
Cybersyn and Allende’s Semi-Automated Luxury Socialism - jashkenas
https://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/2019/02/26/cybersyn-and-allendes-semi-automated-luxury-socialism/
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INGELRII
Cybersyn is great. It highlights the problem of applying cybernetics (systems
theory) into a system with many unknowns. Economics as a whole is not a
controlled environment like factory where systems theory can be successfully.

More modern approach with more success is mechanism design (reverse game
theory). Design games that yield results even when you know very little about
the players.

The Nobel Prize: What is mechanism design and why does it matter for policy-
making? [https://voxeu.org/article/nobel-prize-what-mechanism-
design-...](https://voxeu.org/article/nobel-prize-what-mechanism-design-and-
why-does-it-matter)

>Mechanism design theory is a major breakthrough in the modern economic
analysis of institutions and markets. It revolutionalised the way economists
think about optimal institutions and regulation when governments don't “know
it all.” It has had a major impact on current policy-making and will continue
to do so in the future.

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sehugg
_SAGE also didn’t have any goofy fake control panels with a place to put your
liquor_

No, but the Weapons Director Console incorporated an ashtray and cigarette
lighter on the left side.

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IIAOPSW
I would hope the Weapons Director Console would have had a fake liquor panel
with a dual custody lock as a final provision for the doomsday scenario.

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carapace
You can get a PDF copy of Ashby's book "Introduction to Cybernetics" from this
site:
[http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/ASHBBOOK.html](http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/ASHBBOOK.html)
I highly recommend it to anyone who's interested in the subject.

~~~
toomuchtodo
DNS doesn't seem to resolve. Wayback to the rescue.

[https://web.archive.org/web/20190826152737/http://pespmc1.vu...](https://web.archive.org/web/20190826152737/http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/ASHBBOOK.html)

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monocasa
The author is missing the point pretty hard AFAICT.

> In fact, factory managers ended up routing around the central command center
> and teletype process by calling up other factory managers and working out
> potential supply issues.

That's by design. The idea was to run the whole economy like what we'd call
agile now. Horizontal communication was a huge part in contrast to the Soviet
socialist experiments and the central control was more about figuring out
cross unit issues sort of like a Scrum of Scrums.

It was exactly that embracing of horizontal communication in a socialist
economy that had the CIA scared. Their own communications talked about not
being able to tolerate a "successful socialist experiment".

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pram
I always thought ERP is basically applied “cybernetics”

Also a big problem with a system like this, in the 20th century socialist
states, is that the input data would have been complete bullshit. That was one
of the issues the soviet gosplan ran up against during the final days.
Everyone was lying about their production numbers so the data was useless,
whether in a fancy computer system or not.

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s_kilk
That's certainly true of the Soviet case (the fear instilled by the Stalin
years left everyone lying constantly just to avoid the bullet), but Chile was
very different. The whole project was to build a genuinely inclusive and
worker-led democracy. And they got pretty far with it too, considering they
were under economic blockade. We don't get to find out how the story would
have ended because the Yanks decided to do a fascist coup and kill everyone.

~~~
kspacewalk2
Well, not _everyone_. Some people were allowed to live so that an
unprecedented era of prosperity unmatched by any other country in Latin
America could be ushered in.

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sudosysgen
So prosperous that raising the price of public transit by a few dollars has
led to widespread protests.

~~~
kspacewalk2
Are we comparing it to Canada or something? Then you're right, it's not that
close. Or are we comparing it to the lands of triumphant Salvador Allendes,
like Venezuela? No successful coup took place there, and I hear the transit is
downright free in Caracas these days.

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yowlingcat
A sad trod through a common delusion of grandeur I see on the internet these
days. If the Chilean control room was really ripped off of Star Trek, that's a
little absurd and hilarious but moreover sad.

On the flip side, I'm not sure how much I agree with its premise and
conclusion. Sure, it's easy to mock technocommunism historically if you ignore
the elephant in the room that is China. While not in the same category as old
Soviet and LatAm attempts, all of the quaintly endearing anachronism fades
away. What is to be made of China with respect to such a perspective?

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DoctorNick
>What's fun about this piece is that it puts into perspective how absurd,
unworkable, and thoroughly ripped off of Star Trek the Chilean control room
was, which is thoroughly entertaining.

Pretty presumptuous, considering how it was never really put into practice
before Allende was murdered and Pinochet's brutal regime was installed by the
CIA.

Reminds me of a quote:

“The boys of Capital, they also chortle in their martinis about the death of
socialism. The word has been banned from polite conversation. And they hope
that no one will notice that every socialist experiment of any significance in
the twentieth century – without exception – has either been crushed,
overthrown, or invaded, or corrupted, perverted, subverted, or destabilized,
or otherwise had life made impossible for it, by the United States. Not one
socialist government or movement – from the Russian Revolution to the
Sandinistas in Nicaragua, from Communist China to the FMLN in Salvador – not
one was permitted to rise or fall solely on its own merits; not one was left
secure enough to drop its guard against the all-powerful enemy abroad and
freely and fully relax control at home. It’s as if the Wright brothers’ first
experiments with flying machines all failed because the automobile interests
sabotaged each test flight. And then the good and god-fearing folk of the
world looked upon this, took notice of the consequences, nodded their
collective heads wisely, and intoned solemnly:

 _Man shall never fly._ ” – William Blum

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NaggingGranpa
You give the CIA too much credit.

Much of the armed forces and the civilian populace hated Allende and his
policies. Pinochet was an opportunist who jumped on the bandwagon when it was
already in motion. The CIA had it easy. In South Vietnam, under more adverse
conditions, the CIA failed miserably.

