<nettime> Stafford Beer and the Socialist Internet

[David Mandl <dmandl@panix.com>]

When the subject of Brian Eno came up here recently, I meant to chime in
but never got around to it.  A lot of his (non-artistic) work in recent
years has made me uncomfortable, as his main gig AFAICT has been to act as
a "futurist-for-hire" by various big corporations, with everything that
entails (cue California Ideology music...).  His "discovery" and
lionization by WiReD in the mid-nineties kind of clinched it for me.  I
have no idea what he's been doing recently, so this may have changed.

Nevertheless, he's clearly a brilliant guy and has been involved in some
very interesting things over the years.  One person I wanted to mention
was Stafford Beer.  Beer was a cybernetician who worked with Allende in
the early seventies and died just last year.  Eno admired his work and
talked about him a bit in some interviews in the late seventies, and this
led a friend and bandmate of mine to hunt down his books.  He (bandmate)
eventually incorporated texts from Beer's work into a couple of our songs,
a claim that few other bands could make in 1980, I'm sure.

This all leads me to the piece below, which coincidentally appeared in
yesterday's Guardian.

   --Dave.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Santiago dreaming

When Pinochet's military overthrew the Chilean government 30 years ago,
they discovered a revolutionary communication system, a 'socialist
internet' connecting the whole country. Its creator? An eccentric
scientist from Surrey. Andy Beckett on the forgotten story of Stafford
Beer

Andy Beckett
Monday September 8, 2003
The Guardian

During the early 70s, in the wealthy commuter backwater of West Byfleet in
Surrey, a small but rather remarkable experiment took place. In the
potting shed of a house called Firkins, a teenager named Simon Beer, using
bits of radios and pieces of pink and green cardboard, built a series of
electrical meters for measuring public opinion. His concept - users of his
meters would turn a dial to indicate how happy or unhappy they were with
any political proposal - was strange and ambitious enough. And it worked.
Yet what was even more jolting was his intended market: not Britain, but
Chile.

Unlike West Byfleet, Chile was in revolutionary ferment. In the capital
Santiago, the beleaguered but radical marxist government of Salvador
Allende, hungry for innovations of all kinds, was employing Simon Beer's
father, Stafford, to conduct a much larger technological experiment of
which the meters were only a part. 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.

When the Allende administration was deposed in a military coup, the 30th
anniversary of which falls this Thursday, exactly how far Beer and his
British and Chilean collaborators had got in constructing their hi-tech
utopia was soon forgotten. In the many histories of the endlessly debated,
frequently mythologised Allende period, Project Cybersyn hardly gets a
footnote. Yet the personalities involved, the amount they achieved, the
scheme's optimism and ambition and perhaps, in the end, its
impracticality, contain important truths about the most tantalising
leftwing government of the late 20th century.

Stafford Beer, who died last year, was a restless and idealistic British
adventurer who had long been drawn to Chile. Part scientist, part
management guru, part social and political theorist, he had grown rich but
increasingly frustrated in Britain during the 50s and 60s. His ideas about
the similarities between biological and man-made systems, most famously
expressed in his later book, The Brain of the Firm, made him an in-demand
consultant with British businesses and politicians. Yet these clients did
not adopt the solutions he recommended as often as he would have liked, so
Beer began taking more contracts abroad.

In the early 60s, his company did some work for the Chilean railways. Beer
did not go there himself, but one of the Chileans involved, an engineering
student called Fernando Flores, began reading Beer's books and was
captivated by their originality and energy. By the time the Allende
government was elected in 1970, a group of Beer disciples had formed in
Chile. Flores became a minister in the new administration, with
responsibility for nationalising great swathes of industry. As in many
areas, the Allende government wanted to do things differently from
traditional marxist regimes. "I was very much against the Soviet model of
centralisation," says Raul Espejo, one of Flores's senior advisers and
another Beer disciple. "My gut feeling was that it was unviable."

But how should the Chilean economy be run instead? By 1971, the initial
euphoria of Allende's democratic, non-authoritarian revolution was
beginning to fade; Flores and Espejo realised that their ministry had
acquired a disorganised empire of mines and factories, some occupied by
their employees, others still controlled by their original managers, few
of them operating with complete efficiency. In July, they wrote to Beer
for help.

They knew that he had leftwing sympathies, but also that he was very busy.  
"Our expectation was to hire someone from his team," says Espejo. But
after getting the letter, Beer quickly grew fascinated by the Chilean
situation.  He decided to drop his other contracts and fly there. In West
Byfleet, the reaction was mixed: "We thought, 'Stafford's going mad
again,' " says Simon Beer.

When Stafford arrived in Santiago, the Chileans were more impressed. "He
was huge," Espejo remembers, "and extraordinarily exuberant. From every
pore of his skin you knew he was thinking big." Beer asked for a daily fee
of $500 - less than he usually charged, but an enormous sum for a
government being starved of US dollars by its enemies in Washington - and
a constant supply of chocolate, wine and cigars.

For the next two years, as subordinates searched for these amid the food
shortages, and the local press compared him to Orson Welles and Socrates,
Beer worked in Chile in frenetic bursts, returning every few months to
England, where a British team was also labouring over Cybersyn. What this
collaboration produced was startling: a new communications system reaching
the whole spindly length of Chile, from the deserts of the north to the
icy grasslands of the south, carrying daily information about the output
of individual factories, about the flow of important raw materials, about
rates of absenteeism and other economic problems.

