Books: technology: cybersyn: more excerpts

books/technology/cybersyn.md

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     the world such as the Middle East.
 
     -- 232-233
+
+## Misc
+
+    The strike also had the effect of radicalizing factions of the left,
+    some of which began preparing for armed conflict. Political scientist
+    Arturo Valenzuela notes: “ironically, it was the counter-mobilization
+    of the petite bourgeoisie responding to real, contrived, and imaginary
+    threats which finally engendered, in dialectical fashion, a significant
+    and autonomous mobilization of the working class.”18 Rather than
+    bringing an end to Chilean socialism, the strike pitted workers against
+    small-business owners and members of the industrial bourgeoisie and
+    created the class war that the right openly feared.
+
+    [...]
+
+    The solution he proposed was social and technical, as it configured
+    machines and human beings in a way that could help the government adapt
+    and survive.
+
+    [...]
+
+    Accusations come from Britain and the USA. Invitations [to build
+    comparable systems] come from Brazil and South Africa.” Considering the
+    repressive governments that were in power in Brazil and South Africa in
+    the early 1970s, it is easy to sympathize with Beer’s lament: “You can
+    see what a false position I am in.”46 Beer was understandably
+    frustrated with these international misinterpretations of his
+    cybernetic work.
+
+    [...]
+
+    This Government is shit, but it is my Government.’ ”51
+
+    [...]
+
+    The big problem was “not technology, it was not the computer, it was
+    [the] people,” he concluded.70 Cybersyn, a sociotechnical system,
+    depended on more than its hardware and software components. For the
+    system to function, human beings also needed to be disciplined and
+    brought into line. In the case of Cybersyn, integrating human beings
+    into the system, and thus changing their behavior, proved just as
+    difficult as building the telex network or programming the software—or
+    perhaps even more difficult. While the Cybersyn team could exert some
+    degree of control over the computer resources, construction of the
+    operations room, or installation of a telex machine, they had very
+    little control over what was taking place within the factories,
+    including levels of management participation or whether Cybersyn would
+    be integrated into existing
+
+    [...]
+
+    Beer, however, recognized the real possibility of a military coup. In
+    his letter to the editor of Science for People, he considered whether
+    Cybersyn might be altered by an “evil dictator” and used against the
+    workers. Since Cybersyn team members were educating the Chilean people
+    about such risks, he argued, the people could later sabotage these
+    efforts. “Maybe even the dictator himself can be undermined; because
+    ‘information constitutes control’—and if the people understand that
+    they may defeat even the dictator’s guns,” Beer mused.79 I have found
+    no evidence that members of the Cybersyn team were educating Chilean
+    workers about the risks of using Cybersyn, although they might have
+    been.
+
+    [...]
+
+    after the Pinochet military coup, information in Chile did constitute
+    control but in a very different way than Beer imagined. The military
+    created the Department of National Intelligence (DINA), an organization
+    that used the information it gleaned from torture and surveillance to
+    detain and “disappear” those the military government viewed as
+    subversive
+
+    [...]
+
+    The cybernetic adventure is apparently coming to an end, or is it not?”
+    Kohn asked. “The original objective of this project was to present new
+    tools for management, but primarily to bring about a substantial change
+    in the traditional practice of management.” In contrast, Kohn found
+    that “management accepts your tools, but just them. . . . The final
+    objective, ‘the revolution in management’ is not accepted, not even
+
+    [...]
+
+    Decybernation,” a reference to the technological components of Cybersyn
+    that were being used independent of the cybernetic commitment to
+    changing government organization. Beer wrote, “If we want a new system
+    of government, we have to change the established order,” yet to change
+    the established order required changing the very organization of the
+    Chilean government. Beer reminded team members that they had created
+    Cybersyn to support such organizational changes. Reduced to its
+    component technologies, Cybersyn was “no longer a viable system but a
+    collection of parts.” These parts could be assimilated into the current
+    government system, but then “we do not get a new system of government,
+    but an old system of government with some new tools. . . . These tools
+    are not the tools we invented,” Beer wrote.81
+
+    [...]
+
+    Decybernation” was influenced by the ideas of the Chilean biologists
+    Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela. Understanding the import of
+    Beer’s insistence on organizational change requires a brief explanation
+    of how Maturana and Varela differentiated between organization and
+    structure. According to the biologists, the “structure of a system”
+    refers to its specific components and the relationships among these
+    components. The “organization of the system” refers to the
+    relationships that make the system what it is, regardless of its
+    specific component parts. The structure of the system can change
+    without changing the identity of the system, but if the organization of
+    the system changes, the system becomes something else. In their 1987
+    book The Tree of Knowledge
+
+    [...]
+
+    On 5 May the violent actions of the ultraright paramilitary group
+    Fatherland and Liberty pushed the government to declare Santiago an
+    emergency zone. Placing the city under martial law, Allende accused the
+    opposition of “consciously and sinisterly creating the conditions to
+    drag the country toward civil war.”92 The escalating conflict between
+    the government and the opposition did not bode well for the future of
+    Chilean socialism.
+
+    [...]
+
+    Marx, capital was evil and the enemy. For us, capital remains evil, but
+    the enemy is STATUS QUO. . . . I consider that if Marx were alive
+    today, he would have found the new enemy that I recognize in my
+    title.”101 In “Status Quo” Beer used cybernetics to explore some of
+    Marx’s more famous ideas and to update them for the modern world,
+    taking into account new technological advances in communication and
+    computing. According to Beer, the class struggle described by Marx was
+    out of date and “represent[ed] the situation generated by the
+    industrial revolution itself, and [was] ‘100 years old.’ ”102 Beer felt
+    that capitalism had since created new forms of work and new
+    exploitative relations.103
+
+    [...]
+
+    Bureaucracy always favors the status quo,” he argues, “because its own
+    viability is at stake as an integral system.” In order to survive,
+    bureaucracy must reproduce itself, Beer claimed. This process
+    constrains freedom in the short term and prevents change in the long
+    term.109 “This situation is a social evil,” Beer asserts. “It means
+    that bureaucracy is a growing parasite on the body politic, that
+    personal freedoms are usurped in the service demands the parasitic
+    monster makes, and above all that half the national effort is deflected
+    from worthwhile activities.” Beer concludes that since bureaucracy
+    locks us into the status quo, “dismantling the bureaucracy can only be
+    a revolutionary aim.”110 Beer had long railed against bureaucracy
+
+    [...]
+
+    Nevertheless, Beer’s cybernetic analysis failed to tell him how to
+    advise his Chilean friends and help them save Chile’s political
+    project. In fact, it led him to the opposite conclusion: that it was
+    impossible for a small socialist country to survive within a capitalist
+    world system. “If the final level
+
+    [...]
+
+    societary recursion is capitalistic, in what sense can a lower level of
+    recursion become socialist?” he asks. “It makes little difference if
+    capital in that socialist country is owned by capitalists whose subject
+    is state controls, or by the state itself in the name of the people,
+    since the power of capital to oppress is effectively wielded by the
+    metasystem.”112 Or, to put it another way, Beer did not see how the
+    Allende government could survive, given the magnitude of the economic
+    pressure that a superpower like the United States was putting on the
+    small country. But Beer continued to work for the Allende government
+    even after he reached this conclusion, because his personal and
+    professional investment in Chilean socialism outweighed the pessimistic
+    judgment of cybernetics.113