This weblog post is being published on the 100th anniversary of the birth of Stafford Beer, born in London, England on 1926-09-25. He died in Toronto, Ontario, on Canada 2002-08-23. He refered to himself as a cyberneticist. The focus of this post is Beer’s work in Chile.
A cyberneticist is a scientist or researcher who studies regulatory, feedback and control systems in both living organisms and machines. It is often confused with a computer scientist, who focuses on the theory, design, and development of computation and software systems.
Cybernetics was first used by Norbert Weiner (1894 – 1964) in 1948. It originates in the ancient Greek word for helmsperson or pilot = κυβερνήτης, the person responsible for steering a vessel. It is the first word of a book title, Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, written by Weiner in 1948. In general, the preferred version of this work is the 2nd or revised edition, published in 1961 by MIT Press. In it, Wiener theorizes that all intelligent behavior was the result of feedback mechanisms that could possibly be simulated by machines. My aquaintanceship with Weiner – and this work – began in 1984, when I was taking a course in Simulation in Molde, Norway.
To fully understand Beer, one must understand the situation in the world, and especially in Chile. In the early 1970s the people of Chile democratically elected a socialist government, with Salvador Guillermo Allende Gossens (1908 – 1973) who served as the 29th president of Chile from 1970. He served in this capacity until his death by suicide, in 1973, during a coup d’état led by Augusto Pinochet (1915 – 2006). The coup was supported by the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Declassified documents showed that US president Richard Nixon (1913 – 1994) and his national security advisor Henry Kissinger (1923 – 2023) were aware of the military’s plans to overthrow Allende. As a socialist committed to democracy, Allende has been described as the first Marxist to be elected president in a liberal democracy in Latin America.
Before Carlos Fernando Flores Labra (1943 – ) became Chile’s Minister of Finance at the end of 1972, he had been appointed head of Chile’s Production and Development Corporation (Corfo) by Allende in 1969. Amid a rush of excitement for Allende’s plans, Flores hoped to present Beer with his vision for a technology-driven, state-led economic model.
In the autumn of 1971, Flores, an ambitious young engineer from Talca, central Chile, strode into the lobby of the exclusive Athenaeum Club on London’s Pall Mall to meet Stafford Beer. Beer had been increasingly frustrated by the lack of traction his ideas were getting in Britain where he had pioneered cybernetic management principles = the science of effective organization. These ideas had inspired Flores. The meeting resulted in an experimental collaboration in Chile. This collaboration became one of cold war Latin America’s fiercest battlegrounds. Project Cybersyn was a futuristic plan for a modern socialist economy. It was a distributed decision-support system to aid in the management of the national economy. It consisted of four modules: 1) an economic simulator, 2) custom software to check factory performance, 3) an operations room, and 4) The cybernet = a national network of telex machines that linked to a mainframe computer, that would transmit and receive information to and from the government in Santiago.
The viable system model (VSM) is a model of the organizational structure of any autonomous system capable of producing itself. At the biological level, this model involves autopoiesis = a system capable of producing and maintaining itself by creating its own parts. Yes, this is the same system used by humans and other mammals, although that system requires the co-operation of organisms representing two different genders. The theoretical foundations of this system were developed by Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana (1928 – 2021) and Francisco Varela (1946 – 2001), in Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living (1972).
The photo of an ASR 32 telex machine shows a three row keyboard and five-hole punched (or perforated) paper tape that encodes text data using the Baudot (Murray) code. Details about this code can be found in a Wikipedia article. The paper tape supply reel is at the upper left; the tape is lying on top of the punch cover. The tape reader is at lower left. The panel to the right of the keyboard has a rotary telephone dial for connecting the machine to various destinations via the TWX network. Printing paper is supplied from a roll, visible top center, and is fed through the printer mechanism with rubber pinch rollers.
In 1969-70 when I worked as a stock broker apprentice, one of my tasks was to communicate by telex from the office of Wolverton Securities on Burrard Street in Vancouver to our traders on the floor of the Vancouver Stock Exchange. Most communications were about buy and sell orders. We would use the keyboard to prepare a paper tape. When a communication was fully typed onto the paper tape, it could then be sent at full speed using that paper tape as source. All incoming and outgoing communications were printed out in real time as a carbon copy on yellow paper. The original, on white paper, would be given to the originator of the document, most often the appropriate sales person, while the carbon copy would be kept as documentation, should any disputes arise.
In Chile a network of telex machines connected the factories of Corfo’s more than 80 subsidiary companies to an operations room in Santiago, the Chilian capital. There, seven chairs were set in a circle for Allende’s decision makers to monitor production in real time, each with a set of futuristic buttons, a cigar ashtray and space for a whisky tumbler built into the armrest.
