Think Insipid and Grow Rich

These guys are good at accumulating billions.  Saying deep valuable words, not so much.

Probably not a coincidence.

Says I

From 1938, The Devil With The Devil by Larry Clinton, featuring Ford Leary on vocals.

 

Music and lyric credits go to Clinton.

Here comes the devil!

Oh, here comes the devil!

Oh, here comes the devil!

Oh, the devil with the devil says I!

Shhh!

Look out for the devil!

Look out for the devil!

Look out for the devil!

Oh, the devil with the devil says I!

You’re so afraid of Ol’ Man Satan

Now why don’t you stop your hesitatin’

You’re gonna be a long time dead so

The devil with the devil says I!

You’re always giving me the Dickens

Tellin’ me that life’s no easy pickin’s

But just as long as I have fun why

The devil with the devil says I!

You can have your social teas and

Bingo for your fun

But the things I like to do you’ll

Stop 

Me 

One by one

Now even if you make me stronger

That ain’t gonna make me live no longer

So even if I go to (Shhhh!)

The devil with the devil says I!

Look out for the devil! Look out for the devil!

Oh, the devil with the devil says I!

The Future is Right Around the Corner

 

A new year is coming.  Time to tune up the saucer.

The Sociopath Class

São Paulo, Brazil - The view from Paraisópolis on the left is almost as enhanced by Morumbi on the right as the view from Morumbi is enhanced by Paraisópolis

Between 1923 and 1924, the Fascist state removed 27,000 railway workers (15 percent of the total employees) and made arrangements to dismiss a further 13,000 and to curtail sick leave. -- From The Capital Order by Clara Mattei, 2022 (my italics)

As I'm reading Clara Mattei's The Capital Order, the history of how neoclassical economists invented the governmental strategy of austerity following the first World War 100 years ago as a way of staving off the threat of the global spread of socialism and thereby securing the, by no means assured, future of capitalism indefinitely, I am experiencing a keen sense of familiarity (as the author intended). 

Mattei reconstructs the sequence of events.  Capitalism gets much of  Europe embroiled in world war. By conventional wisdom which sounds terribly familiar, the virtues of the free market were expected to devise profitable ways out of the conflict.   In a now familiar pattern, it was demonstrated that in this time of scarcity, the profit motive of industrialists could not be marshaled to behave to the benefit of anyone but industrialists resulting in the manufacture of shoddy equipment made at low wages and sold for high prices, threatening social welfare and the public good across the capitalist world, resulting not only in inadequate materiel, but inflation, poverty for the masses and good times only for the industrialists. In response to the crisis, for the first time since the dominance of capitalism in the 18th century, states across Europe commandeered the reins of industry, raising wages, providing safety nets for workers both at work and at home including among many other novelties, governmental supply of daycare to women entering the workforce in large numbers. Following the war,  the now demonstrated ability of the state to intervene in the economy on a massive scale in ways that produced successes and booms that capitalism had failed on its own to produce (even against a backdrop of the spread of worker's revolutions to the east and the growing power and solidarity of labor everywhere else) inspired a brief, minor burgeoning of the welfare state. Mattei catalogs a worker's dream of programs and innovations that appeared within a brief window following the armistice: universal suffrage, rising wages, unemployment benefits, adult education, worker's councils, guaranteed health care, wealth redistribution and anti-poverty programs. demands for worker control of production. This was a period largely lost to History since those in charge of it forgot to record it.

All of this was about to change forever in short order, thanks to ideas fomented in two little remembered international economic conferences, one in Brussels in 1920,  the other in Genoa in 1922 out of which emerged strategies for stemming the spread of well-being and happiness among the lower classes at the expense of capital accumulation at the top.  Sensing the slip of civilization toward the pole of commonality, the technocrats at the Brussels and Genoa conferences devised rationales and strategies for governments to seize back the space opening up to public ownership of the means of production and a restructuring of the order of social relations as a means of restoring the wisdom of the market.  Happiness it seemed was possible only by virtue of politics.  To reign in profligate spending on human welfare, the "science" of economics commanded governments to impose measures of misery in three depoliticized realms:  Fiscal (low taxes for business, high taxes for workers; government budget and department cuts; entitlement and social welfare cuts), Industrial (eg privatization, wage reduction, benefit reduction, hour increases), and Monetary (the painful return to the gold standard,  the imposition of high interest rates by independent central banks, inflation management, budget balancing v deficit spending to keep the paper currency in circulation to a minimum leaving more for capitalists to invest.)  

