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Sunday, 3 September 2006 01:46 pmBrowsing the LJ of a friend, I just came across a fascinating story:
Before Pinochet, Chile had a democratically elected socialist leader, Dr. Salvador Allende, from 1970-1973. Allende performed an amazing social experiment: he started a project to install an "electronic nervous system" to control Chile's economy. His goals were to provide a socialist technocratic solution to the problems of Soviet-style top-down socialism.
The design was by a British visionary named Stafford Beer, a consultant and researcher in Operations Research and Cybernetics. His design involved a self-learning system that used Bayesian inference to understand public opinion, predict factory outputs, and generally connect government, the public, and industry nation-wide.
And so it was built, with a telex machine on each of 500 factory floors across the country, in what The Guardian has called a "Socialist Internet." While it was operational from 71-73, it never was completed. The control room was partly a mock-up: reports from the computer were provided by telex and employees drew charts that looked like they belonged in Star Trek TNG. Amazing.
In 1972, general strikes (secretly supported by the CIA), were circumvented by the computer network re-routing shipping around strike areas. Score one for the Socialist Internet. When the government was overthrown in 1973, Pinochet had no use for it and the control room and network were destroyed.
The Guardian story is fascinating; I hope to look up Beer's books at some point as well.
Now, when I read the first two-line description of this adventure, I thought it sounded familiar. I figured it out: Stand on Zanzibar features a fictional African country (Beninia) which purchases a country-wide computing system to propel it from third-world to first-world status. I was totally convinced John Brunner stole the idea, until I realized the book was published in 1969, a year before the elections in Chile.
That's just weird.
Before Pinochet, Chile had a democratically elected socialist leader, Dr. Salvador Allende, from 1970-1973. Allende performed an amazing social experiment: he started a project to install an "electronic nervous system" to control Chile's economy. His goals were to provide a socialist technocratic solution to the problems of Soviet-style top-down socialism.
The design was by a British visionary named Stafford Beer, a consultant and researcher in Operations Research and Cybernetics. His design involved a self-learning system that used Bayesian inference to understand public opinion, predict factory outputs, and generally connect government, the public, and industry nation-wide.
And so it was built, with a telex machine on each of 500 factory floors across the country, in what The Guardian has called a "Socialist Internet." While it was operational from 71-73, it never was completed. The control room was partly a mock-up: reports from the computer were provided by telex and employees drew charts that looked like they belonged in Star Trek TNG. Amazing.
In 1972, general strikes (secretly supported by the CIA), were circumvented by the computer network re-routing shipping around strike areas. Score one for the Socialist Internet. When the government was overthrown in 1973, Pinochet had no use for it and the control room and network were destroyed.
The Guardian story is fascinating; I hope to look up Beer's books at some point as well.
Now, when I read the first two-line description of this adventure, I thought it sounded familiar. I figured it out: Stand on Zanzibar features a fictional African country (Beninia) which purchases a country-wide computing system to propel it from third-world to first-world status. I was totally convinced John Brunner stole the idea, until I realized the book was published in 1969, a year before the elections in Chile.
That's just weird.
