On Decybernation

The suggestively titled ‘On Decybernation’ is the name of a report written by the British management cybernetician Stafford Beer, as part of Project Cybersyn (1971-1973). This has been the subject of previous posts on the blog. Cybersyn was one of Beer’s biggest claims to fame, a cybernetic initiative to manage the national economy of Chile. The aim was to build and implement a system to boost economic production, while also maximising self-regulation at the level of factories and workers. The history of Cybersyn is extensively chronicled in Eden Medina’s book Cybernetic Revolutionaries. The Decybernation report has never been published, so I went with a colleague to view it in the Stafford Beer archive (at Liverpool John Moores University) last April. 

The report was written in April 1973 at a key turning point in the project (the Chilean President Salvador Allende would be overthrown by a military coup the following September). The report details Beer’s frustration that the technology his team had developed was not being used as he’d originally envisaged. Beer believed in the power of cybernetics to change the organisation of government but, perhaps unsurprisingly, others were more interested in how the technical components of Cybersyn could be used to support existing structures. 

‘On Decybernation’ muses on the relative successes and failures of Cybersyn, highlighting the need to understand the project as an instrument of revolution; beyond changing systems of economic production, Beer outlines his ambition for Cybersyn to change the very organisation of society, beginning with government institutions. Without this level of change, he concludes, ‘we do not get a new system of government, but an old system of government with some new tools’. 

I thought it might be interesting to reproduce a few passages from the report here, for those interested in Beer’s cybernetic theory of government: 

If we want a new system of government, we have to change the organization of the established order. All my proposals as to how this should be done have been discarded as ‘politically unrealistic’. Maybe they were. In that case it was for others of our group to make alternative proposals. For without any practical proposals for changing organization in the established order, we cannot have a new system of government.

[…] 

If what we wanted to do was to meet the objectives listed for Project Cyberstride and Project Cybersyn, then we have succeeded. Those were technical objectives, and meeting them may count as success to some people. 

If what we wanted to do was to display the technical achievement in management action, then we may yet succeed. This is the technocratic objective, and meeting it may count as success to some people. 

If we wanted to ‘help the people’, this was a social objective, and the outcome is ambiguous. For if the invention is dismantled, and the tools used are the tools we made, they could become instruments of oppression. This would count as failure. 

If we wanted a new system of government, then it seems that we are not going to get it, This too must count as failure. 

Any one person who has worked on this team may have a complex motivation, in which the technical, technocratic, social and political objectives are mixed in unique proportions and constitute his own ‘objective functional’. 

This would explain the confusion, and the disagreement about success. 

While, at first look Cybersyn reads as a classic science fictional case of techno-utopianism, Beer’s perspective shows a genuine belief in the project as an instrument of social change and dismay to see that potential going to waste. The fascinating reference to ‘decybernation’ encapsulates this sense of a critical threat to the dream of cybernetic revolution he saw in Cybersyn and its socio-technical possibilities.