mostly consisted of installing voice and data lines to the management offices of factories and cajoling them to send, on a daily basis, their production numbers along with short-term expected input requirements. Yes, the Cybersyn experiment was cut short by the coup. But the mention of the U.S. is gratuitous. The coup was driven by industrialists and a fear of communism. Orders for the coup were given the imprimatur of the most powerful senators, and tacitly by a majority of the senate. (The leftists' thin margin eroded as moderates broke rank.) Allende's original vision, after nationalization of a small number of key industries, was harmonious cooperation between central planners and the rest of the free market. But there was too much resistance, as reflected in the difficulty Project Cybersyn had in simply collecting data. Part of the resistance was cultural (it's just not how people were used to working), and part of it was deliberate, politically motivated opposition. In frustration Allende increasingly turned to more forceful measures for "controlling the means of production", reneging on some of his promises regarding the extent of nationalization. Eventually he pushed the country too far and he was assassinated by, basically, the capitalist class. (Especially for a South American country, Chile historically was and remains quite conservative. Just as in the U.S., much of the lower classes are as capitalist as the elite, especially when faced with concrete socialist policies, as opposed to the promises.) The U.S. had no hand in any of it. It's only role, AFAIU, was placating the fears of the coup architects by promising asylum if the coup failed, and those promises came after planning for the coup was well underway.