Project Cybersyn - Stafford Beer's Cybernetic Science Fictions

We'd like to take you today on a little trip
down south

to Chile, because it was there in 1971

amidst the turmoil and excitement of Salvador
Allende's early days in office

as the Americas first legitimately elected socialist head of government

that several science fictional cold war technical
developments

found their most poignant bizarre expression.

When Allende came to power by the narrowest
of electoral margins

he quickly nationalised scores of companies

especially the local branches of multinational
corporations.

But Chilean workers were even swifter

as foreign technical managers began to leave
the country

for fear there assets would be expropriated

Chilean workers councils simply took over
the factories.

These councils represented shop floor democracy

which fit Allende's political program perfectly

but they often had no idea how to actually
run the factories

let alone how to manage the ebbs and flows
of supply and demand.

President Allende although a life long Marxist

was well aware by 1970 of the failures of
soviet style economic planning

where arbitrary dictats and grandiose five
year plans

were running the economy right into the ground.

What was needed the Chilean government experts
felt

was a comprehensive system of sophisticated
modern and decentralised

socialist economic management.

So in July of 1971 Allende's planning chief

this man, Fernando Flores, sought to hire one
of the capitalist worlds

foremost management experts, a cybernetics
guru

who had previously helped run the British
steel industry.

His name was Stafford Beer.

this was an auspicious choice.

Beer was profoundly sympathetic both to Allende's
social ambitions

and to the management problem the Chileans
were facing

and it couldn't have hurt that he looks a
bit like Castro as well.

Beers brand new monograph "Brain of The Firm"

sought to cope with precisely the sort of
large scale administrative problems

the Chileans were facing.

Cybernetics which was invented by Norbert
Wiener at MIT during world war two

is the study of communication, feedback and
control mechanisms in complex systems

and what could be more complex than a nations
entire economy.

The opportunity seemed a godsend to Beer

who immediately flew the fourteen hours from
England to Santiago

with several manuscript copies of his new
book in hand.

"Brain of the firm" would turn into the Bible
of the Chilean economic management program

and Beer himself would return back to Britain

sometimes later looking more like Castro all
the time

with the brand new title of Chile's official
scientific director.

The plan that Beer and his Chilean colleges
devised was terrifically ambitious

it was composed of four components which were
to be assembled at a break neck pace

with the full financial and logistical support
of the government

collectively the system was termed Cybersyn

or perhaps more accurately should be pronounced
'cyber-sin'

as it stood for cybernetic synthesis.

in this case the Chileans themselves generally
called it Synco.

The first component of Cybersyn was the Cybernet

an electronic network that would tie most
of Chiles state run factories

to the administration in Santiago.

Although Beer wanted to construct this as
a digital computer network

perhaps on the model of the United States
new Arpanet

the resources simply were not available to
do that.

So the engineers hacked together an ad hoc
system

based on a set of abandoned telex machines

with human intermediaries then taking the
data that was wired to Santiago

and feeding it all into the second component

Cyberstryde

a program put together by a team of Beer's
engineers in Britain

the software would perform a complex electronic
simulation

of the entire Chilean economy

or rather a few abstracted elements of it

and would run on the two quasi modern mainframes
the government had access to

such as this type of IBM model 360.

ideally this revolution in economic management

would be mirrored by one in actual governance.

Here Beer envisioned a program he called Cyberfolk

which would link the populace to national
leaders

through a technical system by kind to the focus
group dial sessions

some pollsters use today.

prehaps most crucially his entire system would
be managed from

a control room or operations room.

Both on the factory level

where these rooms would ideally be installed
for the workers committees to use

and as in this impressive prototype the highest
governmental level.

Indeed when he saw this mock up

president Allende ordered that it be installed
directly within La Moneda

the presidential palace.

we'd like to focus on that demonstration operations
room model

not because it was the most important functional
component of Cybersyn

but precisely because it was not.

this room was the visible manifestation of
the entire Cybersyn system

and that we'd like to argue both enabled & eventually
doomed the entire grand experiment.

