Telling winds from the cybernetic past

http://itsthedatatalking.blogspot.com/2015/01/the-best-laid-plans-of-mice-and-man.html http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/cybernetic-revolutionaries http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/10/13/planning-machine https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/04/allende-chile-beer-medina-cybersyn/

 Does a 1970s Utopian technology effort offer useful guides for those trying to assess the progress of new technology today? In one case, at least, yes. It is the story of Salvador Allende's attempt to build a working Socialist government in Chile with computer cybernetics.

The tale is told especially well, under the able hands of author and researcher Eden Medina. Medina rolls up the takeaways in a recent article in Jacobin magazine. It is a summary of some important lessons garnered during work on her 2013 book, The Cybernetic Revolutionaries.

You see, before CIA influencers sponsored Augusto Pinochet and company's junta, Allende's democratically government was trying to bring a new form of socialism that was data driven. In those days, what might pass for the big data enterprise today would be called cybernetics. This school of technology, founded by Norbert Wiener, studied feedback in systems, be they animal or machine. The automatic pilot was perhaps cybernetics crowning achievement. In the Chile case, technologist Stanford Beers was enlisted to bring the magic of realtime feedback to state planning. It was way ahead of its time, and burdened by lethal sniping.

 A chief lesson in all that conflag is that the state and its priorities shape how a technology is designed and used. In Allende's work to create a better state planning system based on the infant cybernetic architectures, Beers was given had a lot of rein to try and involve workers, ahead of engineers and government bureaucrats in the planning of production. Uber advocates might say that is going on with its upsurge today, though, we'd say, that is arguable.

"Computer innovation wasn’t born with Silicon Valley startups, and it can thrive by taking on design considerations that fall outside the scope of the market," writes Medina. Yet, the basic lesson is tremendously true: technologies get no more freedom to range than the political system gives them. That lesson may be taught at MIT, but it is largely buried in the footnotes or drowned out by the gush of venture capital, and its dreams.

Read more on this.