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.

Arturo Aldunate Phillips

Aldunate Phillips (left) with Norbert Wiener

In November 2020, I wrote a post about a project I’d been involved in, to translate Juana y la cibernética (1963), a short story by the Chilean SF writer Elena Aldunate, with my colleague Ana Baeza Ruiz. The publication, a Spanish-English bilingual edition of the story, had an online launch at the Desperate Literature bookshop in Madrid. During the event, Ana and I reflected on the translation and aspects of the story we’d found intriguing. One of the questions raised by Juana concerns cybernetics itself. The plot, which revolves around an erotic encounter between the protagonist (Juana) and her factory work station, never explicitly touches on the topic of cybernetics and is very far removed from Norbert Wiener’s influential definition of ‘the entire field of control and communication theory, whether in the machine or in the animal’. However, the human-machine relationship which is central to the story does suggest a thematic link to the idea of cybernetics as it relates to the imaginary of robots and automated life. 

This is where the figure of Arturo Alduante Phillips (the author’s father) comes in. A writer-poet and engineer, Aldunate worked for the Electricity Company in Chile (later Chilectra) and as a university lecturer teaching courses in cybernetics. Even more significant, he published two books on cybernetics, Los robots no tienen a Dios en el corazón (Robots do not have God in their hearts) (1963) and Por las fronteras de la cibernética (On the frontiers of cybernetics) (1973). In the first of these books, published in the same year as Elena’s story, Aldunate Phillips explains the fundamentals of cybernetics and the current state of the discipline in relation to machine intelligence, as well as discussing the implications for industry, construction and healthcare. A contemporary review remarks that the book will be of interest to readers who want to know more about how today’s scientific developments will contribute to ‘the material progress of the world and the social transformation that will follow from their application’.

Pages from Los Robots (1963)

In this context, the reference to cybernetics in Juana appears to be less incidental, as it seems likely that the topic was discussed in Elena Aldunate’s family. There is one moment in the story that especially chimes with the issues and debates covered by Aldunate Phillips in his book. Juana remembers some articles she's read in the newspapers: ‘One day the machines will rebel against their masters. They will not depend on them, they will take control of their future’. By contrast, Los Robots is dismissive of the idea of autonomous automated life. One of the concluding remarks in the book reads ‘I believe that it will never be given to the machine to replace the capacity of the human brain, which will continue to be the inspirer, the guide, the one that will have to manage the world of machines’. The message of Juana is more ambiguous and can be read as a cautionary tale. In the final passages, in the consummation of Juana’s desire, she is simultaneously released and obliterated by the machine’s motions: ‘The movement demands surrender […] its expression is burning, lacerating’. An interpretation of this ending might be that humans underestimate machines at their peril, with Juana’s fate serving as a warning about the destructive tendencies of automation…

Juana y la cibernética

November 2020 saw the online launch of a new Spanish-English parallel text translation of the science fiction story Juana y la cibernética (1963) by Elena Aldunate at Desperate Literature, Madrid, for La noche de los libros.

Elena Aldunate (1925-2005) was born María Elena Aldunate Bezanilla in Santiago de Chile, the daughter of the mathematician and engineer Arturo Aldunate Phillips, who was also a published author. She worked as a writer of stories, articles and radio scripts, from the 1950s onwards. An early pioneer of science fiction writing in Chile, Aldunate was one of the first women authors to become associated with the genre through her story anthologies, including El señor de las mariposas (1967) and Angélica y el delfín (1977). With Ilda Cádiz, Hugo Correa, Antonio Montero, Roberto Pliscoff and Andrés Rojas, Aldunate was also involved in the founding of the Club Chileno de Ciencia Ficción, which began in the 1970s. 

As critics have noted, Aldunate’s stories consistently explore psychological themes, such as loneliness, repressed desire and existential crisis, from the perspective of women protagonists. In a biographical essay on Aldunate by Barbara Loach, she quotes the author as saying that ‘one is constantly being filled with experiences and one has to know how to take advantage of what one sees, hears, lives [...] Only with this basis can the imagination be given wings: that is, make fantasy with a foot in reality, and with elements that will be difficult to refute’.  Aldunate’s literary influences include Jules Verne, Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and the Chilean authors Hugo Correa, María Luisa Bombal, Marta Brunet and María Elena Gertner. 

Reflecting on the emerging legacy of Aldunate, Andrea Bell observes that, although she was ‘occasionally profiled and her books reviewed in the Chilean press, her work has only recently come to the attention of literary historians’. During the last decade, the re-publication of Aldunate’s stories in collections such as Cuentos de Elena Aldunate: La dama de la ciencia ficción has helped to remedy this situation, and introduced the author to a new generation of readers. However, little of Aldunate’s writing has been translated into English, an oversight we sought address through the production of this new bilingual edition of Juana y la cibernética. Among the most remarkable and disturbing of Aldunate’s stories, it narrates an ambiguously erotic encounter between the character Juana and her factory work station. 