With the ops room Beer sought to embed Chile's
leaders in a futuristic fantasy

of control made real.

He achieved this by commingling signs of actual first
world technological culture

with theatrical effects derived from science
fictional entertainment.

the design here was borrowed directly from
the future

which is to say it was classically modern.

This is supposed to be an energising place

a place of power and action.

The wood panelling and indirect lighting

evokes the quiet and assured aesthetics of
access and privilege

of the British private club

while the displays and colour scheme connote
urgency and potency.

The ops room was an immersive diorama of information

arranged to surround the operator with visual
cues.

This vivid simulation borrows techniques from
the eighteenth centry

panorama and diorama to present a sense of
comprehensive perspective.

Situated in an inverted panopticon, subjects
sitting at the centre of these screens

would be presented with a three hundred and
sixty degree view out into the Chilean economy

providing them with the illusion of occupying
an omniscopic perspective

from which the market places and factories
beyond La Moneda's walls

were rendered not only visible but legible.

And this commanding viewpoint emphasised visual
rhetorics of control

where knowledge and power were subtly merged

and the distinction between command of facts
& command of resources

including human resources was effectively
elided.

When seated there Chile's leaders found themselves

surrounded by glowing screens containing graphically
abstracted summaries

of diverse economic metrics.

The displays convey an impression of having
infinite data at ones fingertips.

To achieve legibility of the mass of economic
data collected by Cybernet

Cybersyn's designers drew heavily on the modern
design tradition

that began with the German bauhaus

and stretched through the iconic New York
subway maps of Massimo Vignelli

with which they are precisely contemporaneous.

this style shown here in one of the ops room
display slides

emphase simplicity and reduction

bold primary colours

clean geometric shapes

sans-serif typefaces

and grid based layouts

its purpose was to free the reader from unnecessary
detail

to clarify and abstract translating the real
world

into a functional operational schematic that
empowered him to take action.

The ops room flow charts and many of Beer's
accompanying design diagrams

extend this functional rhetoric by appropriating
actual scientific and engineering symbols.

Such as this zig zag sqiggle the electronic
symbol for resistor

and this triangle similar to the electronic
symbol for an operational amplifier.

Further Beer attempts a complex metaphorical
mapping

between his own cybernetic ideas and the technical
meanings of these symbols

using the symbol for resistor to stand for
his concept of

a variety attenuator

and the symbol for an op amp for a variety
amplifier.

Note here that Beer uses the word variety
to refer to human autonomy and agency

which is being technically regulated.

occurring within a project that also incorporated

copious technical specifications including
actual circuit diagrams

such as this one here.

This visual style served to extend the aura
of authority

that emanated from the futuristic technological
aspects

of the project to cover its ideological aspects
well.

Even the furniture of the room worked to further
the fantasy.

Beer modelled the design of the ops room chairs

on Finish designer Eero Saarinen's legendary
tulip chair

like other modernist furniture designers

Saarinen took advantage of new fangled materials

such as fibre glass to create continuous organic
curves

and impenetrable shiny surface textures.

If the tulip chair looks familiar to you its
probably because

its the very chair used in another more famous
fantastical control room

the bridge of the star ship Enterprise.

Since Star Trek aired in Britain two years
previous

these chairs had already acquired a patina
of science fictional futurity.

More specifically

these are the chairs that any self respecting
crew of technological utopians

would want to sit in while they navigate the
dangers

of Romulans or Christian Democrats.

Beer modified the tulip chair to include wide
rectangular arm rests

with streamlined integrated controls just
like the Enterprise's captains chair.

In the ops room each member of the Chilean
governmental elite

would live out their own fantasy of being
captain Kirk.

All these visual touches and physical designs

create an impression of modernity and futurism

an illusion of assured sophisticated almost
causal control.

And what could Chile's leaders desire more
as a third world country

cloistered behind an Andean wall from ostentatiously
sophisticated

and modern neighbours Argentina and Brazil

this visual rhetoric of ultra modernism must
have been tantalising.

