Chile’s Switched-on Socialism Pioneered Networking in Early ‘70s

The idea that computers can strengthen people’s participation in democracy, make government more responsive and spur the economy is no latter-day epiphany. In fact, socialist Chile in the early 1970s was experimenting with ways to make information technology the force for change in that country.

Bringing that little-known fact to light was one of the goals of Eden Medina, Ph.D., of the Indiana University School of Informatics, when she was asked by international curators Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel to contribute to the recent Making Things Public - Atmospheres of Democracy exhibit at the ZKM Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany. A recent book bearing the same name of the exhibit recently was published and it includes a related commentary by Medina.

Medina’s research and expertise was the basis of a multipart installation, “Opsroom,” depicting the history of a Chilean computer project known as Cybersyn, a two-year program initiated in 1971 by Chilean President Salvador Allende. The goal was to connect publicly held Chilean factories to a central mainframe computer in the capital of Santiago and allow the government to monitor factory activities in real-time.

“Cybersyn offered a means of peaceful revolution where economic regulation - not bloodshed - spurred socialist change,” says Medina, an assistant professor who specializes in social informatics and technology, and Latin American history. “Its design reflected both the socialist ideology of the Allende government and the democratic beliefs of the Chilean nation, simultaneously empowering workers and respecting individual liberties.”

“Symbolically, too, Cybersyn represented a new vision of modernity pioneered by a South American country marginalized geographically and politically,” Medina adds.

Reproduction of the futuristic Cybersyn Operations Room included projected historical images of factories at work and a mapping of the Chilean economy. Medina created an interactive DVD presentation depicting the history and design of the project that visitors could navigate by clicking on a mouse. The exhibit also incorporated documentary film from the Allende era to portray the challenges faced by the Chilean government of that day.

While the idea of using the computer technology originated with the Chilean government, it was constructed under the direction of Stafford Beer, a British expert in cybernetics and operational research, using U.S. computer systems purchased with foreign credit.

In spite of the Chilean government’s efforts to control public sector activities, they did not take into account other economic factors that would plague the Allende regime, such as surging black markets, political corruption, consumer goods shortage and workers’ strikes. Allende’s shooting death during a 1973 coup sealed Cybersyn’s fate and the project was abandoned.

“We typically view the use of information technology as an invention mainly of the United States and to a lesser extent, Europe,” Medina says. “However, computers have a long and interesting history within developing nations and Chile’s experience illustrates this. It’s my hope visitors left the exhibit thinking critically about the role of science and technology in government - specially how new information technologies can create new possibilities for governance and how political ideology can influence the design and function of a technological system.”