Cybersyn

= famous planning project under the Allende administration in Chile, stewarded by Stafford Beer

Description

"Owen Hatherley, the author of Militant Modernism, pointed out to me a project called Cybersyn, from the former socialist government in Chile in the early 1970s. I regret that I did not know before this project (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn), which was a real-time, computer controlled planning system, coordinating 500 nationalised factories in Chile. I then read the PhD thesis of Eden Miller submitted to MIT in 2005, which follows the traces of the project, the engineers who set it up, Chilean history in the 1970s. The thesis is a history of technology thesis, yet gives brilliant insights regarding possible models and designs which can be put at the service of a socialist practice…which is exactly what the communist laboratory is for. In this post I want to summarise the findings of Dr. Miller, which is the unique authoritative source on the subject and interpret them in my own way, by also offering some comparative outlook with Red Star’s statistical system of labour allocation.

Cybersyn originates in the work of a British professor called Stafford Beer who developed cybernetic ideas during the 1960s. A group of engineers was influenced by those ideas and when they took a position in Allende’s government invited Beer to set up a computerized system to coordinate 500 factories in Chile with the aims to increase worker participation and achieve efficiency at the shop floor. When Beer came to Chile, there was only one computer, which would be the main government computer at the center. The Cybersyn team used a telex network, which had been used to track satellites. Even though telex networks were only able to transmit ASCII characters, they were based on a high speed of information exchange similar to the Internet.

The first component of the system, Cybernet used the existing telex network in order to make every factory communicate with the main computer. Production information was sent from the factories to a telex control room where employees transferred the data onto punch cards and fed them into the mainframe computer for processing. The system was designed as a real-time economic control, similar to the Red Star’s statistical agencies, but in practice data was transmitted once a day. Telex networks are a brilliant bricoleur’s solution to the lack of available technology in the context of a developing country, which is subject to political hostility by imperialist powers. It shows how available resources can be creatively used for new purposes by change-driven individuals in a change-inducing environment.

The second component of the Cybersyn system, Cyberstride produced quantitative flow charts of activities within each factory. It did ‘statistical filtration on the numbers output from the factory models, discarding the data that fell within the acceptable system parameters and directing the information deemed important upward to the next level of management’ (Miller, 2005). The software developed certain methods to identify production trends and if a variable fell outside of the range determined by the system, the system made a warning, which was called an ‘algedonic signal’. The relevant person from the factory emitting the signal was given time and freedom to solve the problem. In case he was unsuccessful, the central management had the right to interfere. This principle was to preserve the autonomy of the lower-levels managers.

According to Miller, Cyberstride could be seen as an instrument to predict and map the behaviour of Chilean factories. The algorithm was based on Bayesian probability theory to foresee industrial performance. Since the government could rely on possible trends, it could intervene in advance. Beer wanted to keep the problem signals as simple as possible: sources of energy, raw materials, worker satisfaction present on a given day." (http://nightsoflabour.wordpress.com/2010/06/22/cybersyn-further-thoughts-for-a-communist-laboratory/)