The seeds of this idea for a translation were planted a while ago at the start of 2018, but the planning became more concrete because of my involvement in an event series at the University of Leeds: The Transcultural Fantastic (co-organised with colleagues Ingo Cornils and Sarah Dodd). The joint aims of the series were to open up the traditions of the Fantastic from a transcultural and interdisciplinary perspective, investigating utopian and dystopian thought in art, fiction and film, as well as science fiction, folktales and fantasy literature. A workshop on ‘Publishing the Transcultural Fantastic’, which took place on 15 March 2019, featured insights from Terry Craven, co-owner of Desperate Literature; researcher Ruth Kelly (University of Oxford), who has worked on publishing projects in Bangladesh and Uganda; and Sarah Dodd, who, in addition to her role at the University of Leeds, is co-editor of the online magazine of speculative fiction in translation Samovar. The workshop discussed methods for contributing to a body of scholarship that has concerned itself with recuperating the Fantastic from contexts beyond the Anglo-American tradition, as well as alternative approaches to publishing, through small presses, short editions and print on demand, which offer more responsive and dynamic publishing routes. The series also contributed funding for the print edition of Juana.

You can find out more about the translation here: https://desperateliterature.com/product/juana/

Computing Utopia

[The following is a draft excerpt from an article written with Jo Lindsay Walton called 'Computing Utopia: The Horizons of Computational Economies in History and Science Fiction', which appeared in this month's issue of Science Fiction Studies]

In speculative and science fiction, computation is often represented as morally ambiguous, at odds with human concerns or not entirely explicable within human frames of reason. One notable example can be found in the trope of the supercomputer, wherein anxieties about artificial intelligence and automation combine to produce an entity capable of superseding or displacing humankind. For example, Kendell Foster Crossen’s Year of Consent (1954) features the totalitarian supercomputer SOCIAC, who manipulates the “consenting” population via forms of social control. Likewise, Isaac Asimov’s short story ‘The Last Question’ (1956) centres on the human-created supercomputer Multivac (and its successors) and their obsession with the question of how to reverse entropy. They work on the answer over a hundred billion years, long after the end of humankind and the universe itself. 

The imaginary of the supercomputer, then, is entangled with both positive and negative impulses. These impulses crystallize in the tension between computational utopia’s promise of superior knowledge and reason, and the threat of an oppressive and dystopian calculative order. The history of cybernetics is laden with comparable tensions. In popular culture, cybernetics has frequently been conflated with robotics or computer science, an association that was formed through early media reactions to it. The 1948 publication of Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine by the American mathematician Norbert Wiener, one of the originators of the field, gained enormous press attention and led to response articles such as ‘Will Machines Replace the Human Brain?’ (American Monthly 1953) and ‘Man Viewed as a Machine’ (Scientific American 1955). 

In fact, cybernetics refers to a far broader set of concerns, which can be glossed as the study of systems governance, including organic, machinic, and socio-economic systems. It also includes the study of self-governance: how systems constitute and stabilize themselves, how they adapt to changes in their environments and how they survive or fail to survive damage or the introduction of new elements. It is the study of communication, feedback and control that came to define cybernetics as a field of inquiry. 

This interest in feedback, and the maintenance of equilibrium through feedback mechanisms is also the thing that most clearly connects cybernetics with economics. In particular, there are links between cybernetics and neoclassical models of markets and economies as self-governing systems, entities which accomplish an optimum distribution of resources through the self-stabilizing interactions of supply and demand. These principles were at the heart of what came to be known as the “Chicago school” of economics through figures such as George Stigler and Milton Friedman. Both worked for the Statistical Research Group (SRG), funded by the US National Defense Research Committee during World War II, and links have been traced between cybernetic experiments in defense systems carried out in the SRG and Friedman’s later work (Mirowski, 205-206). Mike Featherstone foregrounds this link in his study of the underpinnings of contemporary capitalist thought: 

Friedman’s free market economics presented a computational vision of freedom and social relations, which transformed economy into an apolitical closed space defined by machinic interactions, cold strategic decision making, militarised risk assessment and management, and a complete lack of empathy for the other who was similarly imagined through the lens of cybernetics. (94) 

The characterization of “machinic interactions” is central to Featherstone’s argument that “it is possible to understand the development of late capitalism through its embrace of techno-science and specifically cybernetic theory over the course of the 20th century” (82). This view, while valid, rests on a partial interpretation of the cybernetic field. Historian Ronald R. Kline has argued for the disunity of cybernetics, not only in its multiple meanings, but also with regard to “the different paths cybernetics took in different countries” (7). To some extent, these histories have been obscured by dominant narratives, which inform ideas – in both science fiction and contemporary politics – about the inseparability of cybernetic theory from capitalism. Yet the uptake of cybernetics in countries with distinct social and political trajectories presents a challenge to such ideas. 

