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Read a shitty book about Project Cybersyn
| Consuela | 05/21/26 |
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Date: May 21st, 2026 11:24 PM Author: Consuela I read Cybernetic Revolutionaries (published by MIT in 2011) by Eden Medina, which was about the curious case of Project Cybersyn (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn) which I had not heard of previously. Cybersyn was an early attempt (1971-1973), using cybernetic principles, to create a situation room for Chilean leadership which would collect data from vital Chilean industries in near real-time and have computers analyze it in order to guide policy. It was a fairly radical idea for the time and it was criticized for its totalitarian potentialities, although it was built by cyberneticist Stafford Beer with better motives (but who I thought was quite naive). I mostly see Project Cybersyn as an embryonic, failed and very early precursor to the modern technological security state, which is centralizing further with its upcoming horrific Mark of the Beast system (programmable CBDC + AI + social credit scores). The desire for increased centralization is an ever-present one for those in power, and rationally; hence the perennially relevant Tower of Babel story. Cybersyn was limited by 1971 telex machines and rudimentary computing, while the current iteration has biometrics, programmable money, and ubiquitous sensors. The desire is the same, but the capability has caught up with the desire for the first time in history, which is what makes the current moment categorically different from all previous centralization attempts.
This is a pretty flat note because I didn’t like the book (I had to force myself to finish it and was observing myself continuing with it, wondering why I didn’t stop), didn’t like Eden Medina - she didn’t seem like she understood economics or psychology very well, she was focused on feminism in the book, and she was a technocratic academic. This note is mostly just to memorialize my negative thoughts on it in case I revisit them in the future. |