[Barrin92]

The notion that Cybersyn was a central planning system is common but untrue. That's not what cybernetics, which drew primarily from systems theory approaches, was ever about.

The so called 'cybernetic factory' at the heart of the project was about making real time information exchange between several levels of hierarchy possible, with much delegated to the factories themselves. Centralized decision-making was reserved for high-level planning akin to Auftragstaktik in the German army (I believe it's called mission command in the UK and US).

Friedrich Hayek of all people, who met Beer at a conference in 1960 in Illinois was actually very sympathetic to Cybersyn. The frequent comparisons between Cybersyn and Soviet Planning are pretty much the result of a political campaign against Allende, it doesn't have much to do with the scientific ideas behind the project.

If you have heard people talk about 'smart factories', 'industry 4.0', IoT devices gathering data in real time and relaying them to big computers where they can be analysed and quickly sent back to the workers you have in reality stumbled upon people who are trying to build CyberSyn 2.0, probably without knowing it and less socialist branding.

Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende's Chile by Eden Medina is a good, in depth book on the topic.

[Aloha]

I've expensively studied Soviet central planning, and I'm hard pressed to tell a difference here. But I'll go read that book you've liked.

Ironically, it's the tankies (neostalinists) who seem to be the loudest defenders of it. If it's propaganda it seemingly worked on the wrong audience.

[sudosysgen]

I don't think your comparison to Soviet central planning really works. As far as I understand it, Soviet central planning worked in long term plans and quotas, with orders given from GOSPLAN all the way down, and if factory owners disagreed they'd have to go send the information all the way up and back down the ladder, while the actual information on production would be manipulated to look good and sent manually by bureaucrats.

On the other hand, cybersyn had no quotas, and no long term rigid plans. Informational exchange did not have to go through bureaucrats, and could be done directly from the factory, eventually automatically by the equipment, and update a digital model that would do a large part of what the bureaucrats at GOSPLAN would do, but automatically and verifiably.

So it seems very, very different to me.

[Barrin92]

> If it's propaganda it seemingly worked on the wrong audience

Not uncommon though, right? The tankies have also adopted the narrative of China as a Communist threat, or in Latin America you end up with the paradoxical situation of most opposition parties in Venezuela belonging to the Socialist International, yet you find feverish and uncritical Maduro support among young radicalized left-wing Americans.

We have the same phenomenon in Germany where ironically the formerly West-German members of Die Linke have a much more cartoonish, ideological view compared to their actually ex-socialist former East-German counterparts.

[Aloha]

Honestly, the fact that tankies exist in 2022, still bewilders me.

[Aloha]

Err, extensively even.