This article was published in issue 87 of Xinrui Weekly (it came out last year, but I forgot to repost it), under the title A “Failed” Social Experiment in Cybernetics—A Review of The Cybernetic Revolutionaries. It was slightly abridged at the time of publication (mainly the parts about involution were cut); here is the original text.
Allende was elected president of Chile by a large margin in 1970. After taking office, he immediately launched a series of socialist reforms, including banning foreign enterprises, striking at landlords, and establishing a state-owned economy, among other measures. During this period, in order to effectively manage the nationalized economic system, Allende invited the British cybernetics expert Beer, and with his help built a computer system called “Cybersyn.” This system did play a partial role; for example, in 1972 it helped the Allende government obtain information from grassroots factories in real time, thereby weathering a massive strike. However, due to various internal and external problems, Chile’s economic environment deteriorated, and in 1973 a coup overthrew the Allende government, ending this vigorous socialist revolution; the Cybersyn system was also abandoned.
This book, The Cybernetic Revolutionaries, is about the origins and course of this Cybersyn system. Although it has some bright spots, on the whole the project looks short-lived and unsuccessful; how much interesting material could there really be to write about it? This book offers a very good demonstration: it shows that the history of science does not always have to focus on those developments that were ultimately the most successful, and that these seemingly failed technological paths can also become very interesting narrative subjects.
This historiographical perspective is especially worth borrowing for Chinese historians of science and technology, as it can inspire us to develop more historical narratives that are not centered on the West. Traditional histories of science and technology focus on the developmental paths that eventually succeeded, and because the developed countries of Europe and America did in fact lead the route of modern technological development, what ultimately counts as success often has to be measured by Western standards.
For example, writing the history of science and technology in China has long been a very typical Western-centered perspective. Chinese historians of science and technology have always been devoted to excavating from ancient China those technological advances that appeared “earlier than in the West,” such as how many years earlier the compass was invented than in the West, how many years earlier an accurate value of pi was obtained than in the West, and so on. But this narrative of being “earlier than the West” precisely reflects a standard of “measured by the West.” The reason we pay attention to these technological achievements is that these technological advances ultimately shone among Westerners. With a few exceptions such as Chinese medicine, if a certain idea or creation was ultimately not developed by Westerners, and ultimately did not contribute to the modernization initiated by the West, then it would also be hard for those ideas and creations to enter the mainstream narrative of Chinese history of science and technology.
In other words, the traditional way of writing Chinese history of science and technology, while portraying ancient China as very “advanced,” still uses a Western-centered scale to measure “advanced” and “backward.” As a result, this historiographical method is very ill-suited to the history of science and technology in modern and contemporary China. For historians of science and technology discover that the prosperity and leadership of ancient China in the technological sphere suddenly disappeared, and modern China became backward everywhere in technological fields, offering little of note. All praise for ancient China thus turns into humiliation for modern China in reverse, because the more formidable the ancestors were, the more it means the descendants are disappointing.
Of course, the history of science and technology in modern and contemporary China can be written as the story of how the Chinese people, through hard struggle, continually caught up with the world’s advanced level; but if only “catching up with advanced Western technology” is worth writing about, then one still has not escaped Western centrism, and the West remains the benchmark for measuring technological progress. In the later period, this benchmark became even narrower, with Western centrism almost turning into American centrism.
In recent years, Western scholars themselves have also been reflecting on the limitations of their own historical perspectives and seeking to break with Western centrism. So what replaces it? Not necessarily another centrism, but more likely some kind of pluralism. That is to say, historians of science and technology are trying to break the “linear narrative” that judges heroes by success or failure, and they argue that the development of technology does not have only one direction or one possibility; in different cultural environments, technological development actually follows different paths. These localized developments are very difficult to evaluate in terms of success, failure, and significance with a unified standard.
This book’s focus on Chile’s cybernetic revolution is just such an example of an anti-linear narrative. In hindsight, Chile’s cybernetic experiment did not succeed; it died after less than three years. And in terms of material technology, this practical application was in fact not “advanced” either. The system the Chileans used consisted of only one IBM computer, and it was an already somewhat outdated model. This old machine was connected to many teletype machines across the country; such teletype machines were nothing more than devices that used Morse code to transmit telegrams, merely adding a keyboard and printer to simplify the process of inputting and parsing the telegrams.
In terms of the technical artifacts themselves, this system was indeed rather unremarkable, but the key lay in the way the technology was applied. The Allende government used these crude devices to assemble a control system that could operate effectively. We can see in this process all kinds of conflicts and coordination arising among scientific theory, technical equipment, social environment, and political ideals.
