Eden Medina.
Cybernetic Revolutionaries: technology and politics in Allende's Chile.
MIT Press. 2011
In Cybernetic Revolutionaries, Eden Medina tells the history of two intersecting utopian visions,
one political and one technological.
The first was Chile’s experiment with peaceful socialist change under Salvador Allende;
the second was the simultaneous attempt to build a computer system that would manage Chile’s economy.
Neither vision was fully realized, but they hold lessons for today
about the relationship between technology and politics.
Drawing on extensive archival material and interviews, Medina examines the cybernetic system envisioned by the Chilean government&msadh;which was to feature holistic system design, decentralized management, human-computer interaction, a national telex network, near real-time control of the growing industrial sector, and modeling of the behavior of dynamic systems. She also describes, and documents with photographs, the network’s Star Trek-like operations room, which featured swivel chairs with armrest control panels, a wall of screens displaying data, and flashing red lights to indicate economic emergencies. Technologies, Medina writes, are historical texts; when we read them we are reading history.