Characterizing the conclusions that came out of the Brussels and Genoa conferences, Mattei quotes Hannah Arendt:

The search for the best form of government reveals itself to be the search for the best government for philosophers”—the people doing the search—“which turns out to be the governments in which philosophers have become the rulers of the city."

From the perspective of workers and the poor, the resurgence of state-prescribed austerity derailed progress as the freedom of solidarity was supplanted with the need of individuals to compete for jobs offered strictly on the boss’ terms.  For the capitalist class, it proved to be the magic formula that revived the zombie of capitalism. While austerity gained strong footholds across Europe and North America, Mattei’s study focuses on the UK and Italy. In the UK with a strong economy and a  milder degree of inequality between a numerous upper class and a less politicized working class, the capitalist reclaiming of the economic agenda was achieved mostly through upper class solidarity. In Italy, only recently united into a nationality,  with a much smaller elite that nevertheless was able to impose greater wealth inequality on a highly politicized working class, more extreme measures were required. This came in the form of the populist, originally socialist Benito Mussolini whose rise to power in 1922 was the blank slate on which austerity it turned out could be written.  The neoclassical economists who drew inspiration from the Brussels and Genoa conferences provided Mussolini with an animating spirit for his authoritarian fascism.  To British neoclassical economists (and their media outlet, The Economist magazine) Mussolini's fascism was applauded as brilliant for the unruly, child-like Italians.  The physical brutality of outright fascism would never fly in genteel Britain it could be agreed.  Conveniently, it didn't need to be. 

In both countries, economists won the day.  Taxes were eased for the wealthy,  while the limit for tax exemption was lowered to increase the number of working class taxpayers by 300% in one year in the UK.   Italy privatized rail, telephone, health insurance and the construction and management of motorways. It was therefore not profligate social spending but unfettered capitalism that was behind capitalism's next big crisis with the collapse of the stock market causing ripples across the world in ways that led to the rise of Mussolini's ally Hitler in Germany and the New Deal in the United States.  Roosevelt's aggressive response to the crisis was modeled on the prescriptions of John Maynard Keynes, an early austerity adopter who circumstances inspired to come around to advocate governmental intervention in the economy in the name of preserving capitalism for another day.  

For 30 years, in addition to less exploitation of the workforce, proportional tax rates for corporations and the wealthy and a more robust economy, Keynesian stimulation of the economy through social spending fueled a renaissance of public works and expansion of welfare for the sick, the old and the poor, resulting in the introduction of massively popular social programs which by the 1960's threatened to eclipse the original purpose of the New Deal which was cryogenic preservation of free market capitalism.  By the late 70's however, austerity was back-- first floated by a new type of Democrat in Jimmy Carter before it was enshrined by the neoliberal revolution of Reagan, Thatcher and free market economists out of such places as the University of Chicago in the US and Bocconi University in Italy.  

According to Mattei:

Economists modeled the market society as one in which all people, if sufficiently rational and virtuous, could potentially thrive. This seemingly emancipatory insight was actually among the most classist: social hierarchies were reflections of individual merit, meaning that those who weren’t at the top didn’t deserve to be.

Filtering everything through the lens of austerity became the signature of the "serious" politician or journalist.  It's why discussions about universal healthcare are programmed to terminate on the rhetorical question "How will we pay for it?" whatever answer is supplied.  It's also why any measure to provide savings to taxpayers is treated with more urgency than the crisis of the climate that promises to splinter the relevance of budget battles on the rocky shore of planetary catastrophe.  But concern for the future of life of earth is frivolous and profligate when it comes from the fancies of the young.  If there is a solution, the invisible hand of the free market will surely provide it.