And for a government struggling with the chaos
of economic and social turmoil

the promise of panoramic knowledge and direct
control

must have also have seemed utterly irresistible.

But lets look a bit more closely at the actual
technical functions

of that ops room.

Beer made clear in his descriptions to his
clients

that this was to be a control room

where the rubber of cybersyn hits the road.

"This operations room has to be driven

and the people in it are the drivers."

Yet there is no button or control surface
here

that actually directly controls anything

nowhere in the room is there any provision
for outputs from the ops room

only informational inputs.

Even those chair controls so reminiscent to
us today of a video game pad

are really just the remote for the various
information displays.

None of those big buttons actually sends a
signal outside the ops room complex.

They only call up images on the screens as
shown here.

Now of course presumably one could leave the
inner sanctum

and find a telephone somewhere and give orders
verbally.

Even in the traditional office there is one
of those on the desk

but there is no desk here, no papers to be
signed

only lounge chairs with ash trays cup holders
and those over sized buttons

for calling up information on to the projection
screens.

This is a room functionally designed for omniscience

not omnipotence

for all of its sci-fi trappings its a library
console

not a launcher of photon torpedoes.

The ops room is really a stage set a model
of modernity

not an actual control centre at all everything
about it is an illusion

a potemkin village.

Cybersyn is the Emerald city

and the ops room is the curtain that conceals
the wizard of Oz.

But why was this illusory physical embodiment
of power so important?

The answer to this question lies deep in Stafford
Beer's cybernetic theory.

In "Brain of the Firm" Beer explains his theory
of

how every organisation is a hierarchy of five
managerial functions.

He illustrates this hierarchy in diagrams
such as this one

which indicates the functions of each level
in schematic terms.

Once more much of the authority here lies
in the very visual rhetoric of illustration.

As with the ops rooms displays

Beer appropriates scientific and technical
symbols

to imbue his representations with an aura
of intrinsic authority.

But as the title of his book makes clear let
alone these images from it.

Beer also appropriated organic metaphorics
to legitimise his theories.

Beer claimed to have derived his five level
hierarchy

from the organisation of the human central
nervous system.

It was this organic metaphor which originally,
according to Beer

attracted Dr Allende, who had been a pathologist
before entering politics.

And this is one of the primary reasons the
ops room

was so important for Allende's government

despite the actual lack of executive function

it was the physical manifestation of large
cerebral diffuse processes

and abstract concepts.

It vividly promised but was actually never
designed to deliver.

A discrete localised site of operational control
in an economic and technical system

which was specifically designed to minimise
such satisfying top down hierarchies.

The stage set of embodied omnipotence is ancient
political theory

as illustrated here famously in Thomas Hobbs
1651 classic Leviathan.

The ops room provided a simple location

for visualising an illusion of encapsulated
governance

and that illusion was crucial to the bureaucratic
and political success

which enabled cybersyn's very existence.

But there is also a mirage of autonomy and
human potency

operating at a deeper level

throughout the entire cybernetic theory expounded
by Stafford Beer.

Indeed more is going on in these organic metaphors

then just a mapping of the corporation

on to an abstraction of the human brain stem.

Technical systems here intrinsically incorporate
human components.

Like the faceless teams who collate and manually
enter that

Cybernet telex data into the Cyberstride computers

so those ops room displays could be animated
so impressively.

Indeed those very displays are not even computer
screens.

There only supposed to look that way.

In fact there slide projections

orchestrated by an invisible army of human
helpers

who behind the scenes of the ops room

laboriously produced the slides and slot them
into

old fashioned Kodak carousels.

The technical artifice in other words is partly

even largely composed of living breathing
servomechanisms

to actuate its futuristic displays of cybernetic
organic modernity

and to actualise the powerful illusion of
omnipotence visualised there.

And again on a deep level this hybridity of
human and machine

is intrinsic to cybernetics itself.

The science of managing complex institutions
and human organisations

as if they were in fact black box instrumental
apparatuses.

