« reblog: Bruce Sterling - The Farmville Horror | Main | Devin Monnens writes a critical essay about Brenda Brathwaite's "Train" »

March 20, 2010

Santiago Dreaming - Project Cybersyn of Allende's Chile

proto-cyberpunk non-fiction in South America. I've got to find Andy Beckett's book, Allende Pinochet in Piccadilly. This article for the guardian is so deliciously provocative that it whets my appetite for more. He shares some details of an early electronic information network that was developed by cybernetics researcher, Stafford Beer, for the government of Salvador Allende in Chile. Also to look up will be Eden Miller Medina's PhD dissertation that includes some detail on the network called Cybersyn.

Santiago Dreaming by Andy Beckett for the Guardian
Excerpt:

This was known as Project Cybersyn, and nothing like it had been tried before, or has been tried since.

Stafford Beer attempted, in his words, to "implant" an electronic "nervous system" in Chilean society. Voters, workplaces and the government were to be linked together by a new, interactive national communications network, which would transform their relationship into something profoundly more equal and responsive than before - a sort of socialist internet, decades ahead of its time.

via Kottke.org
Update:
MetaFilter has expanded coverage of CyberSyn

Posted by Rafael Fajardo at March 20, 2010 08:41 AM