When you hear Chuck Todd asking some faceless Republican Senator what he intends to do about the social security deficit or Joe Biden darkly hinting about what must be done about entitlements, when the ruling class acts in concert to put a stop to overworked union member's ability to strike for sick leave rather than forcing members of their own class to pony up, don't think of it as grownups asking hard questions and doing hard work for the good of the economy.  Think of it as the Sociopath Class maintaining the relations of the rest of us to itself.  The class that brought us Capitalism, Hierarchy, Organized Religion, Inequity, Inequality, Colonialism, Slavery, Race, Racism, Mass Incarceration, Thermonuclear War, Anthropogenic Climate Change also gave us Austerity for us, Squandering for themselves.

Many of them, particularly those who were born into the class, think of wealth as an identity and not as an injustice they perpetrate and perpetuate on society and the planet usually by availing themselves of the lucky accident of the circumstances of their birth.  Those who aspire to wealth as a life goal have objectively poor taste and character.  As an idly wealthy character in the first season of HBO's series The White Lotus says in response to the woke radicalism of his collegiate daughter,  "Nobody cedes their privilege." It's an echo of Martin Luther King's observation that "Privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily."  It's both a valid rationale for the sociopath class and a directive for the rest of us.

Music to Think By

Op by Danish duo Svaneborg Kardyb.

 

Do you remember?

On a bend of a quiet road in the furthest reaches of the most rural New Jersey exurbs of New York City circa 1962 (before 'exurb' was a word), twin boys toddle under a late summer sun in the green grass of their front yard under the watchful gaze of their mother.  I am one of those boys.  My brother thirteen is the other. My attention is on a toddlery activity.  Toy trucks or cars may have been involved, or perhaps just a hole being excavated with sticks or rocks.  Whatever it was was interrupted by the approach from across the street of the neighbor woman, in a dress as I recall -- the common uniform of housewives in those days.  "Say hello to Mrs Pelagidis," my mother must have said, which I must have done before turning back to whatever had been occupying me and my brother.  The play reached a stage at which my brother thirteen assumed controls of the equipment.  To entertain myself I turned to observe my mother and Mrs Pelagidis engaged in barely fathomable adult conversation.  My mother said something that caused Mrs P to laugh.  From my vantage close to the ground, I studied the course of the laugh, from the way it burst involuntarily out of  Mrs Pelagidis' red painted lips to the way her mouth reformed to a smile, to the way the smile faded.    I remember the thought in my head "How long until the smile from mommy's joke goes away?"

I've held onto that memory for 60 years.  I can revisit it at will-- not all of the details are still there, but the progress of that laugh has never decayed.  I remember clearly the shape of Mrs P's mouth, the red lips, the whiteness of the teeth that suddenly appeared as they parted reflexively to react to my mother's wittiness, the smile dimples punctuating her cheeks, and after the staccato burst of laughter had stopped, the glacially slow closing of the ruby painted lips ultimately concealing the teeth once again, the lingering tension at the corners of the mouth slowly relaxing long after the drollery that had started the process had been uttered.  Perhaps I'd watched the progress of a laugh more than once which is where that sociological question came from.  Not only do I remember the smile, but I have a lifetime of memories of remembering the smile.

My first week of Junior High School, my class got a tour of the school library.  It was a long sunlit room full of books and tables that took up about half of one side of the corridor of a recently added wing of the school called the 'Annex'.   "Does anyone know what 'annex' means?" the librarian asked.  Having searched the data storage in my head for a trace of the cool sounding word and come up blank, I scanned the faces of my classmates for evidence of anyone with the answer.  The fact that I remember the incident might be an indication that someone knew and that maybe it stung a little that the someone wasn't me.  I remember the librarian's clarification of the term: that an annex was an addition, joined onto a main existing structure.  News to me.  Interesting.  In any case, it stuck in my head that in 6th grade, the meaning of the word 'annex' had been beyond me.

