18 ms·

Socialist Cyborgs

58 points by tlrss 5y ago

yakshaving_jgt 5y ago
> The conventional narrative of Eastern European communism is one of technologically backward states that failed to enter the information age, locked behind an impenetrable Iron Curtain that prevented both people and ideas from circulating. Yeah. That's typical Western Russophobia for you.
- qsort 5y ago
  Is any of those points wrong, though?
  - yakshaving_jgt 5y ago
    …Well, yes? Of course? How else do you explain a supposedly "technologically backward" society beating even the Americans in the space race? I mean, even this very article immediately refutes that narrative.
    - Igelau 5y ago
      I think you're mistranslating "conventional narrative" as "we think this is a rock-solid fact". It doesn't mean that.
      - yakshaving_jgt 5y ago
        I'm not sure why you think that. I certainly don't think "fact" has anything to do with this, as this is all about narrative. What I'm taking issue with is that this narrative is being characterised as conventional, which means in accordance with what is generally done or believed. I think this is only generally done or believed in Western society, which I already alluded to.
    - qsort 5y ago
      Dude, are you literally trolling right now? The space race did not end the way you think it did. And no, the article does not refute that "narrative" at all, if you're reading carefully. The 80s were the years of the microcomputing revolution in the West, by that time most of the computing products of the Eastern block were knockoffs of the western counterparts. They were objectively lagging behind at that point.
    - nanna 5y ago
      Ok, but you're talking 1950s, when this article is talking about the '70s and '80s. The US got so far ahead of the USSR in computing because of the military-industrial-academic complex that channelled vast public resources and knowledge into projects that had both military/state ends as well as commercial ones too. Especially after the launch of Sputnik and the subsequent sense that the US was trailing the USSR in a 'cybernetics gap', which triggered a huge amount of funding in the US for technical developments. This is the story of how the personal, graphical, interactive and internetworked computer was invented. In the USSR the military did its own thing without sharing its knowledge and inventions with the wider society, especially with such cutting edge inventions like computers. As such outside of the military (even this is debatable), the USSR as a whole did fall significantly behind the West in terms of technological progress. Who knows, if it hadn't it might still be around today. See Slava Gerovitch and Benjamin Peter's writings, for example: InterNyet: https://web.mit.edu/slava/homepage/articles/Gerovitch-InterNyet.pdf https://web.mit.edu/slava/homepage/articles/Gerovitch-InterN...
      - yakshaving_jgt 5y ago
        I'm not really refuting any of that, and I think your point is orthogonal to the one that I'm making. As far as I'm aware, Western sentiment with regards to technological capability in the USSR didn't radically shift in those two or three decades. In fact I believe popular sentiment remained fairly static all throughout the Cold War which encompasses the decades you named.
    - pid-1 5y ago
      > How else do you explain a supposedly "technologically backward" society beating even the Americans in the space race? Invest in a small elite and let the rest of the country starve. That's old as civilization.
      - artem247 5y ago
        That's very unfair. The education was free for all, there was significant investment in education, 90% of schools in my rather ancient city were built during Soviet time, not before, not after. Same for university campuses and hospitals. That systemic investment into education along with state-wide industrialisation eventually paid-off. There were wide-spread programs how for example factory worker can get a higher education while still being able to provide for his family. Invest in a small elite and let the rest starve was more of a motto of Russian Empire, where most of people couldn't read, yet there were some technological achievements nevertheless.
        soco 5y ago
        I argue that the ways of the Russian Empire weren't that much different from the Soviet Union ways - both internally and with its vassal states.
        tristor 5y ago
        "New boss... same as the old boss." as they say. This is true for most regime changes in history. Those in power change, and their motivated reasoning may change, but the net effects on those down the stack is pretty much the same.
        thriftwy 5y ago
        Russian Empire was very different, like South Korea - North Korea different.
        artem247 5y ago
        I would say that Russian Empire and USSR were similar in the methods of achieving their goals — a lot of rigid hierarchical structures, top-down management, a certain level of brutality. But the goals were very different.
    - flerchin 5y ago
      Russian boots on the moon when?
    - aaron-santos 5y ago
      The propagandist wants the opponent to be strong enough to be a threat but ideologically weak enough to defeat. That should be enough for anyone to pause and think hard about what's really going on.
- teekert 5y ago
  For sure, but it's also the other way around, I read RTV for some time (everybody should), same news, very different angle. The fear and contempt of the west (the NATO) is palpable. I imagine it is the same the other way around, but I am just used to it. Edit: A nice example: EU: https://www.dw.com/en/nord-stream-2-gas-pipeline-what-is-the-controversy-about/a-44677741 https://www.dw.com/en/nord-stream-2-gas-pipeline-what-is-the... RT: https://www.rt.com/business/476844-eu-russia-us-sanctions/ https://www.rt.com/business/476844-eu-russia-us-sanctions/
  - yakshaving_jgt 5y ago
    Yes, I absolutely recognise that. I've spent enough time in both Sweden and Russia (and Poland, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Romania, etc, etc, etc) to recognise the same stories and military expeditions being told from different angles. It is absolutely true that each nation tells their citizens their own stories. The point I took issue with was in the excerpt I pulled, which describes the Western perspective as the "conventional" one, which seems a rather Americentric thing to write.