Until now, obtaining and processing such valuable information - even in
richer, more stable countries - had taken governments at least six months.  
But Project Cybersyn found ways round the technical obstacles. In a
forgotten warehouse, 500 telex machines were discovered which had been
bought by the previous Chilean government but left unused because nobody
knew what to do with them. These were distributed to factories, and linked
to two control rooms in Santiago. There a small staff gathered the
economic statistics as they arrived, officially at five o'clock every
afternoon, and boiled them down using a single precious computer into a
briefing that was dropped off daily at La Moneda, the presidential palace.

Allende himself was enthusiastic about the scheme. Beer explained it to
him on scraps of paper. Allende had once been a doctor and, Beer felt,
instinctively understood his notions about the biological characteristics
of networks and institutions. Just as significantly, the two men shared a
belief that Cybersyn was not about the government spying on and
controlling people. On the contrary, it was hoped that the system would
allow workers to manage, or at least take part in the management of their
workplaces, and that the daily exchange of information between the shop
floor and Santiago would create trust and genuine cooperation - and the
combination of individual freedom and collective achievement that had
always been the political holy grail for many leftwing thinkers.

It did not always work out like that. "Some people I've talked to," says
Eden Miller, an American who is writing a PhD thesis partly about
Cybersyn, "said it was like pulling teeth getting the factories to send
these statistics." In the feverish Chile of 1972 and 1973, with its
shortages and strikes and jostling government initiatives, there were
often other priorities. And often the workers were not willing or able to
run their plants: "The people Beer's scientists dealt with," says Miller,
"were primarily management."

But there were successes. In many factories, Espejo says, "Workers started
to allocate a space on their own shop floor to have the same kind of
graphics that we had in Santiago." Factories used their telexes to send
requests and complaints back to the government, as well as vice versa. And
in October 1972, when Allende faced his biggest crisis so far, Beer's
invention became vital.

Across Chile, with secret support from the CIA, conservative small
businessmen went on strike. Food and fuel supplies threatened to run out.  
Then the government realised that Cybersyn offered a way of outflanking
the strikers. The telexes could be used to obtain intelligence about where
scarcities were worst, and where people were still working who could
alleviate them. The control rooms in Santiago were staffed day and night.  
People slept in them - even government ministers. "The rooms came alive in
the most extraordinary way," says Espejo. "We felt that we were in the
centre of the universe." The strike failed to bring down Allende.

In some ways, this was the high point for Cybersyn. The following year,
like the government in general, it began to encounter insoluble problems.
By 1973, the sheer size of the project, involving somewhere between a
quarter and half of the entire nationalised economy, meant that Beer's
original band of disciples had been diluted by other, less idealistic
scientists. There was constant friction between the two groups. Meanwhile,
Beer himself started to focus on other schemes: using painters and folk
singers to publicise the principles of high-tech socialism; testing his
son's electrical public-opinion meters, which never actually saw service;
and even organising anchovy-fishing expeditions to earn the government
some desperately needed foreign currency.

All the while, the rightwing plotting against Allende grew more blatant
and the economy began to suffocate as other countries, encouraged by the
Americans, cut off aid and investment. Beer was accused in parts of the
international press of creating a Big Brother-style system of
administration in South America. "There was plenty of stress in Chile," he
wrote afterwards. "I could have pulled out at any time, and often
considered doing so."

In June 1973, after being advised to leave Santiago, he rented an
anonymous house on the coast from a relative of Espejo. For a few weeks,
he wrote and stared at the sea and travelled to government meetings under
cover of darkness. On September 10, a room was measured in La Moneda for
the installation of an updated Cybersyn control centre, complete with
futuristic control panels in the arms of chairs and walls of winking
screens. The next day, the palace was bombed by the coup's plotters. Beer
was in London, lobbying for the Chilean government, when he left his final
meeting before intending to fly back to Santiago and saw a newspaper
billboard that read, "Allende assassinated."

The Chilean military found the Cybersyn network intact, and called in
Espejo and others to explain it to them. But they found the open,
egalitarian aspects of the system unattractive and destroyed it. Espejo
fled. Some of his colleagues were not so lucky. Soon after the coup, Beer
left West Byfleet, his wife, and most of his possessions to live in a
cottage in Wales. "He had survivor guilt, unquestionably," says Simon.

Cybersyn and Stafford's subsequent, more esoteric inventions live on in
obscure socialist websites and, more surprisingly, modern business school
teachings about the importance of economic information and informal
working practices. David Bowie, Brian Eno and Tony Blair's new head of
policy, Geoff Mulgan, have all cited Beer as an influence.

But perhaps more importantly, his work in Chile affected those who
participated. Espejo has made a good career since as an inter- national
management consultant. He has been settled in Britain for decades. He
chuckles urbanely at the mention of Pinochet's arrest in London five years
ago. Yet when, after a long lunch in a pub near his home in Lincoln, I ask
whether Cybersyn changed him, his playful, slightly professorial gaze
turns quite serious. "Oh yes," he says. "Completely."

* Andy Beckett's book Pinochet in Piccadilly is published by Faber.




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