Months later, bored out of my mind one day, I resorted to a reliable time-killer, looking through a drawer of saved artwork and writings from over the years and I came across plans I had drawn up 4 years earlier in second grade for building a robot from spare pieces lying around the house.  The memory of the ambition came back to me easily.  The design called for a bucket for the head, antennae for ears, a sheet of tin for the torso, wheels for feet, and remarkably, for a computer "annexed to the brain".  I stared at the word scrawled in pencil with an 8 year old's wobbly penmanship -- "ANNEXED".  Had I once (sort of) known the word but forgotten it?  What kind of kid knows the word "annexed"?   More importantly, where was it when I needed it for the library tour?   

Forgetting the right answer is unfortunately not as rare for me as I'd prefer it to be. This past weekend, we had guests over for pie and coffee.  The subject of the conversation somehow turned to concerts we'd attended over the years.  My wife recounted the incredible story of her parents having the foresight to take her brothers and her to see the Beatles in Memphis at the height of Beatlemania in 1966.  She recalled the unsettling sight of her mother screaming along with the teenyboppers.  Our guests recalled concerts they'd attended -- Snoop Dogg for one and Chuck Berry for another.  I struggled to come up with my own.  I remembered seeing Mott the Hoople once.  But that was almost sad in retrospect.  Struggling to come up with something more impressive, a faint notion tried to light some synapses in my brain: Hadn't my wife and I seen Talking Heads at Pine Knob in the Michigan suburbs for their Speaking in Tongues tour in 1983?  It felt like a good possibility, but somehow no matter how hard I tried I could not conjure the image of me and my wife in the audience of a Talking Heads concert.  "Did we see Talking Heads?" I tried to ask her over the cacophony of reminiscences of fondly remembered events.  She thought for a moment.  "Yes we did." she finally said, less than forcefully.  I awkwardly tried to leverage her agreement into my own contribution to the conversation, but before I could, it hit me: if I wasn't even sure I had been to the concert, what business did I have using it as a memory to finagle a point for my team in the one-up-manship contest?  How could I expect anyone to be impressed when I myself had not been impressed enough to remember it? 

This was not the first time I had had trouble confirming my presence at that Talking Heads concert in the suburbs of Detroit some 40 years ago.  It's not out of the question that that could be due to the ingestion of memory impairing substances preceding the event, but given my wife's hesitation, it's not clear to me that our notion of attendance at the concert wasn't formed from hearing about someone else's experience of it.  Even if we had been there-- and I don't rule it out*-- it could hardly be called a memory.   It's more like poorly constructed folklore.  The memory of something seems to be an important element of it having happened.  Something that evidence could prove happened to me but that I can't remember-- is it a question for history, or is it a zen koan?