  - teddyh 5y ago
    This is literal whataboutism.
    - markenqualitaet 5y ago
      It is not, I think, if it's the _exact same relation in reverse.
      - teddyh 5y ago
        It is still whataboutism. Do two wrongs make a right? Does an accusation of hypocrisy nullify any original criticism, no matter how true?
        markenqualitaet 5y ago
        No, I get what you mean, but I still think it's a different argument in nature. It's not two wrongs, it's one and the same. For me typical fallacy would be something like "You did A. A is bad." "So what? You did B. B is bad." This tries to dismiss A , while "Both did A." tells us something about A.
- bufferoverflow 5y ago
  You need to learn some history instead of propaganda. Both people and ideas were highly filtered in circulation. That's a fact.
  - coldtea 5y ago
    >You need to learn some history instead of propaganda. Just don't trust the history of your national side -- or the winners, in most cases.
    - randomeat 5y ago
      WW2, for example
      - coldtea 5y ago
        Especially that. What with provoking the Japanese before Pearl Harbor to get an excuse to join the war, the propaganda over decades to dismiss the importance of USSR in the fall of Nazi Germany, Dresden, the reasoning behind hitting Hiroshima and Nagashaki, the cozying up with "ex" Nazis in West Germany (now an ally), and tons of other dirty laundry... What, you expected at least this to be a clear cut "pure good vs pure evil" affair, the way "sanctioned" national histories retell it? Here's but an example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS_St._Louis#The_%22Voyage_of_the_Damned%22 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS_St._Louis#The_%22Voyage_of_... https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2017/06/american-nazis-in-the-1930sthe-german-american-bund/529185/ https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2017/06/american-nazis-in-... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2001/04/hitlers-willing-business-partners/303146/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2001/04/hitlers...
        randomeat 5y ago
        Minor in comparison to the larger propaganda over that war
        reducesuffering 5y ago
- VictorPath 5y ago
  It's great that Bulgaria was so technologically forward in 1945! If the Warsaw Pact allowed people and ideas to circulate, they might have launched satellites and men in space before the West!
Grumbledour 5y ago
This narrative reminds me of the similar program in the UK to teach a whole generation computer literacy which I think the country still benefits from. It is somewhat comforting to see what long lasting consequences such programs can have if you really put in the effort, if only for a few years. Maybe this also hits a bit close to home when my own government constantly declares how they want to make us the next center of [insert current buzzowrd] and of course always fails because it's just an excuse to pump a few billion into the private sector. But looking at these kind of stories, hope is not lost and I wish to see these kind of experiments again soon.
- shellac 5y ago
  > This narrative reminds me of the similar program in the UK to teach a whole generation computer literacy Probably the "BBC Computer Literacy Project" https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=BBC_Computer_Literacy_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=BBC_Computer_Lite... (apologies, there's no specific wikipedia page) which produced both a home computer - the BBC Micro - and a series of TV programmes starting with The Computer Programme.
  - Grumbledour 5y ago
    Yes, thank you. Not being from the UK and having heard about it mainly from youtube I could not remember the name.
    - the-dude 5y ago
      To provide further context: one could say ARM spun out of it.
Guthur 5y ago
The major Achilles heel of communism is its central planning. It was, and likely still is, intractable to model the nuances and therefore inherent flexibility of a price based market system. The Soviet Union would seesaw back and forth from plenty in one particular item to absolute scarcity. There was very little room for micro adjustments as so much was centralised. The efforts that were undertaken to replace the price signal were also truly monumental, armies of bureaucrats collecting information on every detail of consumption and then trying project needs across an entire society. It's a herculean task even by today's standards of information processing.
- varispeed 5y ago
  > The major Achilles heel of communism is its central planning. It is removing agency from people and assumes that the party knows better - which essentially is just another form of slavery.
- sega_sai 5y ago
  I am wondering to what extent the central planning is much more tractable now with the amount of data and computerization. It is not like free market is perfect in adjusting either (i.e. situation with timber or computer chips or containers in covid times). I'm not convinced that central planning is the best way to organize the state, but I'm wondering whether the intractability argument against is still valid or not.
  - thriftwy 5y ago
    It's going to be highly non-trivial when most of your supply chain (any item maker in the world) is not on the same plan, but instead offers wares at market rate.
  - nextstep 5y ago
    There was a semi-successful attempt at this in the 70s in Chile, but it was stopped by the CIA: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn
_hao 5y ago
