you need to read about chile 1971

[solarbird]

If you’re into the whole old-school SF idea of planned/constructed societies and all that -and if you haven’t read much SF of the 30s though early 60s, you’ve missed out – you really need to read about Synco (a.k.a. Project Cybersyn) in Chile during the Allende administration, before the Pinochet coup d’etat. Because they tried it, for industrial production.

The Wikipedia article gives you an overview, but THIS WAS REAL, NOT A MOVIE SET:

The Opsroom or Operations Room: a physical location where [nationalised industry] information was to be received and stored and made available for speedy decision-making. It was designed in accordance with Gestalt principles, in order to give users a platform that would give them a chance to absorb information in a simple and comprehensive way.

They didn’t get finished before the coup d’etat – the screens were used, but they had to have slides prepared each day rather than getting the data straight from the computer. But they were using the data – successfully, in many cases. All the major production facilities were, in fact, connected, via a massive network of telex machines, and data was flowing to the central computer, which was modelling and predicting based on daily data, and heuristic decisions were being made and acted upon and everything.

The goal was to have it all be realtime, as their computer capabilities ramped up. Keep in mind: this was in an era when moving this kind of data around and collating it within a single company in most countries could take took weeks, and decision-making could take even longer. They were doing it daily, with an eye towards continuously.

The difference between this and the Soviet and Chinese experiments is that it was intentionally decentralised. They were specifically avoiding those systems and trying to come up with something both socialist and rationalist and distributed – some of the factories had started setting up their own mini-facilities like this central one.

I’m fascinated by what they might’ve come up with, without Pinochet and his military dictatorship. They had the entire system destroyed – Pinochet was about authoritarianism, and had no time for this distributed-authority bullshit.

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Comments

[vostoklake]

And of course the centralisation of authority and the consequent bureaucratic sclerosis is the reason why socialist economies didn't work in the pre-Internet era. Now, a post-capitalist future is actually possible.

Also, I know quite a few people whose parents were Chilean refugees. They understand why so many lined up to spit on Thatcher's grave for defending Pinochet.

[solarbird]

Yeah, yet another reason to hate Pinochet - like anyone needed any more.

[hidden_in_plain_sight]

Had a Chilean refugee as a housemate one summer. Good conversations, plus an introduction to the pleasures of a pisco sour. ^_^

[angelwolfgeek]

Interestingly this fixes one of my major critiques of communism, and the command driven economy, that quite simply that it dosen't take into account human behaviour. Pesky dictators aside, I do think it would be cool to see someone try the same model with modern technology - a single desktop and a bunch of mobile phones could handle the same tasks with much more ease.

[solarbird]

A modern desktop would certainly have more power than the System 360 they were using, sure, but also, your models could also be a lot deeper and include a lot more variables. So you'd still want to throw as much processor at it as you could - particularly as you moved it closer and closer to realtime.

[angelwolfgeek]

Yup, I suspect some modern *phones* might - but hardware is seriously cheap. Wouldn't hurt to throw a cluster at the problem. Nonetheless, the technology to do this better exists. The will to do so, apparently less so.

[hidden_in_plain_sight]

We're implementing it right now, as a regional-scale cluster. Can't say much more than that (pesky NDAs like y'know) but it's already paying off even though it is not yet fully built-out.

[hidden_in_plain_sight]

And, by the bye, 'boo hiss' on Pinochet and Thatcher, both of them being the worst sort of wreckers. :(