Creativity in technological development is not always embodied in the creation of the most advanced theories and artifacts; in fact, how to apply existing technology so as to adapt it to local political, economic, and cultural environments likewise requires creativity, as well as keen judgment and practical wisdom. Moreover, the practical wisdom that ultimately makes technology suitable for local environments does not always come from elite figures such as scientists and entrepreneurs; many times it also comes from the most basic workers and consumers. This diversity among the participants who push technological development forward can in fact be found in any technological case, but it is especially evident in late-developing countries. In the history of modern and contemporary science and technology in China, if we no longer focus only on catching up in advanced technology itself, but instead shift our perspective to the broader social level, we can also discover more creative activity.
Many factors from the political, economic, and cultural spheres, in turn, are also reflected at the level of how artifacts operate. This book depicts many technical details of the Cybersyn system, such as how the chairs rotated, how the buttons were designed, how the aesthetic style was chosen, and so on. These details are by no means just about achieving functions or improving efficiency, technical aims of that sort; rather, they reflect the intertwining of a variety of complex political ideas, demands for equality, gender consciousness, and other plural scales.
Cybersyn is not an exception. In fact, in those seemingly more mainstream technological processes, what drives progress is not just some internal logic; every step in technological development involves the intertwining of multiple scales such as social, political, and cultural ones. This is also true of ancient technologies such as the Four Great Inventions. What played the decisive role was not so much the invention of the relevant technical artifacts themselves as how these inventions were actually applied and spread in different civilizations. The compass was used more in China for geomancy, and less for promoting navigation, whereas in the West it became an aid to the Age of Discovery. Such similarities and differences require us not only to look at the level of artifacts in technological invention, but also to examine how technological inventions adapt to different social and cultural environments.
We need to break the monotonously linear view of technological development; even more, we should break the monotonously linear view of social development. The political, economic, and cultural development of human society should certainly not presuppose some monotonous linear standard of measurement.
However, more often than not, people’s attitudes toward evaluating social systems are instead more monotonous and extreme, and they frequently use an either/or, black-or-white dichotomy to judge problems. This binary thinking has ancient origins, and during the Cold War it was reinforced to an unprecedented degree. Capitalism and socialism were cast as two mutually exclusive systems that could not coexist, and then these two were bound together with all sorts of other attached labels. For example: socialism = the Soviet model = planned economy = centralism = evil; capitalism = the American model = market economy = liberalism = good. This crude, American-centered dichotomy deeply entered people’s minds, and even many people who opposed the United States consciously or unconsciously adopted similar logic of abduction, moving toward extremism.
This book also helps us break this “Cold War rhetoric.” We find that Allende did indeed seek to implement socialism in Chile, but this was absolutely not the Soviet model. He was also indeed implementing some kind of centrally controlled planned economy, but this planned economy based on cybernetics was also different from the Soviet one. In fact, the American market economy also requires a great deal of central regulation, including tax and monetary policy, and these regulations are likewise planned.
In fact, by the time of today’s Internet era, the boundary between market and plan has become even more blurred. On the one hand, governments are still ceaselessly regulating the market through interest rates, reserves, taxes, bonds, and so on; on the other hand, beyond the level of the state, in many more granular domains there are more and more phenomena of planning and regulation based on data and algorithms. For example, on service platforms like Meituan and Didi, systems use integrated calculations to plan each rider’s route and speed in advance; on shopping sites like Taobao and JD.com, companies use traffic analysis to plan promotional intensity for shopping festivals in advance; on social platforms like Facebook and Douyin, platforms can use algorithms to control user behavior and even induce users’ political leanings…
From America to Meituan, wherever there is a digital management system, there will be planning and control. If one blindly opposes “planning” and “centralized control,” then on the one hand one is closing one’s eyes and pretending not to see phenomena that actually exist; on the other hand one will also miss a careful examination of these information systems. “Planning” is not always a bad thing, but of course it is not necessarily a good thing either. The key is not to simply oppose all planning, but to delve into specific problems and examine the concrete ways in which each system plans and controls.
What is called “cybernetics” is a discipline that studies how various information systems carry out regulation and control, but what cybernetics actually is is also not a simple question. Cybernetics was proposed by Wiener, and then combined with the work of Turing, Shannon, von Neumann, and others, and was mainly developed in the United States, forming the basis of computers and the Internet.
But is the American path of cybernetics necessarily the only correct direction of development? Not necessarily. In fact, the “cybernetics” developed in the United States was, in a certain sense, narrowed. For Wiener, cybernetics was by no means merely a concept belonging to computer science; it also included research in fields such as biological organisms and neuroscience, as well as economics, society, and so on. Although these fields continued to exist to some extent in the later development of cybernetics as an academic discipline in the United States, they all became marginal or turned into independent disciplines. Even the core concept of “cybernetics” was gradually replaced by “artificial intelligence.”
