(2023-10-18) Shalizi Project Cybersyn

Cosma Shalizi on Project Cybersyn. Initial notes, January 2022....This has something of a cult following among contemporary socialists, in no small part, I suspect, because of the period glamour of the photographs of the control room, and because of the aura of righteous martyrdom given the fate of Allende and his government

Considering my interests in the possibilities and limits of economic planning, however, what I want to get very clear on are:
What the various participants (Beer, the various groups among the Chileans) hoped to achieve with Cybersyn;
What the system as implemented actually achieved; and
What a similar system might do with modern, or reasonably-foreseeable, technology.

The main source on all this is Medina's book, which I need to actually finish

Update, 18 October 2023

Having just finished Eden Medina's book (which seems to have no successors), and the papers from the 1970s she cites as the technical sources, a few more notes

Cybersyn was to have four main components:

"Cybernet": A network of telex machines linking factories to the government agency that ran the nationalized

"Cyberstride": A central program running on that mainframe which was essentially doing anomaly / change-point detection on the time series coming in from the periphery

As Dan Davies puts it, the content of the signals it output would have amounted to basically either "situation nominal" or "there's something up at the mill". (cf XmR)

An important part of the design here was that when Cyberstride did raise a warning, it was supposed to go back to the relevant factory, which would get a chance to deal with the matter on its own, thus preserving a certain measure of firm-level autonomy.

"CHECO": A simulation model of the Chilean macroeconomy, which was supposed to let policy-makers do what-if exercises.

The fabulous control room or operations room, which was supposed to display information from Cyberstride and CHECO to decision-makers

(Stafford Beer was also very taken with his thoughts about "algedonic" [=pain-pleasure] meters which The People could twist back and forth to indicate how satisfied or dis-satisfied they were, with a central read-out, but that was, if not literally vaporware because a handful of prototypes were built, then very clearly never going to be a thing.)

I have listed the four parts in order of decreasing completion and utility.

The telex network was the only piece that seems to have been actually useful to the Allende administration --- and that not in the way intended. In October 1972, the mostly-conservative, mostly-small-business-owner trucking industry staged a nation-wide strike against Allende

Cyberstride was eventually brought up and running, but the lag time between taking measurements, running them through the mainframe, and getting them back to decision makers was so long that it seems to have been a complete flop in its intended purpose of detecting problems early before they became serious

It was, of course, an entirely centralized system in terms of computation.

Rhetoric to the contrary, it did nothing to de-centralize control, or to involve workers in participatory decision-making. It also was in no sense a planning system, or any kind of replacement for market coordination.

CHECO produced some models, but at no point does Medina refer to any decision-maker actually consulting them

The operations room also doesn't seem to have been much use. The screens were not, in fact, hooked up to computers; they were for displaying slides

My assessment, based on all this, was that if the Allende government had, by some miracle, survived (), and Cybersyn had been built out as intended, what would have resulted would've been an pioneering example of what we'd now call a "dashboard", tracking time series of performance indicators and throwing alerts to possible change-points in the series.*

it depends on the information being entered into the system honestly in the first place, and not fudged to conceal problems, to exaggerate distress, or to set easier goals for oneself.

In any case, as a replacement for market coordination, Cybersyn was simply a non-starter. To describe it as a decentralized planning system is nonsense.

Nowadays, of course, the software would run easily on anyone's phone. It'd be easy to give each factory manager their own anomaly-detector, and the telex network would be subsumed into the ordinary phone network. Why you'd want to share the information rather than having anomaly detection done locally is, with modern technology, less clear

I do not want to end on a dismissive note. The people who worked on Project Cybersyn tried to do something new and hard and worthwhile under difficult conditions. What they achieved was remarkable enough to need no exaggeration.

if the CIA and/or domestic reactionaries didn't overthrow them, the Communist Party would have