Hello everyone,
I was hoping to learn more about the Chilean government's research and development of Project CyberSyn. The types of sources I'm looking for would be academic works (books, articles, dissertations) as well as primary sources (archival documents, testimony, news reports from the period, etc.)
My current understanding is that CyberSyn was an early IT/networking project where the goal was to improve the material well-being of factory workers and facilitate the successful transition to a socialist democracy in Chile. It worked primarily through self-regulation via feedback loops measured through self-reporting of worker happiness.
I'm especially interested in the high-level technical construction of this project. I want to better understand the function and operation of this system, and to understand how modern professionals view its long-term viability.
If possible, I would like to collect perspectives from those in Information Technology fields (such as AI & Data analytics). As well as the views of social scientists and philosophers regarding the project's viability from a humanistic perspective.
I know this is a big ask on an obscure topic, but really any direction would be helpful.
Thank you for reading!
Eden Medina's Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende's Chile is the standard source, coming from a broadly cultural history / science and technology studies perspective.
I would also recommend Aaron Benanev's article for Logic, "How to Make a Pencil," in which he argues for the need for such systems for a functional socialism, albeit perhaps on a different conceptual basis than Stafford Beer's Cybersyn plan.
Interestingly, though I know many Marxists and tech historians who are critical of Beer and Cybersyn in conversation, I am not sure I know of a textual source laying out that case. Given how it ended, one can understand why.