Cybernetic Revolutionaries

A history of Project Cybersyn, the system built for the Allende government between 1971 and 1973 to manage Chile's nationalised industries. Medina draws on archival material and interviews with participants.

Her central argument is that the project's design intent and its instrumentation pulled in opposite directions. Stafford Beer intended the system to increase the autonomy of workers and plant-level managers, while the apparatus he built, a telex network reporting into a single operations room, tended towards centralisation.

Medina also distinguishes what the operations room conveyed from what the underlying data could support, a distinction often lost in later accounts.

Source for Project Cybersyn.