This three-part episode of Kernel Panic explores a startlingly advanced computer network developed in Chile in the 1970s.
Project Cybersyn was part of an effort by President Salvador Allende, the first democratically elected Marxist leader, to modernize the Chilean economy. It was developed in parallel with American networks that would become the internet, despite the fact that President Nixon was simultaneously trying to undermine the Chilean economy and overthrow Allende.
Cybersyn, designed by a farthinking British theorist and run by a cadre of young revolutionary programmers, was an astonishing success. Using little more than old telephone wires and mothballed pre-war machinery, the Chilean program built out a real-time data stream reminiscent of today’s social media newsfeeds.
For two years, programmers watched and monitored the country’s industry from a retro-futuristic control room in the capital. They battled strikes and attempted coups until September 1973, when Allende was overthrown by a military junta led by Augusto Pinochet. The dream of a stable, modernized Chile died with Allende, and so did the potential for a second internet, built in parallel and evolved under a totally different system of information sharing.
For this episode of Kernel Panic, we talk to: Fernando Flores, who served under Allende as finance minister before spending three years in prison under Pinochet; Raul Espejo, operational director of Project Cybersyn; and the family of Stafford Beer.