An important, if unrealized, project that marks a chapter in the diverse history of cybernetics is Project Cybersyn (or Proyecto Synco in Spanish), a Chilean initiative funded under the socialist government of Salvador Allende between 1971 and 1973. Cybersyn was directed towards the development of a cybernetic system to manage the economy and communicate with factories that had come under government control as part of Allende’s nationalization efforts. The project was a collaboration between Chilean technical experts and Stafford Beer, a British research scientist in management cybernetics. Beer was interested in cybernetics as “the science of effective organization” and how it could be applied to the field of industrial management (Beer, Decision and Control, 425). 

Project Cybersyn was intended to manage economic production using the feedback of data from the factories. Statistical software programs were designed to model factory performance scenarios, based on analysis of the data, enabling the Chilean government to regulate production and pre-empt crises with effective action (Medina, 6). Despite limited technological resources, consisting of one central computer and a network of telex machines, the project went some way towards developing this system (Pickering, 250). The main objectives of Cybersyn were to maximize economic production while also facilitating self-regulation of the factories. It thus represented an attempt to incorporate devolved decision-making and worker autonomy into a cybernetic management system. For Beer, the design constituted “a weapon against state bureaucracy” (see Medina, 170). 

Cybersyn control room

A comprehensive history of Project Cybersyn is the subject of a 2011 book by Eden Medina. Her study focuses on the relationship between computer technology and politics, and the difficulty of embedding political values in systems design. In the case of Cybersyn, she argues that this can be seen in the frequent mischaracterization of the project as a tool for centralized government control of the economy, despite its outwardly decentralized approach. Indeed, in January 1973, when The Observer broke the news of Cybersyn to the English-speaking public, the headline simply ran “Chile run by computer.” In an allusion to Nineteen Eighty-Four, Cybersyn, the “first computer system designed to control an entire economy” had allegedly been “assembled in some secrecy so as to avoid opposition charges of ‘Big Brother’ tactics.” Later that year, Allende’s government was overthrown by a military coup and Project Cybersyn was never completed. Under the subsequent dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, economic policy was remodelled by a group of Chilean neoliberal economists called the Chicago Boys, some of whom trained under Friedman. In the decades that followed, information technology became increasingly integrated into global finance and financial markets were rapidly expanded, deregulated, and diversified. 

In his novel Synco (2008), the Chilean SF writer Jorge Baradit offers an alternative history of Project Cybersyn. It opens six years after the coup of 1973 which, in a parallel version of events, is dismantled with the assistance of Pinochet. The completion of Synco – “the hidden leviathan [...] the mechanical eye of socialist Chile” (Baradit, 29-30) – has transformed Chile into a fully-fledged cybernetic state. The country’s capital of Santiago provides the backdrop for the main action of the story and it is here that the protagonist Martina returns after some years in Venezuela. She is startled at the changes wrought by Synco but she soon becomes disquieted after witnessing the full extent of its political influence and surveillance. While the circumstances that lead to this totalitarian regime are never fully explained, it is implied that a cybernetic model of government is inextricable from centralized state control, and the collaboration between Pinochet and Allende serves to bolster the system. Synco’s power grows and by the end of the novel its network begins to effect changes in the language and geography of Chile. In the final scenes, as Martina is flown out of the country, she sees military jets heading the other way for a final showdown with this “god made of wires” (230). 

The novel’s bleak view assumes the inevitability of Cybersyn’s techno-totalitarian trajectory. The actual project, by contrast, was fragile and fledgling. Its computing resources were minimal. Devoted to a broadly “decentralizing, worker-participative and anti-bureaucratic” form of economic management (Beer, Brain of the Firm, 257), it was tantalizingly poised between a model and the thing itself. Along these lines, Medina maintains that “there is historical value in studying innovative technological systems, even if they are never fully realized” (Medina, 10). The recognition that systems like Cybersyn cannot be measured only by the logic of ‘what happened’ is an important one and highlights the question of making visible alternatives to dystopian economic computation.

References

Asimov, Isaac. “The Last Question.” Science Fiction Quarterly (November 1956): 6-15. 

Baradit, Jorge. Synco. Madrid and Barcelona: Ediciones B, 2008.

Beer, Stafford. Decision and Control. London: Wiley, 1966. 

---. The Brain of the Firm. London: Allen Lane, 1972. 

Crossen, Kendall Foster. Year of Consent. New York: Dell Publishing Company, 1954. 

Featherstone, Mike. Planet Utopia: Utopia, Dystopia, and Globalisation. London: Routledge, 2017. 

Fliegers, Serge. “Will Machines Replace the Human Brain?” American Monthly. 76 (1953): 53-61. 

Hawkes, Nigel. “Chile Run by Computer.” The Observer, 7 Jan 1973. 

Kemeny, John G. “Man Viewed as a Machine.” Scientific American. 192 (April 1955): 58-67. 

Kline, Ronald R. The Cybernetics Moment: Or Why We Call Our Age the Information Age. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 2015. 

Medina, Eden. Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011. 

Mirowski, Philip. Machine Dreams: Economics Becomes a Computer Science. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002. 

Orwell, George. Nineteen Eighty-Four. London: Secker & Warburg, 1949. 

Pickering, Andrew. The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches Of Another Future. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2011. 

Wiener, Norbert. Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1948.