I'm from Bulgaria and the article is pretty good for the most part. I'm from the so called "children of democracy" generation which is basically the first generation(s) after the communist regime fell in '89 (I was born in 1993). One thing I have to say is that IT in Bulgaria succeeds right now not because of the government or some historical acumen, but despite of it. I think there might be some inertia from back then, but that's gone if we look things as of today. Taxes are low (relatively) to other EU countries, while the quality of work being done is very high. With that said Bulgaria is still mainly an outsourcing destination. There are some innovative homegrown companies like Chaos Group (creators of V-Ray) and others, but relatively to the size of the market they are few and far between. I'm based in London now, but on my recent trip back a month ago I met with some ex-colleagues and we talked about how there's potentially a salary bubble forming. There are positions for new grads without any experience starting from 5000 BGN (2500 EUR) which is absolutely insane. Given that the average gross salary for Sofia (the capital and most well paid/expensive city in Bulgaria) is 1976 BGN[1] that's not normal. Another case was for a German company so desperate to find people that they paid a friend of mine net 6000 EUR a month as a front-end. That's even crazier. Companies like VMware that created big campuses pay around 7000-9000 BGN a month for devs (not seniors/team leads). You can live like a king with those kinds of salaries in Bulgaria, but you'll be surrounded by shitty infrastructure, non-existing government and all other types of shit that people like me that have left don't want to deal with. [1] https://www.nsi.bg/en/content/3930/statistical-regions-district https://www.nsi.bg/en/content/3930/statistical-regions-distr...
- merpnderp 5y ago
  New graduates in computer science start out at about 2x the median household income in my small US state. I don't know if it is a bubble or the world economy is changing faster than people can be educated.
  - beckman466 5y ago
    > the world economy is changing faster than people can be educated how can people learn if large parts of humanity's scientific and technological feedback/learning loops are commoditized and made artificially scarce by our economic system? especially now that we have digital technology available that could make the storing and transmitting of informational artifacts super cheap. so i think neither of the two reasons you stated, but because we are living in a black box society. we are being forcefully disinherited by the propertied class. knowledge laborers who get 2x median income have just been less victim to capitalist gatekeeping, since a few are needed to generate more intellectual property for the propertied class. [2] [1] Aaron Swartz, Guerilla Open Access Manifesto: https://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamjuly2008_djvu.txt https://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamj... [2] Wendy Liu, Gatekeeping in the tech industry: https://dellsystem.me/posts/fragments-50 https://dellsystem.me/posts/fragments-50
jyotimalhot 5y ago
great!!
twic 5y ago
> The organization that prepared most Bulgarian children to be the model communists of the future was the Dimitrov Communist Youth Union (DKMS). Ah, that's why my Red Hat machine was always building DKMS modules!
kongin 5y ago
>Perhaps today’s technological and political entrepreneurs, like their socialist predecessors, may find out that a new generation raised in conditions of financial crashes, pandemics, and political deadlock may draw different ideological conclusions to what the new status quo intends. What a weird take, the generation that lived after the end of communism saw everything get worse year after year. It's just that the majority of us left. Out of six first cousins born between 1983 and 2003 one is still in Bulgaria because she can make a living from the farmland that we were all meant to inherit and is keeping an eye on the ageing relatives that are still there. The rest of us aren't there and don't intend to return for the next 40 years. We all view socialism very favourably and our parents as idiots who killed the golden goose expecting golden chicken nuggets till the end of time.
- phreeza 5y ago
  The last paragraph caught me by surprise, most eastern European expats I know are quite anti-socialist.
  - kongin 5y ago
    Of course I vote against socialism in the West, I'm here to make money, the less taxes the more money.
    - ricksunny 5y ago
      I can't tell where there might be irony here - >We all view socialism very favourably and our parents as idiots who killed the golden goose expecting golden chicken nuggets till the end of time. vs. >Of course I vote against socialism in the West, I'm here to make money, the less taxes the more money. Can you describe how these two statements can be rationalized into a cohesive position?
      - kongin 5y ago
        A vegan cattle rancher doesn't want everyone to be vegan.
hyfgfh 5y ago
Is it about socialism or communism?
angryostrich 5y ago
It always makes me sad to see these beautiful ideas to use technology to bring about a better life for everyone squashed by ineptitude and greed of bureaucracy. In their view, it was the Bulgarian worker rather than the system that was to blame—shirking responsibilities, pilfering the petty change, and sleeping on the job. It's amazing how similar this is to capitalist thinking. Guess it doesn't matter if the people are exploited by private owners or the state.
KorematsuFredt 5y ago
I remember the socialist India where workers unions opposed any kind of computerization/automation. This especially hurt Indian banks as they continued to use costly manual calculations which employed army of clerks. However one of the despotic Indian PM forcibly took over all private banks and "nationalized" it and later the same party used these banks as a jobs program to employ thousands of party workers and others to win votes. A lot of these youngsters were bored of this manual work and insisted on computerization and the workers unions could not maintain the opposition. (In Indian government owned businesses people never lose their jobs. Which means even if a machine replaces your work, you will still get paid just to show up at work. While it makes sense to oppose digitization when you are unemployed, it makes sense to support it once you are employed. A bit of catch 22. This is not true for private companies as they can not keep people on payroll they don't need.)

