Go-ddamnn. Who'da thunk?
The Socialist President Salvador Allende was elected to power in Chile in 1970, and embarked upon a series of radical reforms to Chilean society and the economy. As an alternative to a Soviet style centrally planned economy, Allende’s government instead looked for another route through which to replace the market.
At the heart of this strategy was Project CYBERSYN, a prototype internet system designed to link together the needs of the economy via a cybernetic ‘central nervous system’ devised by British cyberneticist, Stafford Beer.
Building on the insights of Norbert Wiener, the founding father of cybernetics, Stafford’s vision entailed a radical experiment in grass-roots networking. Aiming to directly involve workers at all levels of production and distribution in the organic management of the economy, Project CYBERSYN reached an advanced prototype stage before the network’s destruction in the military coup led by Augusto Pinochet on September 11th, 1973.
And who here, besides me, knows who Norbert Wiener was?
(In the late 90s, I happened upon a book in my local college library, it was on the new book rack, called HOW WE BECAME POSTHUMAN: Virtual bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (by N. Katherine Hayles), which is how I know about him.)
Scifi frauds. SF illuminates.
_________________
Culture General Contact Unit (Eccentric)
|
Index 
Flat 
Internet in Chile in '73 ??!
Reply