My guests barely knew who the Talking Heads were anyway.

~~~~~~

* I don't rule it out even knowing that anyone who remembered it would insist that anyone who had been to that concert would have remembered it.  I am representing those who prove that it's possible to forget the unforgettable.  (and no one's fault if they do.)

The Frog's Eye and the Feedback Loop

On a sunny summer day, a Northern Leopard frog sits on a lily pad at the edge of a pond.  A beetle lands nearby and retracts its wings.  After a moment of stillness, it starts to crawl.  The frog, immobile to now, leaps on the beetle in a flash, scoops it into its mouth with its sticky tongue and swallows.  It returns to stillness.  Moments later, the shadow of a heron wading close by falls suddenly over the frog.  Before the heron has a chance to swoop in, the frog leaps toward a patch of darkness on the surface of the pond and escapes under the canopy of bobbing lily pads swimming for deeper water.  It is a simple sequence of interactions, facilitated by the frog's vision.

The eyes of a frog protrude from its head to a unique extent for any vertebrate.  They are relatively immobile, moving only as the frog moves its head.  Unlike human eyes which have a focal point that requires them to be directed at an object in order to see it, every surface of the frog's eye sees equally all at once, in light and, masterfully, in dark.  Even a frog's eyelids-- a top, a bottom and a third nictating eyelid that lubricates the eye when it is on land-- are transparent.  Moreover due to parallax effects of the placement of the eyes and their bulging shape a frog has nearly 360° of peripheral vision at all times.  Thus a frog is a vision machine, turned on whenever the frog is awake, and evidence suggests even when it's not. Frogs see color and as has been recently demonstrated can even distinguish between shades in what a human would consider complete darkness.  In fact, a frog's survival is very much dependent on what its eyes can perceive.  As one researcher put it, a frog "will starve to death surrounded by food if it is not moving." 

Our intuition about vision is that the eyes merely perceive the external world by transmitting images whole to the brain to interpret. But this is not the case for frogs.  

We know this because of a landmark study of frog vision by Jerome Lettvin, Humberto Maturana, W.S. McCulloch and Will Pitts, described in their paper, "What the frog's eye tells the frog's brain"  published in 1959 for the Proceedings of the Institute of Radio Engineers.  Lettvin a professor of electrical and bioengineering and communications physiology at MIT had met Pitts-- a self-taught wunderkind in math and logic from Detroit--  as a graduate student at University of Illinois. Lettvin, Pitts and their American colleague McCulloch were all researchers in the up and coming field of cybernetics, the study of the organization and control of systems biological and electronic, and especially the interaction between machines-- specifically computers-- and the humans who operate and interact with them. The term 'Cybernetics' was coined in 1947 from the Greek κυβερνήτης for "steersman" by Norbert Wiener and Arturo Rosenblueth, early pioneers in the field.  Wiener and his group at MIT were interested in studying components of systems (mechanical, organizational and biological) built to respond to problems organically encountered in the course of operation-- a class of engineering problem the solution to which promised a wide array of applications, not least the engineering  of what has come to be thought of as artificial intelligence.  The bedrock of cybernetics was the feedback loop, in which one part of a system provides input to a processor producing a response which in turn is intepreted by the originating component as instructions for what to provide next in the way of input.  

Ensconced at MIT following his graduate work, Lettvin had become interested in vision and the role it played in how creatures interact with the world. Maturana, a Chilean national completing his Ph.D. at Harvard at the same time had done electron microscopy of the hundreds of thousands of fibers in the frog's optic nerve and his results had inspired the method devised by the researchers for distinguishing classes of nerve bundles in order to intercept neural firings to get readings of responses to visual stimuli.

For the experiment which used the Northern Leopard frog (Rana pipiens) as subjects, electrodes were attached strategically to the optic nerve and to the superior colliculus-- the vision receptor of the brain.  Over the eye was mounted a specially constructed aluminum hemisphere on the surface of which were moved various objects of different shapes, sizes and colors by means of magnets in varying light.  In this way, readings could be taken of the frog's neural responses to the visual stimuli.  What the researchers discovered was that certain bundles of nerve fibers were prone to respond to specific categories of visual stimulus.  Contrast between contiguous areas of the visual field (distinction of an object from the area surrounding it) was detected by one type of bundle.  The movement of an edge on the plane evoked responses from another. The net curvature of an edge (the shape of much of a frog's diet) stimulated a third category of bundle. Another was sensitive to changes in degree of ambient darkness-- such as what might be caused by a descending shadow.  Each type of bundle transmitted a signature pattern of impulses to the brain at the introduction of its associated visual stimulus.  The researchers concluded that the optic system of the frog had evolved to detect specific features of the visual horizon in whole, and that far from being a passive camera scanning the environment for images for the brain to interpret was on its own detecting and sending information whole pre-interpreted for the brain for a hastened response-- capture and intake in the case of beetles, flight in the case of herons.  As Lettvin put it to a colleague, “The eye speaks to the brain in a language already highly organized and interpreted, instead of transmitting some more or less accurate copy of the distribution of light on the receptors.”