58 points by tlrss 5y ago

> The conventional narrative of Eastern European communism is one of technologically backward states that failed to enter the information age, locked behind an impenetrable Iron Curtain that prevented both people and ideas from circulating. Yeah. That's typical Western Russophobia for you.

qsort 5y ago
Is any of those points wrong, though?
- yakshaving_jgt 5y ago
  …Well, yes? Of course? How else do you explain a supposedly "technologically backward" society beating even the Americans in the space race? I mean, even this very article immediately refutes that narrative.
  - Igelau 5y ago
    I think you're mistranslating "conventional narrative" as "we think this is a rock-solid fact". It doesn't mean that.
    - yakshaving_jgt 5y ago
      I'm not sure why you think that. I certainly don't think "fact" has anything to do with this, as this is all about narrative. What I'm taking issue with is that this narrative is being characterised as conventional, which means in accordance with what is generally done or believed. I think this is only generally done or believed in Western society, which I already alluded to.
  - qsort 5y ago
    Dude, are you literally trolling right now? The space race did not end the way you think it did. And no, the article does not refute that "narrative" at all, if you're reading carefully. The 80s were the years of the microcomputing revolution in the West, by that time most of the computing products of the Eastern block were knockoffs of the western counterparts. They were objectively lagging behind at that point.
  - nanna 5y ago
    Ok, but you're talking 1950s, when this article is talking about the '70s and '80s. The US got so far ahead of the USSR in computing because of the military-industrial-academic complex that channelled vast public resources and knowledge into projects that had both military/state ends as well as commercial ones too. Especially after the launch of Sputnik and the subsequent sense that the US was trailing the USSR in a 'cybernetics gap', which triggered a huge amount of funding in the US for technical developments. This is the story of how the personal, graphical, interactive and internetworked computer was invented. In the USSR the military did its own thing without sharing its knowledge and inventions with the wider society, especially with such cutting edge inventions like computers. As such outside of the military (even this is debatable), the USSR as a whole did fall significantly behind the West in terms of technological progress. Who knows, if it hadn't it might still be around today. See Slava Gerovitch and Benjamin Peter's writings, for example: InterNyet: https://web.mit.edu/slava/homepage/articles/Gerovitch-InterNyet.pdf https://web.mit.edu/slava/homepage/articles/Gerovitch-InterN...
    - yakshaving_jgt 5y ago
      I'm not really refuting any of that, and I think your point is orthogonal to the one that I'm making. As far as I'm aware, Western sentiment with regards to technological capability in the USSR didn't radically shift in those two or three decades. In fact I believe popular sentiment remained fairly static all throughout the Cold War which encompasses the decades you named.
  - pid-1 5y ago
    > How else do you explain a supposedly "technologically backward" society beating even the Americans in the space race? Invest in a small elite and let the rest of the country starve. That's old as civilization.
    - artem247 5y ago
      That's very unfair. The education was free for all, there was significant investment in education, 90% of schools in my rather ancient city were built during Soviet time, not before, not after. Same for university campuses and hospitals. That systemic investment into education along with state-wide industrialisation eventually paid-off. There were wide-spread programs how for example factory worker can get a higher education while still being able to provide for his family. Invest in a small elite and let the rest starve was more of a motto of Russian Empire, where most of people couldn't read, yet there were some technological achievements nevertheless.
      - soco 5y ago
        I argue that the ways of the Russian Empire weren't that much different from the Soviet Union ways - both internally and with its vassal states.
        tristor 5y ago