The creators of CyberSyn were referred to as the Santiago Boys, a group of young Chilean engineers who used early computer technology to manage the national economy under Allende in the early 1970s. After Pinochet’s coup, the Chicago Boys, a clique of economists educated under Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago, swiftly brought their mentor’s neoliberal ideals to Chile. According to Evgeny Morozov (1984 – ), the Chicago Boys were a violent, bloody and not-so-creative response to the Santiago Boys. They used dark tech = the use of technology to pursue a political agenda: propaganda, surveillance and pursuing their enemies.
ITT, whose Chilean holding Chiltelco Allende had nationalised on assuming the presidency, helped foment anti-Allende sentiment and funded opponents of his government in Chile in the months before the coup d’état, according to declassified cables.
Deep digs into alleged, more sinister uses of technology in the early 1970s, were part of Operation Condor, the US-backed network of rightwing Latin American regimes which shared intelligence to hunt down leftist dissidents. Operation Condor claimed the lives of as many as 60 000 people between 1975 and 1989, and some estimates put the number of its political prisoners at 400 000 more.
It was orchestrated, at least in part, from an operations centre probably situated in the Recoleta neighbourhood of Buenos Aires. It used the same telex technology as Flores and Beer’s Cybersyn Project to share intelligence.
Beer was known as a charismatic, but sometimes volatile, man who had been educated at elite private schools. He demonstrated his elitist beliefs by driving a Rolls-Royce and keeping the company of the later disgraced media baron Robert Maxwell (1923 – 1991) while living in Surrey. Despite this, he grew a beard, taught tantric yoga, wrote poetry and painted. He lived in Wales then Canada with few material possessions. The philosopher Humberto Maturana (1928 – 2021) memorably remarked of Beer that he had arrived in Chile a businessman and left a hippy.
Beer died in 2002, and after two years researching his work and legacy, Morozov believes that his lack of formal academic training – he never completed his degree, which was interrupted by military service, or studied for a doctorate – as well as the “wrong” kind of eccentricity and his explicit links to Allende all dented his credibility in intellectual circles. “He became more of a counterculture guy, rather than a serious thinker,” Morozov explained.
Fernando Flores was held in a prison camp in the south of Chile until his release in 1976. He moved to Silicon Valley, where he enjoyed a successful entrepreneurial career, before returning to Chile and becoming a senator.
Pinochet was arrested in London in 1998 on an international warrant obtained by the Spanish lawyer Baltasar Garzón. Before his arrest, the former dictator had been staying at the Athenaeum Club on Waterloo Place where Beer and Flores first met.
Cybernetics, the field Beer was so closely related to, was largely sidelined in the 1970s by excitement surrounding artificial intelligence. “Beer’s ideas still get discussed because he wanted information technology to be the coordinating force, not the market,” said Morozov. “That’s why I find the legacy of the Cybersyn Project and Stafford Beer to be a very promising avenue for reinventing what socialism of the 21st century should be.”
Notes:
The relationship between cybernetics and artificial intelligence is complex. Anno 2026, researchers in both areas attempt to distance themselves from each other. In terms of artificial intelligence, the standard textbook is: Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach by Stuart Russell (1962 – ) and Peter Norvig (1956 – ). It was originally published in 1995, with the latest edition being the 4th, published in 2020. Most casual readers will find it too mathematical and heavy going. A much better approach is to avoid the mathematics by reading the original, first edition of Artificial Intelligence (1983) by Elaine Rich (1953 – ). The standard introduction to cybernetics is An Introduction to Cybernetics (1957) by the psychiatist W(illiam) Ross Ashby (1903 – 1972). These last two books are both readable by people without a degree.
Stafford Beer’s most readable book is Designing Freedom (1974) based on his 1973 Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) Massey Lectures that explores how cybernetics, the science of effective organization, can be used to design social institutions that enhance human liberty rather than restrict it. The Massey Lectures are an annual five-part public lecture series in Canada where distinguished writers, thinkers and scholars have explored major contemporary ideas and issues since 1961. Charles Vincent Massey (1887 – 1967) was a Canadian diplomat and statesman who served as the 18th governor general of Canada from 1952 to 1959. Massey was the first governor general of Canada to be born in Canada. My junior secondary school in New Westminster was named after him.
Carlos Fernando Flores Labra is a Chilean engineer, philosopher, entrepreneur and politician. From 1969 – 1973 he was finance minister in the cabinet of president Salvador Allende. He then spent three years as a political prisoner from 1973 to 1976 after the military coup of General Augusto Pinochet. Subsequently, he was exiled after negotiations on his behalf by Amnesty International. He moved with his family to Palo Alto, California, where he worked as a researcher in the Computer Science department at Stanford University. At the same time he undertook a Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley, writing a dissertation titled: Management and Communication in the Office of the Future. It is about how people will manage, communicate and coordinate team efforts using computer networks in future workplaces. Returning to Chile ca. 2000 he was senator for the Arica and Parinacota and Tarapacá regions between 2001 and 2009. From 2010 – 2013, he was designated President of Chile’s National Innovation Council for Competitiveness by President Sebastián Piñera (1949 – 2024).