A teen named Simon Beer was putting together electrical meters out of old radio parts and colored cardboard in a potting shed in Surrey, England, sometime in the early 1970s. People would turn a dial to show how happy or unhappy they were with a political decision. The meters were meant to measure public opinion. It’s weird enough to be a hobby project. What was going on in Chile at the time and who his father was make things even stranger.
In Santiago, Simon’s dad, Stafford Beer, was helping Salvador Allende’s government build something that had never been done before: a real-time national communications network that would connect factories, workers, and the government into a single, responsive system. Project Cybersyn was the name of it. Some have called it a socialist internet that was built thirty years before the internet even existed, which is a pretty good description.
Most people have never heard of that, so give it some thought. In the way that people think of naive idealists, Beer wasn’t one. He was a serious cybernetician, which means he was both a scientist and a management theorist. He had become frustrated working as a consultant for British businesses because they didn’t follow his advice.
Chile, which was on the verge of a real revolution, gave people something different. When Allende’s team wrote to ask for help running a jumbled empire of newly taken over mines and factories, Beer flew there almost right away. He charged less than usual but insisted on getting chocolate, wine, and cigars all the time. He was likened to Orson Welles by the Chilean press.
What the project came up with was truly impressive. A network of 500 telex machines that had been bought by a previous government and then forgotten about was found sitting idle in a warehouse and sent to factories all over the country. Every day, economic data came into two control rooms in Santiago. One computer processed it all, and in the afternoon, it was sent to the presidential palace. The whole operation sped up a process that usually took six months and made it happen in twenty-four hours.
The speed wasn’t the most interesting thing, though. That’s what the design was meant to do. Beer and Allende made it clear that Cybersyn was not meant to be a system for spying. The goal was the opposite: to let workers really help run their own workplaces, so that information could flow both ways, not just up. When I think about it now, this difference seems to have been very important. It was built on trust and decentralization at a time when most technology was moving toward more control and centralization.
Then Pinochet’s coup happened in September 1973, and Cybersyn was taken apart almost right away. It’s only mentioned briefly in most books about the time of Allende. The experiment was over before it could show that something was true or false.
The next few decades are part of a history that most people know but don’t always put into words. No one saw how quickly the internet would come along, spread, and change everyday life. The engineers who made it in the 1970s and 1980s said they didn’t think about how it could be used wrong. One of the people who created the basic TCP/IP protocol, Vinton Cerf, has said that it was hard enough just getting the network to work. Safety wasn’t their main concern, and normal human aggression barely crossed their minds. Then the Morris Worm hit in 1988 and crashed thousands of computers. The idea that the network would police itself slowly fell apart, and it has been there ever since.
The comparison makes me feel bad. Around the same time, two ideas about how to connect technology came into being. One, called Cybersyn, was built on purpose with a theory of power in mind, but it was destroyed by force before it could fully work. The other was made to be quick and open, with security and social structure put off until later. It was then given to anyone who wanted it. An army takeover killed one vision. The other turned into what we live in now.
It’s possible that Stafford Beer’s test would not have worked on its own. A lot of utopian projects do. But there is something useful that can be found in the wreckage: not the technology itself, which is very old, but the question that it kept asking: who does the network serve, and who controls the flow of information? When Cybersyn was buried in 1973, those questions were not answered. They are still not answered. They just sound louder.