        "New boss... same as the old boss." as they say. This is true for most regime changes in history. Those in power change, and their motivated reasoning may change, but the net effects on those down the stack is pretty much the same.
        thriftwy 5y ago
        Russian Empire was very different, like South Korea - North Korea different.
        artem247 5y ago
        I would say that Russian Empire and USSR were similar in the methods of achieving their goals — a lot of rigid hierarchical structures, top-down management, a certain level of brutality. But the goals were very different.
  - flerchin 5y ago
    Russian boots on the moon when?
  - aaron-santos 5y ago
    The propagandist wants the opponent to be strong enough to be a threat but ideologically weak enough to defeat. That should be enough for anyone to pause and think hard about what's really going on.
teekert 5y ago
For sure, but it's also the other way around, I read RTV for some time (everybody should), same news, very different angle. The fear and contempt of the west (the NATO) is palpable. I imagine it is the same the other way around, but I am just used to it. Edit: A nice example: EU: https://www.dw.com/en/nord-stream-2-gas-pipeline-what-is-the-controversy-about/a-44677741 https://www.dw.com/en/nord-stream-2-gas-pipeline-what-is-the... RT: https://www.rt.com/business/476844-eu-russia-us-sanctions/ https://www.rt.com/business/476844-eu-russia-us-sanctions/
- yakshaving_jgt 5y ago
  Yes, I absolutely recognise that. I've spent enough time in both Sweden and Russia (and Poland, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Romania, etc, etc, etc) to recognise the same stories and military expeditions being told from different angles. It is absolutely true that each nation tells their citizens their own stories. The point I took issue with was in the excerpt I pulled, which describes the Western perspective as the "conventional" one, which seems a rather Americentric thing to write.
- teddyh 5y ago
  This is literal whataboutism.
  - markenqualitaet 5y ago
    It is not, I think, if it's the _exact same relation in reverse.
    - teddyh 5y ago
      It is still whataboutism. Do two wrongs make a right? Does an accusation of hypocrisy nullify any original criticism, no matter how true?
      - markenqualitaet 5y ago
        No, I get what you mean, but I still think it's a different argument in nature. It's not two wrongs, it's one and the same. For me typical fallacy would be something like "You did A. A is bad." "So what? You did B. B is bad." This tries to dismiss A , while "Both did A." tells us something about A.
bufferoverflow 5y ago
You need to learn some history instead of propaganda. Both people and ideas were highly filtered in circulation. That's a fact.
- coldtea 5y ago
  >You need to learn some history instead of propaganda. Just don't trust the history of your national side -- or the winners, in most cases.
  - randomeat 5y ago
    WW2, for example
    - coldtea 5y ago
      Especially that. What with provoking the Japanese before Pearl Harbor to get an excuse to join the war, the propaganda over decades to dismiss the importance of USSR in the fall of Nazi Germany, Dresden, the reasoning behind hitting Hiroshima and Nagashaki, the cozying up with "ex" Nazis in West Germany (now an ally), and tons of other dirty laundry... What, you expected at least this to be a clear cut "pure good vs pure evil" affair, the way "sanctioned" national histories retell it? Here's but an example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS_St._Louis#The_%22Voyage_of_the_Damned%22 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS_St._Louis#The_%22Voyage_of_... https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2017/06/american-nazis-in-the-1930sthe-german-american-bund/529185/ https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2017/06/american-nazis-in-... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2001/04/hitlers-willing-business-partners/303146/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2001/04/hitlers...
      - randomeat 5y ago
        Minor in comparison to the larger propaganda over that war
      - reducesuffering 5y ago
VictorPath 5y ago
It's great that Bulgaria was so technologically forward in 1945! If the Warsaw Pact allowed people and ideas to circulate, they might have launched satellites and men in space before the West!