 We're told that Lettvin was laughed off the stage at American Physiology Society in Atlantic City when he presented the paper.  Walter Rosenblith, an MIT colleague and leading researcher in vision was so skeptical of Lettvin's results that he snubbed his colleague in assembling a meeting on vision shortly after the conference-- but on challenging Lettvin in his lab to demonstrate his methods, he was reportedly convinced.  The paper became among the most cited for at least the next ten years. 

One researcher inspired by it was Stafford Beer.   Beer was a British theorist, consultant and author in business management of a field that he called Operational Research.  Heavily influenced by the cybernetics of Norbert Wiener he had written for years about how the optimal structure of an organization should emulate the nervous system of an organism -- with tendrils into the environment-to-be-perceived and fed to a central brain for processing the data and quickly directing the limbs in how to respond to conditions at hand, but his focus had been on the structure of the midcentury corporation.  He had never had an opportunity to apply his theories on anything beyond a client company, let alone to a social movement, until he was approached by Fernando Flores, a young up-and-comer in Salvador Allende's coalition Socialist government that had been elected in Chile in November 1970.  

As a graduate student at the University of Illinois in the early 60s, Flores had been inspired by encounters with the cybernetics community headed  by Heinz von Foerster, director of the Biological Computer Laboratory.  Now working for Allende's government as an employee of  CORFO, the acronym for Chilean Production Development Corporation, Flores wanted a system cybernetically devised to permit rapid response to current conditions within the various economic sectors of the country.  To this end he hired Beer as consultant to engineer the project.  

Beer had been thinking for years about how to get around the persistent problem in pre-internet times of information lag.  Owing to the speed at which economic data was collected, typed up and published, information  gathered for strategic planning purposes was typically 3 months old before it was analyzed by decision makers, making the response frequently too late and irrelevant to the situation on the ground.  Given the international opposition to Allende's election immediately raised from the world's most powerful players economically and strategically,  opposition in the form of barriers of trade and blacklisting (to say nothing of the active plotting against Allende orchestrated and enabled from the Nixon administration and CIA, including the assassination of a pro-Allende General shortly after the 1970 election in an unsuccessful attempt to embolden anti-Allende factions in the military to prevent Allende's assumption of the office), Flores was wanting to devise for Chile something that did not exist at the time anywhere in the world except in the US and UK, and at that, still very much as more a set of ad hoc links set up between disparate technologies of a handful of universities than an integrated system.  

In a very real sense, Beer was tasked with creating an interconnected network-- an internet if you will-- from the ground up.  The project was dubbed Cybersyn (a portmanteau of Cybernetics and Synergy) in English and Synco (for Sistema de Información y Control) in Spanish.  Beer's original design called for links between the behemoth mainframes of the time strategically placed around Chile's challenging geography (4000 miles from North to South and only 60 miles from East to West.), but at the time only one was available for the project's use in the country, an IBM/3060 in Santiago-- and given the hostility of the international business community to Allende's socialist  government, likely to be the only for the foreseeable future. 

As Beer discovered, one thing that Chile had no shortage of at the time was Telexes, hundreds of which had been lying in storage since the project for which they were originally procured had been shelved by a previous administration.  The windfall permitted instant communication of data over great distances through telephone lines. Telexes were installed in strategic factories, farms and offices across the country.  To gather and process the information, Beer conceived of a "war room" of large-screen wall-mounted monitors fed with data and controlled by decision makers arranged in a circle to enhance the democratic spirit of collaboration in specially designed fiberglass chairs custom made in Chile per Beer's specifications. with simplified controls built into the arms giving each participant the ability to call up charts and relevant data from their respective sectors for group discussion.  The technology was new but the war room bore a certain resemblance to something out of Star Trek or Kubrick's 2001.  