~~~
DoctorNick
>Much of the armed forces and the civilian populace hated Allende and his
policies.

No, actually, he was quite popular[1]:

>Between 1970 and 1973, the Unidad Popular (Popular Unity)—the coalition of
parties backing Allende—actually increased its vote, a growing popularity
which in itself casts some doubt on the widely spread tales of economic
disaster wrought by the government. In the last significant election, a fierce
electoral battle for Congress in March 1973, the Unidad Popular increased its
share of the vote to 44 percent. The rest of the vote was split among the
several other parties, which at that time functioned freely and openly in the
Chilean tradition. The 800,000 who greeted the President on September 4
constituted nearly one-tenth of the national population, the largest political
rally ever held in Chile.

It was the upper classes that hated him, the people who had been getting fat
off the people for the past several decades and stood the most to lose from
his presidency.

[1]: [https://www.thenation.com/article/true-verdict-
allende/](https://www.thenation.com/article/true-verdict-allende/)

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llamataboot
If you want a fun read that you won't know quite what to make of, I highly
recommend Chronicles of Wizard Prang by Stafford Beer - little bit hard to
find a PDF from a non-spammy site, but they are out there!

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coldtea
> _Mind you the Chilean government was being starved of dollars at the time as
> a form of colonial pressure, just as the Venezuelan government is now in
> 2019. The results were hilarious._

Yes, a coup, a dictatorship and tens of thousands tortured and executed, haha.

The whole TFA screams of facile dismissal and cheap comic shots (people smoked
on airplanes at the times and well into the 80s even in the US, so there is
nothing to strike as funny about having ashtrays on the chairs in everybody
that wasn't born yesterday and only remembers a world after the smoking
ban/decline).

Yes, it was just a fancy control room inspired by sci-fi and wanting to look
futuristic, no, they didn't think they were running the Enterprise.

And their failures were more largely attributed to foreign influence, blatant
sabotage and sponsored subversion, and diplomatic pressure, than their
economics approach or the design of the room. They might have failed
economically too, but not for being communist. They were just more socialist
than it was acceptable / allowed for a Banana Republic in Latin America at the
time (or now). Similar measures in sovereign countries in Europe wouldn't bat
an eye...

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stebann
I felt bad when I read that too. I think foreigners don't know about Latin
America, they where all indoctrinated to hate "socialist" or "populist" Latin
America states. All propaganda, they never think why people put them there
first. Just look what happened in Bolivia.

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coldtea
It's funny in a way, that a modern person believes that through technology we
can very well reach consciousness with computers, go to Mars, design our
genes, achieve immortality, colonize the universe, find the "god's particle",
and so on, but successfully modelling an economy is impossible...

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ccvannorman
I don't think that's the precise way people feel. Socialism/etc HAS "failed",
and capitalism HAS "succeeded", for certain definitions of failed and
succeeded. What people assume is that socialism today would fail (and I
agree). But if presented with new facts, e.g. here is a robot that can produce
food, gather solar power, and manufacture goods for you, and there is one per
household, suddenly the literal definition of socialism can become much more
pallatable.

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coldtea
Well, modern capitalism is socialism (the US for example or EU are hardly
"free markets", there are all sorts of protections, interventions, tarrifs -
hardly a Trump novelty -, things like copyright (another artificial government
given restriction on trade and manufacturing, central monetary policy, huge
armies and postcolonial negotiations to secure favorable deals, mass
surveillance, and so on.

And modern socialism (whether what the US calls as such in the nordic
countries or France, or what they have in China) is also a whole lotta of
capitalism, so there's that too.

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helpPeople
Many believe those protections you describe is the cause of inequality.

For example,when only 300k/yr physicians can give you access to medicine, it's
not capitalism.