Grumbledour 5y ago

This narrative reminds me of the similar program in the UK to teach a whole generation computer literacy which I think the country still benefits from. It is somewhat comforting to see what long lasting consequences such programs can have if you really put in the effort, if only for a few years. Maybe this also hits a bit close to home when my own government constantly declares how they want to make us the next center of [insert current buzzowrd] and of course always fails because it's just an excuse to pump a few billion into the private sector. But looking at these kind of stories, hope is not lost and I wish to see these kind of experiments again soon.

shellac 5y ago
> This narrative reminds me of the similar program in the UK to teach a whole generation computer literacy Probably the "BBC Computer Literacy Project" https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=BBC_Computer_Literacy_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=BBC_Computer_Lite... (apologies, there's no specific wikipedia page) which produced both a home computer - the BBC Micro - and a series of TV programmes starting with The Computer Programme.
- Grumbledour 5y ago
  Yes, thank you. Not being from the UK and having heard about it mainly from youtube I could not remember the name.
  - the-dude 5y ago
    To provide further context: one could say ARM spun out of it.

Guthur 5y ago

The major Achilles heel of communism is its central planning. It was, and likely still is, intractable to model the nuances and therefore inherent flexibility of a price based market system. The Soviet Union would seesaw back and forth from plenty in one particular item to absolute scarcity. There was very little room for micro adjustments as so much was centralised. The efforts that were undertaken to replace the price signal were also truly monumental, armies of bureaucrats collecting information on every detail of consumption and then trying project needs across an entire society. It's a herculean task even by today's standards of information processing.

varispeed 5y ago
> The major Achilles heel of communism is its central planning. It is removing agency from people and assumes that the party knows better - which essentially is just another form of slavery.
sega_sai 5y ago
I am wondering to what extent the central planning is much more tractable now with the amount of data and computerization. It is not like free market is perfect in adjusting either (i.e. situation with timber or computer chips or containers in covid times). I'm not convinced that central planning is the best way to organize the state, but I'm wondering whether the intractability argument against is still valid or not.
- thriftwy 5y ago
  It's going to be highly non-trivial when most of your supply chain (any item maker in the world) is not on the same plan, but instead offers wares at market rate.
- nextstep 5y ago
  There was a semi-successful attempt at this in the 70s in Chile, but it was stopped by the CIA: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn

_hao 5y ago

I'm from Bulgaria and the article is pretty good for the most part. I'm from the so called "children of democracy" generation which is basically the first generation(s) after the communist regime fell in '89 (I was born in 1993). One thing I have to say is that IT in Bulgaria succeeds right now not because of the government or some historical acumen, but despite of it. I think there might be some inertia from back then, but that's gone if we look things as of today. Taxes are low (relatively) to other EU countries, while the quality of work being done is very high. With that said Bulgaria is still mainly an outsourcing destination. There are some innovative homegrown companies like Chaos Group (creators of V-Ray) and others, but relatively to the size of the market they are few and far between. I'm based in London now, but on my recent trip back a month ago I met with some ex-colleagues and we talked about how there's potentially a salary bubble forming. There are positions for new grads without any experience starting from 5000 BGN (2500 EUR) which is absolutely insane. Given that the average gross salary for Sofia (the capital and most well paid/expensive city in Bulgaria) is 1976 BGN[1] that's not normal. Another case was for a German company so desperate to find people that they paid a friend of mine net 6000 EUR a month as a front-end. That's even crazier. Companies like VMware that created big campuses pay around 7000-9000 BGN a month for devs (not seniors/team leads). You can live like a king with those kinds of salaries in Bulgaria, but you'll be surrounded by shitty infrastructure, non-existing government and all other types of shit that people like me that have left don't want to deal with. [1] https://www.nsi.bg/en/content/3930/statistical-regions-district https://www.nsi.bg/en/content/3930/statistical-regions-distr...

