1971 Socialist Internet In Chile

In the early 1970's Chile had the Internet, which is a big revelation to all you newshound tipsters who sought to impress me with the New York Times piece about that nation-wide network of e-socialism called Cybersyn. Old news: Andy Beckett wrote about Chile's retro-Net five years ago for The Guardian, dubbing it "a sort of socialist internet, decades ahead of its time".

I discovered Beckett's article last year, as it makes fascinating apocrypha to his book Pinochet In Piccadilly (the veritable Gospel of Chile according to Matt, who recommended it to me, but written by Beckett) a marvelous work tracing Chile's British roots back from the time the land masses were still connected (18th Century) to the 1998 arrest of Gen. Augusto Pinochet in a London clinic.

A continuation of his keen and sometimes Where's Waldo-ish scouting for the British influence in Chile, Beckett's Cybersyn story duly tickles its author because the mastermind of the revolutionary network was a gregarious Brit named Stafford Beer, perhaps a not-so-quiet echo of the Scottish Admiral Thomas Cochrane, 10th Earl of Dundonald, who in 1818 was invited by Chilean leader Bernardo O'Higgins to command Chile's Navy and win key battles, helping, er, navigate Chile toward independence from Spain.

No such eventual luck for Beers' bosses, though you can't fault his project. Despite seeming fantastical for its time, it worked. And while full functionality was not achieved before power changed hands in Chile, Cybersyn nevertheless helped defray the effects of the crippling trucker's strike, part of the Nixon Administration CIA-instrumented economic strangulation strategy, a line of attack that ultimately failed to topple Allende's government, and so preceded the September 11, 1973 Coup. The Times writes:

Cybersyn’s turning point came in October 1972, when a strike by truckers and retailers nearly paralyzed the economy. The interconnected telex machines, exchanging 2,000 messages a day, were a potent instrument, enabling the government to identify and organize alternative transportation resources that kept the economy moving.

Stepping back for a moment, when first I saw this Times article I was suspicious because, as everyone knows by now, the same New York "Kleptomaniac" Times just doesn't care and has gone on a craven bender, recklessly pilfering Southern Cone journalism left and right, giving itself a hefty five-finger discount on absolutely all stories Argentina, from every news source imaginable.

Fortunately, as far as I can tell and haven't really looked that much, this troubling trend doesn't seem to have braved the Andean passes over into Chile; while the Times piece on Cybersyn was likely inspired by Beckett's, it's fresh enough and certainly plenty originally-reported that it even has a hook: there is an exhibit in La Moneda Cultural Center showcasing replicas of the trekki-esque chairs and other apparatusses found in the Santiago Cybersyn HQ.

(UPDATE: my friend who works there says: Si hasta una semana más en el Centro de Documentación del centro Cultural Palacio al moneda.)

But while both articles are necessarily historical, Beckett's feels moreso as he mines the richness of Beer's character, his upbringing, his entrance on the Chilean stage, and the political and theoretical backdrop for a socialist Internet in Chile. He writes:

As in many areas, the Allende government wanted to do things differently from traditional marxist regimes

and quotes Raul Espejo, a senior advisor to Allende's minister Fernando Flores:

"I was very much against the Soviet model of centralisation...My gut feeling was that it was unviable."

But soon into the Allende presidency, the results of nationalization efforts were haphazard. So an important Cybersyn objective was to wire up factories throughout Chile and aggregate vital stats so that Santiago could measure national productivity in real time.

Worth noting that an improvised form of nationalization came about when factory owners opposed to Allende stayed home, on strike. In The Battle of Chile, a film by Patricio Guzman who documented the buildup to the 1973 Coup (view Part 1 here), there are several interviews with factory workers who formed part of a larger movement: despite their bosses not showing up, these workers continued to man the factories to salvage the economy.

A Chilean who was watching this part of the movie with me was bowled over by the passionate solidarity these workers displayed, the timbre in their voices, the idealistic glint in their eyes. She was amazed that people from her country could ever show so much enthusiasm for a common cause. The Chile of today has been completely transformed.

In Pinochet in Piccadilly, Beckett interviews Sergio Rueda, a leftist activist who was tortured by the Pinochet junta and exiled to England, where he assimilated and continued to live, returning regularly to visit family since the dictatorship ended in 1990. Beckett writes:

Visits back to Santiago had changed his view of Chile...increasingly he found it difficult to gain a mental foothold in his former homeland: "There are some raw materials from the past, but people have changed. There is an entrepreneur kind of mentality. You will find people that you know will say, 'Oh, you are abroad. We can do business. I am selling doors.'"

Macleans says Pinochet turned Chile into "a nation of entrepreneurs." Snarky Napoleon once called England, "a nation of shopkeepers." Beckett I'm doing your work for you.

The Thieving Times also loves entrepreneurship, so they definitely come down on capitalism's side, in the little "where are they now" sub-section of the Cybersyn story. Flores, who was active in the project, is celebrated:

He later was one of the inventors of the Coordinator, a program that tracked spoken commitments between workers within a company, one of the first forays into “work flow” software. He became a millionaire and returned to Chile, where today he is a senator representing the Tarapacá Region.

I'm a shopkeeper too - Click here to buy Pinochet In Piccadilly today!.