Dreaming of Cybernetic Democratic Socialism: Remembering Chile’s Project Cybersyn
We were delighted to open this year’s engagement programme with The Santiago Boys: Discussion featuring Evgeny Morozov for a stellar panel discussion co-hosted by the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (IIPP) and the UCL Department of Science and Technology Studies (STS). Evgeny Morozov is a public intellectual, writer, and researcher who studies technology’s social and political implications. He has recently released a nine-part podcast series (The Santiago Boys: The Tech World That May Have Been) in which he dramatises the winding true story of Chile’s Project Cybersyn, the true story of Chile’s pursuit of cybernetic democratic socialism in the 1970s. It is the true story of how Chilean President Salvador Allende’s government leaders and a British cybernetics and management consultant came together to craft a new way forward for a country and its people and how those efforts were ultimately cut short in 1973 by US-supported military coup, Chicago Boys’ neoliberal economic reforms, and installation of the dictatorial leader Augusto Pinochet.
Morozov revealed more about the 2.5-year journey behind this series, which involved him learning more about the art of narrative storytelling and working with a sound team to develop musical accompaniments that punctuated key moments and immersed readers deeper into the world of its historical protagonists.
Project Cybersyn’s Formation
Morozov recounts that the Chilean government began conceptualising Project Cybersyn to aid the national government management of the national economy following its nationalisation of critical enterprises. Project Cybersyn was a distributed decision support system designed to manage the national economy through digitality (visuality, computing, and interfaces) and bottom-up participative decision-making. After a chance meeting in London, Fernando Flores, Finance Minister for President Allende’s administration in the early 1970s, recruited Stafford Beer, a British cyberneticist and management expert, to work on Project Cybersyn.on Project Cybersyn took place from the late 1970s to 1973, and Beer served as its principal architect.
Specifically, Morozov explains that to compensate for the lack of managers, the government envisioned harnessing the power data, real-time communications, and computation to close its managerial gap. The government decided to model the activities across all of its nationalised enterprises and talk with workers to develop indicators and models of its productive processes that would be monitored daily and supplied to Project Cybersyn system via a network of telex machines (Cybernet).
Project Cybersyn’s Larger Vision
Morozov emphasises that Allende’s government pursued Project Cybersyn as a core component of its visionary pursuit of cybernetic democratic socialism. This transformation involved the development of redistributive national wealth policies, nationalising enterprises, and increasing workers’ autonomy. The then-emergent intellectual paradigm, Dependency Theory, also informed Project Cybersyn’s visionary global political aims. Morozov highlights that Dependency Theory emerged from prominent thinkers in Latin America in the 1960s (e.g., Raul Prebisch, Hans Singer, etc). Dependency theory is a global historical approach to understanding the uneven nature of global capitalist development and resource flows between ‘developing’ (periphery) and ‘developed’ (core). Project Cybersyn aimed to diminish Chile’s peripherality in the global capitalist system.
Directing Technological Transformation — the frontier of geopolitical and economic competition — toward social and economic progress
Morozov highlighted that technology then (and still now) is seen as the frontier of geopolitical and economic competition. For many Global South countries, government leaders faced significant industrialisation challenges around technological industrialisation (digitalisation). However, technological industrialisation (digitalisation), left to its own devices, would not result in social and economic progress for developing countries, especially where such processes created new dependencies on the Global North countries through the high technological fees, licensing arrangements, intellectual property rights, and copyright trademarks. Thus, technological sovereignty was a core aim of Project Cybersyn to ensure that Chile’s industrialisation efforts were directed towards social and economic progress for a large segment of its populace.
Project Cybersyn’s Lessons — talk discussion
IIPP Head of Research, Cecilia Rikap, one of the talk panellists, pointed out that Project Cybersyn’s technology-led democratic approach to national economic planning distinctly differed from the top-down approach employed by the then-USSR. Reflecting on this story, Rikap asked how this series’ key lessons should be reflected on by policymakers today caught between a rock and a hard place. Countries regularly have to choose between slower technological development in favour of its technological sovereignty at the expense of faster technological development in favour of its competitiveness, dynamic capabilities, and technological modernisation at the risk of increased technological dependency. In a world where Big Tech companies are increasingly challenging the sovereignty of their own states concerning AI, Rikap remarked that we can draw lessons from Chile’s Project Cybersyn in terms of development, innovation, the interplay of states and large businesses, and economic planning that remain relevant today.
Professor of Science and Technology Policy at the UCL Department of Science and Technology Studies, Jack Stilgoe, highlighted the contemporary popular discourse around the inevitability of digital transformations and AI. The podcast highlighted genuine alternatives and imaginings of technological transformation that remain poignant and can inform the thinking and the discussion about digital technologies and AI today. Introducing technology into political debates often heightens existing tensions between democracy and socialism. Stilgoe asked Morozov what should we, the audience, conclude about technocracy and scientism, where the democratic idealism of technological transformation can also give way to the practices regularly cited as being authoritarian in nature today, like, for example, surveillance capitalism.
Conclusion
Pursuing democratic approaches to technology policy that emphasises both public value and public purpose is complex not only as a national technological and economic planning project but also as an ideologically-driven political project. Morozov’s masterful retelling of Project Cybersyn’s story and illustration of the Santiago Boys’ significance and broader legacy emphasise why these key lessons remain so relevant today. Specifically, Morozov reveals the role that visionary leaders, collaborative innovation networks, democratic-power-enhancing institutions, participatory practices, and social movements can play in reorienting technological transformations toward more just futures.
In a dynamic, interdependent and rapidly changing world, becoming even more so through digital transformation processes, ensuring that such efforts are pursued alongside economic progress, social progress, and equity is vital. Today, policy actors negotiate the confluence of geostrategic, big tech, and elite interests as they undergo digital transformations across their governments. The critical question of our time is how people can ensure that those efforts remain rooted in public value, public purpose, and democratic power across societies and in service of the global common good.
