‘Santiago Boys’ rescues Chile’s ‘socialist internet’ – 07/23/2023 – Mundo

In the year in which the military coup in Chile completes half a century, Belarusian writer and researcher Evgueni Morozov explores the event from a little-known angle. Famous for his criticism of big tech, the author has spent the last two years immersed in the history of the Cybersyn engineers, a project started in the late 1960s and known as the “socialist internet of Salvador Allende” – the president of Chile overthrown by the Armed Forces on September 11, 1973.

Cybersyn is both part of the memory of the coup and the history of cybernetics studies, but little is known about its members. Unlike the Chicago Boys —young people linked to the American neoliberal school who headed the economic policy of the dictator Augusto Pinochet, who took over after the coup—, Allende’s engineers and technocrats had their prestige restricted to the academic world. A repair that Morozov intends to make with the podcast “Santiago Boys”, launched this Saturday (22) and available on audio platforms.

In the work, Morozov not only reconstitutes the Chilean group’s utopian and partially successful attempt to create communication systems under non-capitalist precepts, but also recovers government disputes with ITT, the corporation that supported the coup against Allende —or “the big tech of the time”, in his words. It is a work of historical recovery that also oxygenates current geopolitical debates, from the global war for semiconductors to the pressure of governments on technology companies.

With nine episodes of about an hour, the podcast is narrated by the author in English (with a Belorussian accent) and there is only one new version planned, in Spanish — even though Morozov speaks Portuguese and the story he tells permeates the João Goulart government (1961-1964). In addition to the former president, Leonel Brizola also appears in the work, whom Morozov cites as a Brazilian governor who tried to nationalize ITT.

Morozov lives in Calabria, in southern Italy, and produced the podcast from home during the pandemic with the help of other researchers. He interviewed more than 200 people in his attempt to give prominence to a group he describes as “much more radical, innovative and interesting” than that Pinochet ally.

“There is a mythology, also in Brazil, around the Chicago Boys, seen as pioneers of neoliberalism, presented as great innovators, involved in the idea that everything before them was dated, obsolete, Keynesian, communist”, he tells the Sheet. “But if we want to talk about them, we need to treat them as a response to a much more innovative initiative, which was far from obsolete.”

Cybersyn, by the boys from Santiago, was a system created to measure data on the Chilean economy –an old-fashioned big data– as the government nationalized dozens of companies and needed to control them. The country was already experiencing the imminence of a coup, without support from Parliament, with strikes and social pressure.

The project’s main graphic reference is what Morozov calls the “magic room”, an operating room that most resembles a scene from the science fiction series “Star Trek”: a space occupied by seven white and orange chairs with large control panels on their arms and whose walls had screens that displayed data sent by telex machines from different parts of the country. That’s where the engineers and Allende stayed.

Information came from factories to a central computer. A software analyzed the data and warned about any breaches of patterns. “They built predictive models, like artificial intelligence, from all the factories they visited, and involved workers in these models. It was possible to see if what was happening on a given day was a deviation from normality or not”, says the researcher. “Something technologically very complex for Chile and for the time.”

Morozov is not the first to write about the subject. The book “Cybernetic Revolutionaries”, by MIT professor Eden Medina, from 2014, has a photograph of that room on the cover. There are also dissertations and articles on the case, including one by Morozov himself for the New Yorker magazine.

In the podcast, he dives into the details of the engineers’ routine and tells the story of that moment in Chile from a technological and geopolitical perspective: the dispute against ITT, the surveillance and propaganda technologies used by Allende’s enemies, and the innovations that did not succeed.

Among the protagonists of the narrative are the Chilean Fernando Flores and the British Stafford Beer. The first was Minister of Finance, then Secretary General of the Government and head of the project. At the time 27 years old, now 80, he gives testimonials in the first episode. He ranges from a political prisoner in Latin America to an entrepreneur in California who influenced some of Silicon Valley’s pioneers.

The second, who died in 2002, was a consultant, business executive and professor in Manchester, in addition to living in a mansion and driving a Rolls-Royce. He becomes a hippie, Marxist, bearded and counterculture figure after the Chilean experience.

In the future, Morozov intends to adapt the project into a series or a movie and extend it to other “failed technology rebels” stories. But he makes it clear: “Not these arrogant one-dimensional characters from Silicon Valley. I have no interest in that kind of failure.”