Description

This article presents a history of ‘ Project Cybersyn ’, an early computer
network developed in Chile during the socialist presidency of Salvador Allende
(1970–1973) to regulate the growing social property area and manage the transition
of Chile’s economy from capitalism to socialism. Under the guidance of British
cybernetician Stafford Beer, often lauded as the ‘ father of management cybernetics ’,
an interdisciplinary Chilean team designed cybernetic models of factories within
the nationalised sector and created a network for the rapid transmission of econ-
omic data between the government and the factory floor. The article describes the
construction of this unorthodox system, examines how its structure reflected
the socialist ideology of the Allende government, and documents the contributions
of this technology to the Allende administration.