With a middling economy that had historically underperformed, Chile was an unlikely place for an internet to be pioneered.  In devising a system to maintain Cybersyn beyond his involvement with the project, Beer took inspiration from the new theory of 'autopoiesis' describing the self-regeneration of biological -- and by extension, human designed-- systems that was developed in Chile by none other than Humberto Maturana with his colleague at University of Chile Francisco Varela.  Beer invited Maturana and the latter's University of Illinois mentor Heinz von Foerster to see the progress of the project and share thoughts and suggestions with the team.  Allende himself visited.  

The strikingly futuristic room was small and the heat generated from the cramped equipment and close quarters sometimes caused malfunctions, but the Cybersyn concept was given a test by a paralyzing national trucker strike joined by small business owners and shopkeepers in September 1972 (all of it instigated and funded covertly by Nixon and Kissinger's CIA as it turned out) to bring their foe Allende's economy to a halt.  As a test of Cybersyn's design and purpose, word from across the country was quickly brought to the war room via Telex. In this manner the team could rapidly determine where there were shortages, where there might be factories that Allende's government could nationalize.  In spite of the striking of the petit bourgeoisie, workers who were very much in the Allende camp assumed control of factories and with the help of the cybersyn team knew where to send goods and equipment to keep the country fed and supplied with essentials.  The strike which ended after 26 days was weathered successfully in part due to the part that Cybersyn played in mitigating stoppages and blockades.

A second strike of shopkeepers, professionals and Santiago taxi drivers in June 1973 (also enabled due to heavy CIA involvement) further destabilized the country.  On September 11, a violent military coup headed by General Augusto Pinochet seized control of the government.  In the course of events, Allende was killed at the Presidential Palace (by suicide a scientific autopsy much later appeared to confirm).  Stafford Beer was back in the UK at the time.  Fernando Flores,  who had met with Salvador Allende earlier that day was later arrested along with hundreds of Allende officials, imprisoned and subjected to the Pinochet regime's brutal brand of torture for 2 years before being released and forced into exile.* 

In spite of its early successes, Project Cybersyn's fate had already been somewhat sealed. In the face of growing economic and societal instability, intense right wing propaganda (and to some extent poor PR on the part of the Allende government), the project had come to be tarred as authoritarian overreach.  The taint of its association with Allende's moderate socialism all but guaranteed that it would be relegated to the dustbin of history by Pinochet's extreme right-wing coup.  Heavily backed by the US,  Chile became a laboratory for the austere economic policies of the University of Chicago school personified by Milton Friedman, an early testing ground for the neoliberal world order that would soon come to dominate and suffocate the global economic and political order. 

The public's introduction to Cybersyn was somewhat responsible for its demise.  To the Cybersyn team, Control didn't mean Authoritarian rule as was frequently misinterpreted to great effect by foes of Allende's project, but rather informed response to the best information.   In fact, when Stafford Beer was tasked to sell Salvador Allende on the plan, in explaining one of his famous charts of his Viable System Model of overlapping circles demonstrating the flow of information and control in a system in all directions, he was struck by Allende's characterization of the highest level of the hierarchy, the brain of the organism as being "por fin, el pueblo" (At last the people).  In the conception of the Cybersyn team, the fuel for the feedback loop was information transmitted, fully interpreted, by the specialized organ of the state's economy, the workers, to stimulate an informed response from a centralized decision-making organ acting to the benefit of the body politic.  Much like the eyes and brain of the frog.  

Georgios Cherouvim

_____

Inspired by material from Cybernetic Revolutionaries, by Eden Medina, MIT Press, 2011.

~~~~~~

* On his release, with the Pinochet government still in full swing, Flores, whose brainchild Project Cybersyn was, emigrated to the US where he took up residence at Stanford University. Finding himself present at the creation of Silicon Valley, he was able to ride the wave of the earliest internet bubbles to turn his experience and expertise in organizational logistics into a fortune-- ironically becoming an exponent of Silicon Valley libertarianism.  For Stafford Beer, Cybersyn was a point on the path of an opposite trajectory-- the one-time business consultant was turned into a committed socialist by his experience of Allende's Chile; and he continued to offer his services to cybernetic projects in Mexico, Venezuela and Uruguay.