How to Manage an Economy

During Salvador Allende’s government, Chile’s main industries were transferred to state ownership. The challenges resulting from the speed and scale of this nationalisation process led to the development of a project to manage public industries, which included worker participation, a future-oriented vision and the ability to adapt quickly to change.

The project was called Cybersyn or Proyecto Synco (abbreviations of the words ‘cybernetic synergy’ and ‘information and control system’, or ‘sistema de información y control’ in Spanish). It was coordinated by the State Development Corporation (CORFO) and the Technology Research Committee of Chile (INTEC), and it was led by Fernando Flores, the general technical director of CORFO; the British cybernetician Stafford Beer; and Raúl Espejo, the project’s operational director.

Cybersyn was based on the ‘viable systems model’, a management approach proposed by Beer that had analogies with human neurophysiology, and had four subsystems: Cybernet, a national telecommunications network that allowed data to be sent from factories to the government in real time; Cyberstride, software that predicted industrial performance and identified potential crises; Checo, a simulator designed to make economic reports easier to understand; and Opsroom, an operations room. As a whole, the project provided quick information on vast amounts of data and systematised them so political and economic decisions on Chilean industries could be taken.

All Cybersyn processes were concentrated in its cutting-edge operations room developed by INTEC’s Industrial Design Area under the leadership of the German designer Gui Bonsiepe. Although Salvador Allende visited a prototype of the room in January 1973, only the pilot phase—of both the room and the entire Cybersyn project—was ever implemented. Bonsiepe and other INTEC members had an appointment with the president at the Palacio de La Moneda to discuss installing the room directly in the presidential palace. However, the meeting was postponed just days before the coup d’état on 11 September 1973.