merpnderp 5y ago
New graduates in computer science start out at about 2x the median household income in my small US state. I don't know if it is a bubble or the world economy is changing faster than people can be educated.
- beckman466 5y ago
  > the world economy is changing faster than people can be educated how can people learn if large parts of humanity's scientific and technological feedback/learning loops are commoditized and made artificially scarce by our economic system? especially now that we have digital technology available that could make the storing and transmitting of informational artifacts super cheap. so i think neither of the two reasons you stated, but because we are living in a black box society. we are being forcefully disinherited by the propertied class. knowledge laborers who get 2x median income have just been less victim to capitalist gatekeeping, since a few are needed to generate more intellectual property for the propertied class. [2] [1] Aaron Swartz, Guerilla Open Access Manifesto: https://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamjuly2008_djvu.txt https://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamj... [2] Wendy Liu, Gatekeeping in the tech industry: https://dellsystem.me/posts/fragments-50 https://dellsystem.me/posts/fragments-50

jyotimalhot 5y ago

great!!

twic 5y ago

> The organization that prepared most Bulgarian children to be the model communists of the future was the Dimitrov Communist Youth Union (DKMS). Ah, that's why my Red Hat machine was always building DKMS modules!

kongin 5y ago

>Perhaps today’s technological and political entrepreneurs, like their socialist predecessors, may find out that a new generation raised in conditions of financial crashes, pandemics, and political deadlock may draw different ideological conclusions to what the new status quo intends. What a weird take, the generation that lived after the end of communism saw everything get worse year after year. It's just that the majority of us left. Out of six first cousins born between 1983 and 2003 one is still in Bulgaria because she can make a living from the farmland that we were all meant to inherit and is keeping an eye on the ageing relatives that are still there. The rest of us aren't there and don't intend to return for the next 40 years. We all view socialism very favourably and our parents as idiots who killed the golden goose expecting golden chicken nuggets till the end of time.

phreeza 5y ago
The last paragraph caught me by surprise, most eastern European expats I know are quite anti-socialist.
- kongin 5y ago
  Of course I vote against socialism in the West, I'm here to make money, the less taxes the more money.
  - ricksunny 5y ago
    I can't tell where there might be irony here - >We all view socialism very favourably and our parents as idiots who killed the golden goose expecting golden chicken nuggets till the end of time. vs. >Of course I vote against socialism in the West, I'm here to make money, the less taxes the more money. Can you describe how these two statements can be rationalized into a cohesive position?
    - kongin 5y ago
      A vegan cattle rancher doesn't want everyone to be vegan.

hyfgfh 5y ago

Is it about socialism or communism?

angryostrich 5y ago

It always makes me sad to see these beautiful ideas to use technology to bring about a better life for everyone squashed by ineptitude and greed of bureaucracy. In their view, it was the Bulgarian worker rather than the system that was to blame—shirking responsibilities, pilfering the petty change, and sleeping on the job. It's amazing how similar this is to capitalist thinking. Guess it doesn't matter if the people are exploited by private owners or the state.

KorematsuFredt 5y ago

I remember the socialist India where workers unions opposed any kind of computerization/automation. This especially hurt Indian banks as they continued to use costly manual calculations which employed army of clerks. However one of the despotic Indian PM forcibly took over all private banks and "nationalized" it and later the same party used these banks as a jobs program to employ thousands of party workers and others to win votes. A lot of these youngsters were bored of this manual work and insisted on computerization and the workers unions could not maintain the opposition. (In Indian government owned businesses people never lose their jobs. Which means even if a machine replaces your work, you will still get paid just to show up at work. While it makes sense to oppose digitization when you are unemployed, it makes sense to support it once you are employed. A bit of catch 22. This is not true for private companies as they can not keep people on payroll they don't need.)