Fernando Flores proudly remembers the curiosity that led him to embark on an ambitious and futuristic project during the government of Salvador Allende in Chile.
“When I was young I always worried about being someone and I read a lot,” the Chilean politician who held various positions in the Allende government, overthrown by Augusto Pinochet on September 11, 1973, told BBC Mundo.
Thanks to that love of reading, he stumbled upon the theories of the British Stafford Beer, a technology guru known for his work in the fields of operations research and cyber management.
With the ideas of the engineer and the knowledge of the theorist, the duo developed the Cybersyn project, known by some as “the socialist internet” or “the Allende internet”.
The idea was to create a system to efficiently manage a socialist economy, applying cybernetics to the management of Chilean industrial networks.
The ambition of this engineer had led Allende to appoint him head of the Production Development Corporation (Corfo), an agency under the Ministry of Economy in charge of supporting entrepreneurship, innovation and Chilean competitiveness, at just 26 years old.
Already high up in a government that intended to carry out many changes, the visionary originally from Talca, in central Chile, anticipated “a very big management crisis” during Allende’s tenure.
“I decided to send Beer a letter in which I told him that we had a problem,” says Flores, who is now 80 years old and lives in California, United States.
Beer received the letter on July 13, 1971.
In it, Flores spoke to him about the “complete reorganization” of the public sector of the Chilean economy, which he was in charge of, and said he was “in a position from which it is possible to implement it on a national scale -in which cybernetic thought becomes a necessity-, scientific views on management and organization”.
Fernando remembers that Beer responded by expressing joy that someone understood his books and proposed that they meet.
“Hence my visit to London was born. I already had a trip to Europe planned, so it was a happy coincidence.”
Cybernetics to manage nationalizations
The meeting took place that same autumn at the exclusive private Athenaeum gentlemen’s club in central London.
There Flores asked Beer for advice on how to apply cybernetics to the management of the nationalized sector of the Chilean economy, which was expanding rapidly due to Allende’s nationalization policy.
Flores explains that he already had a theoretical understanding, but needed help to test it. For this reason, at the end of the meeting, the then head of Corfo asked Beer to recommend someone.
“He told me that he himself was that person,” Flores enthuses.
And he details that he did not ask anyone for permission to start Cybersyn, initially, not even Allende was aware of the project.
“I had enough power to leave. When we had him walking more and that started to grow, of course I talked to him, ”she adds.
Demand for managers
Thus, Flores recruited Beer, whose ideals by then were far from socialism.
Shortly after the productive meeting at the Athenaeum, Beer traveled to Santiago de Chile and they both got down to business.
Flores says that working with Beer was “an enormous privilege.”
Evgeny Morozov, a technology writer who has researched the Cybersyn project, explains that Allende had nationalized so many companies that he had created a great demand for managers who could run them effectively.
“But they didn’t have those managers,” the creator of “The Santiago Boys”, a series of podcasts about the Cybersyn project launched this year to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the coup that ended the Allende government, told BBC Mundo. .
“The idea was to delegate some of the running of the companies to computers that could analyze what the companies needed and anticipate problems that might arise,” he adds.
“The goal was to automate the management of the Chilean economy as much as possible.”
Morozov claims that the Chilean government planned for the project to be fully operational between 1975 and 1976.
“But that never happened because the coup came before.”
“This is a coup”
Flores speaks with pain of the events that put an end to the Allende government and affirms that his life “was marked” by them.
By the middle of 1972, the Cybersyn Project was advancing, as well as the conspiracies against the socialist government.
During the October 1972 strike, Flores had developed a close relationship with Allende and was appointed Vice Minister of the Economy in the midst of the crisis.
“There I told Allende: ‘Look, this is much bigger than a truck stoppage. In principle, this is a coup d’état’”, says Flores, adding that Allende was surprised by this statement.
“After that conversation, he appointed me in charge of coordinating the government’s response to the strike.”
On December 1 of that same year, Flores became, at the age of 29, one of the youngest Economy Ministers Chile has ever had.
With this new position, he had to put the project aside to focus on the day-to-day tasks of a minister.
And then came the blow.
“I ended up in hard jail, with no rights. Overnight they put me on a plane with my family and the next day I was working at (University of) Standford.”
“It’s amazing. People can’t realize what that means,” he continues.
That marked the end of the Cybersyn project.
In time, Beer would leave the world of technology and business to become a left-wing activist.
In California, Flores became a technology entrepreneur, but with the return to democracy, he returned to Chile and politics.
In 2001 he was elected senator and later worked as president of the National Innovation Council for Competitiveness under the government of Sebastián Piñera.
“It didn’t get past the prototype stage”
Eden Medina, a historian of technology and Associate Professor of Science, Technology and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, explains that the project was in the prototype stage when they carried out the coup in September 1973.
“The Cybersyn Project has its origins in Chilean democratic socialism,” says Medina.
“Different parts of the project had reached different phases, but the project as a whole did not go beyond the prototype phase,” the author of the book “Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in the Chile of Salvador Allende” tells BBC Mundo.
Medina says that in Chile there were less than 50 computers at the beginning of the 70s.
“Initially the Cybersyn Project engineers were just working with one computer and then they started working with another one,” he adds.
This fact makes the historian dislike the term “socialist internet”.
“I think people call it the socialist internet because it was a form of alternative computer network.”
“They were trying to connect the factories that had been nationalized to a national communications network, but they were only using a computer,” explains the American historian.
Technology expert Evgeny Morozov adds that when the coup took place the project was missing “key elements” and that “the whole system was integrated.”
“An Interrupted Dream”
Flores says that Cybersyn cannot be said to have failed.
“The project ended because the military government was against everything Allende was doing,” he says.
The former head of Corfo adds that it is impossible to know if they could have completed it successfully.
“We would have had to last three more years (to find out). We would have had to develop many parts that we did not develop and that I have developed later,” he continues.
Within those parts are inventing a theory of conversations for decision making and how to measure moods in the circuit, Flores cites.
Flores does not echo the reports that the CIA ended the project to eliminate the possibility of Chile developing its own internet.
He says they are “journalistic fantasies.”
“When we were doing this, the internet did not exist. What did exist was the ARPANET, which was a project of the US Ministry of Defense.
While the ARPANET was a project to connect computers and software, Cybersyn sought to connect people and components.
Rather than a “socialist internet,” a term Flores doesn’t like either, he says Cybersyn was simply “an interrupted dream.”
Remember that you can receive notifications from BBC Mundo. Download the new version of our app and activate them so you don’t miss out on our best content.
BBC-NEWS-SRC: https://www.bbc.com/mundo/articles/cz4gljnvnnwo, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-09-03 12:50:05
#Cybersyn #project #internet #visionary #create #government #Salvador #Allende