You've activated my special interest trap card, Yugi!
This guy had a pivotal role in the development of Project Cybersyn! It was an attempt at cybernetically managing the democratic economy of socialist Chile under Salvador Allende.
Their goal was to help coordinate the production of major industries across a multitude of factories using fucking TELEX machines connected to one central computer in near-real time.
If engineering cybernetics covers self-regulating and autonomously driven mechanical or electrical systems (such as robotics), then management cybernetics covers those same principles in an organization, company, nation, or any place where people work together in different roles and relations.
For Cybersyn, it could be used to help coordinate the distribution of limited raw resources to factories with limited workforces. Integrating this data upwards could help national leaders forecast economic activity and identify key policy areas to advance. Mean, disseminating information downwards could help factory workers be more democratically self-regulated and practice collective decision-making instead of a top-down command economy. It was built fully to facilitate a more participatory economy in the entire nation; direct
This was based on Beer's "Viable Systems Model", which was meant as a model for how any organization acts as a self-regulating informational organism, with nested feedback loops all the way down, all to facilitate interaction with the outside world. It's crazy stuff to get into. A lot of modern management practices have picked up on Beer's work, but conveniently dropped all the emphasis on how democratic decision making and access to information are critical.
Unfortunately, Cybersyn was only partially implemented and had a very limited run. As usual, the US had direct opposition to the success of a socialist economy in their sphere of interest and continued domination over Latin America. Therefore, the CIA heavily influenced a series of owner-operator trucker strikes and a military coup d'état. Decades of Chilean democratic legacy were crushed by harsh dictatorship under the Pinochet regime.
Beer and Allende envisioned an economic alternative that we've never seen materialized —one based on freedom in the workplace and a direct stake in national politics. It is a future that could have been and could still be! In the meantime, its legacy has impacted socialist theory, science fiction, and modern management.
This MIT article is a great start to giving into the crazy details of this project and the people behind it.
For nerds that enjoy socialism, democracy, economics, technology, and management: I suggest reading 'Designing Freedom' for a starter before trying 'Brain of the Firm' or 'Heart of Enterprise'.
Addendum: I think it's so important to note that when people question whether our lives could be any different than our current affairs under non-democratic capitalist hegemony, people have already decided YEARS into figuring out alternatives. It's not a question of "how would it work under socialism?" but of "who doesn't want to see this future realized and why?".
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