Eden Medina- Research

Book Released

From MIT Press:
"In Cybernetic Revolutionaries, Eden Medina tells the history of two intersecting utopian visions, one political and one technological. The first was Chile's experiment with peaceful socialist change under Salvador Allende; the second was the simultaneous attempt to build a computer system managing Chile's economy. Neither vision was fully realized--Allende's government ended with a violent military coup; the system, known as Project Cybersyn, was never completely implemented--but they hold lessons for today about the relationship between technology and politics.

Medina, drawing on extensive archival material and interviews, examines the cybernetic system envisioned by the Chilean government--which was to feature holistic system design, decentralized management, human-computer interaction, a national telex network, real-time control of the growing industrial sector, and modeling the behavior of dynamic systems. She also describes, and documents with photographs, the network's Star Trek-like operations room, which featured swivel chairs with armrest control panels, a wall of screens displaying data, and flashing red lights to indicate economic emergencies.

Studying project Cyberysn today helps us understand not only the technological ambitions of a government in the midst of political change but also the limitations of the Chilean revolution. At the same time, human attempts to combine the political and the technological with the goal of creating a more just society can open new possibilities, technological, intellectual, political, and otherwise. Technologies, Medina writes, are historical texts; when we read them we are reading history."

Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende's Chile is available for order on Amazon.com Videos are available of Professor Medina talking about her book at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School and the Department of Computer Science at the University of Chile.

Learn more about the book at www.cyberneticrevolutionaries.com.

Other Current Projects

•I am co-organizing a reading workshop on technology for the Indiana University Center for Theoretical Inquiry in the Humanities.

•With funding from the Indiana University Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research, I am researching the communication breakdowns that occurred during the 2010 Chile earthquake and co-authoring an article on the social construction of tsunami risk with anthropologist Stephanie Kane.

•I am co-editing the book Beyond Imported Magic: Studying Science and Technology in Latin America (MIT Press, under contract).

•I am laying the groundwork for my next multiyear research project "Historical Perspectives on Information Technology and Human Rights."

Previous Projects

•I co-organized the Mellon Foundation John E. Sawyer Seminar in Comparative Cultures that took place during the 2010-2011 academic year. The seminar was titled "Rupture and Flow: The Circulation of Technoscientific Facts and Objects." More information about the seminar is available at our seminar website.

•My article, "Big Blue in the Bottomless Pit: The Early Years of IBM Chile," uses Chile as a South American case study to explore how IBM created and benefitted from its global corporate culture.

(image used with permission from IBM Chile)

•In 2005, I designed an installation on the Cybersyn history that appeared at the ZKM Center for Digital Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany from March-October. The installation was part of the larger exhibit "Making Things Public" curated by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel. Here you can see an overhead shot of the Opsroom installation. I authored an accompanying catalog entry on the installation, which appears in the edited volume Making Things Public (MIT Press, 2005).

(Photo taken from http://www.zkm.de).

•Investigating ways to intergrate the history and social studies of computing in the informatics and computer science curriculum constitutes an ongoing interest of mine. I have published articles on this topic for the Computer Research Association and the ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education (ACM SIGCSE). I presented a paper on this subject at the 2005 United Nations World Summit on the Information Society in Tunis, Tunisia.

• In 2005, I presented a conference paper on the history of the Citroën Yagán, a Chilean "automobile for the people" designed by the French car maker during the socialist government of Salvador Allende. The paper illustrated how Chile's political history contributed to the manufacture of this unique automobile. It argued that the re-evaluation and reframing of the Allende period in recent years resulted in the rediscovery of and nostalgia for the Yagán -- a car that has been dubbed the "ugliest automobile in history." Here you can see a picture of my father-in-law in the driver's seat of the Yagán.

•In 2004, I wrote an article on the Chilean free software movement and the challenges it faced in an economy driven by the private sector.