In essence then, despite his adamant insistence

that he was constructing tools to augment
not

interpolate human capacities.

Beer's cybernetics is a vision of the cyborg.

The cybernetic organism which represents the
merger of

human and technical elements.

And in this particular cyborg vision

chillingly the hierarchies of control are
reversed.

The humans labour to augment the capacities
of the machines.

Natural intelligence is subsumed or simply
obscured

by mechanical screens.

This is a dark version of the wizard of Oz
indeed.

Yet without the actual possibility of control

What does it matter that the ops room was
constructed

upon these metaphorics of ominous cyborg embodiment?

in early 1973 news of Cybersyn

which had up until this point been kept as
a great secret

leaked to the international and domestic press.

As both were generally quite hostile to Allende's
project already

news of the scheme to incorporate the nation
into a

massive cybernetic control system

did not go over very well at all.

Indeed in a sense Cybersyn fell victim to
the very mythologies

of power and omniscience that it had itself
deliberately inculcated

through its futuristic design.

That illusion of possessive embodied power

had proved instrumental in getting the Allende
administration

to commit to the risky and fabulously expensive
program.

And it had worked.

What national leader would not be attracted
to such a perfect

psychical representation of managerial omnipotence?

But now the rhetoric of cybernetic control
looked like a serious liability.

Beer's response in this hand written speech
he prepared for Allende to

give in defence of the Cybersyn project

in January of nineteen seventy three

was to insist on the benign nature of the
operations room.

"It is not science fiction", he insisted.

"It is not the machine that uses us."

Yet despite these affirmations, fear of technocracy

dominated responses to the programs unveiling.

As Beer himself later recounted to the historian
Eden Medina

shortly before his died:

"The sort of headlines I was getting was Beer
directs Chile from

computer. That's absolutely rubbish. That's
not what I was doing."

Yet as the Chilean right wing magazine "Que
Pasa" declaimed

in September of 1973 less then a week before
the coup:

"Cyberstride's biggest problem however is that
it puts a terrible

weapon of control in the hands of the popular
unity

that could influence the private life of Chilean
citizens

by cybernetic means."

Here was the awful paradoxical product of
Cybersyn's illusions of omnipotence.

Beer could not very well insist in his defence

that the Chilean government had wasted massive
amounts of

precious resources on a system that was in
a word, impotent.

Indeed even at this stage the actual state
of the ambitious system

was not exactly impressive.

Cybernet was an assemblage of old telex machines.

Cyberstride was really only an extremely simplified

economic modelling suite.

Cyberfolk never attracted much enthusiasm
beyond Beer himself.

And the vaunted ops room was in actuality
just a mock up.

It wasn't even plugged in.

It couldn't even display real economic statistical
data

let alone micromanage the nations economy.

This all heightens the irony

that by the spring of nineteen seventy three

Beer was forced into hiding to avoid rumours

that this foreigner was secretly delivering
the technology

of totalitarian control to the Chilean government.

Beer was reduced to holing up in an isolated

beach front cottage an hour away from Santiago

where government ministers occasionally discretely

drove out to consult with him.

As a result though, he was far more fortunate
than

many of his Chilean colleagues when the coup
came

on September the eleventh nineteen seventy
three.

Unlike president Allende Stafford Beer was
able to flee the country safely

while CIA backed military officers
stormed the seat of government

at La Moneda.

In one of its first acts under Marshal law

The ruling junta destroyed the prototype ops
room

and disconnected the Cybernet.

Was it that the generals were making a populist
gesture

to dismantle the supposed technologies of
control?

Or rather, Was it that having eagerly examined

the supposed technology of governmental totalitarian
omnipotence?

They discovered that Cybersyn was, at essence

merely a system for coordinating economic
statistics

and therefore destroyed it as worthless?

Disappointed to discover the truth behind
the powerful illusions

they may have simply felt that the entire
system should be disappeared.

So many others would share Cybersyn's fate

in the dark years to come.