In this episode we are discussing Cybernetic Revolutionaries by Eden Medina (MIT Press, 2011), which examines the effort to create a cybernetic system of communication and industrial management during the socialist government of Salvador Allende in Chile, from 1970 to 1973.
Medina uses this fascinating case study to explore the relationship of two utopian visions: one socialist, and one technological, embodied in figures such as British cybernetics pioneer Stafford Beer and Fernando Flores, a member of Allende’s government and advocate of Beer’s ideas. Links to references in the episode:
Elizabeth Stainforth and Jo Lindsay Walton, 'Computing Utopia: The Horizons of Computational Economies in History and Science Fiction,' Science Fiction Studies, 46:3 (2019)
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The podcast music is Stealing Orchestra & Rafael Dionísio, 'Gente da minha terra (que me mete um nojo do caralho).' Reproduced from the Free Music Archive under a Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License, available here: https://bit.ly/35ToW4W
The podcast logo is an adapted version of the Left Book Club logo (1936-48), reproduced, edited and shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International licence. Original available here: https://bit.ly/35Nd6cv.
The image in this episode is one of Stafford Beer’s schematics for the Cybersyn project, which was displayed in the central operations room in Santiago.