In addition, American cybernetics placed greater emphasis on constructing a top-down machine system that operates in a tightly coordinated way; but the cybernetics practiced by the British scientist Beer and in Chile emphasized the system’s self-organizing properties more strongly. This system could be even more “decentralized,” with every grassroots node having the chance to make decisions freely, while the central system played the role of communication and coordination.
In a certain sense, Cybersyn may actually be closer to the original meaning of “cybernetics,” whereas the version developed in the United States has drifted further from the original intention. So which understanding of cybernetics is more accurate? Which application of cybernetics is more advanced? In fact, it is very hard to give a decisive judgment. A better attitude is to acknowledge the complexity and plurality of technological development: a certain technology does not necessarily have only one direction of development.
The progress of technology is like biological evolution: there is no absolute direction or standard, and adapting to the environment is the only criterion of measurement. But environments are relative and plural. The American environment, the Chilean environment, and the Chinese environment are all different; a technology may take different paths in different environments, and one cannot say that any one path must be the most correct. Even within a particular region, “the environment” is not static: practices that once adapted to the environment will themselves become a force for transforming the environment, and when the environment changes, the suitable route may change again.
Of course, I am not trying to advocate a nihilism of “whatever you do is right.” Recognizing difference and change does not mean abandoning science; on the contrary, science is always trying to grasp and master a changing world.
The original aim of cybernetics was precisely to understand and master a complex and changeable environment. When Wiener coined the term cybernetics, he borrowed the Greek word for “steersman.” Steering a ship is by no means a once-and-for-all affair; the steersman must constantly pay attention to the ship’s internal and external environment and respond promptly to all kinds of changes.
Wiener believed that whether one is controlling a body, a machine, a ship, or a society, it all amounts to this kind of mechanism in which information is continually exchanged between inside and outside; whether animals, human beings, machines, or social institutions, all are constantly transmitting information and continuously adjusting themselves according to feedback from that information.
Cybernetics can, in a sense, also be called “feedback theory,” and “feedback” is also a concept that Wiener used creatively. “Feedback” is the core concept of cybernetics. What is called control is not about establishing a once-and-for-all model and then endlessly transmitting commands from top to bottom, from within outward. More importantly, the controller needs to keep receiving feedback; every command it issues will provoke a response from the external environment, and after receiving feedback, the controller must adjust itself constantly, with the next command built upon its reading of that feedback.
Looked at this way, the reason the Soviet model of planned economy failed was less that planning itself was mistaken than that something went wrong in the feedback mechanism. The economic system and the production environment are constantly changing; if the so-called plan merely transmits some rigid and formulaic demands from the top down, of course it will head toward failure. The reason the market economy succeeds is also that the feedback mechanisms spontaneously formed among supply and demand are always superior to an artificially designed top-level framework. But even in a freely competitive market, certain central structures will gradually form on their own, such as industry associations, business alliances, standardization organizations, monopolistic enterprises, and so on. This too is because a loose, scattered, flat structure often cannot compare with an organized organic whole.
The paradox is that the participants in a free market are innumerable individuals capable of organizing themselves from the bottom up, yet the spontaneity of these individuals ultimately always tends toward forming an organic organization with a central system. It is like human beings, with a brain and a central nervous system, always possessing more agency and creativity than those paramecia or jellyfish that lack any vivid structural differentiation. The same is true of human economic and social systems: in an era of high civilization, some form of central structure is hard to avoid.
So the key issue is less how to avoid the emergence of any “control center” than how to prevent the control center from becoming rigid, to the point that it can no longer obtain timely and accurate feedback from grassroots spontaneous forces.
The phenomenon of “involution” in a sense is precisely the result of the failure of the feedback mechanism through which ordinary people communicate with the central system. When those at the bottom suffer oppression and hardship, they cannot find an effective direction in which to convey their pain, much less bring about improvement in the overall system, and top-down directives do not become any gentler because of the suffering of the lower levels. So the people at the bottom can only turn the direction of feedback toward their peers or other lower-level forces, imposing even more pressure on them.
The reason the feedback mechanism fails may be that the center and the grassroots are not in a benign symbiotic relationship, but rather in a vampiric parasitic relationship, or even one of mutual hostility. The suffering experienced at the bottom cannot be effectively transmitted to the center; it is like a person whose limbs have lost their sense of pain—then he will very easily fail to foresee danger, or make poor decisions. Sometimes, when the central system is malfunctioning, the limbs will also make spontaneous stress responses to avoid danger, but at other times, the pathology of the central system may cause the entire body to fall into numbness and chaos.
In short, in the Internet age, cybernetic issues at the political and economic levels have by no means become outdated; on the contrary, in many fields they appear especially important. How to apply cybernetics to the complex social level, how to establish benign feedback mechanisms—we may be able to draw some inspiration from Allende’s social experiment. Even if his experiment ended in failure, at the very least it can serve as a warning to us.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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