Reading: Designing Freedom, Regulating a Nation: Socialist Cybernetics in Allende’s Chile.
Tune in at 8pm CST/9pm EST via Google Hangout.
Questions to lead discussion:
- What similarities and differences existed between the struggles to attain a decentralized, worker-participative, anti-bureaucratic Chile v. a decentralized, worker-participative, anti-bureaucratic Cybersyn project?
- Medina discusses in detail the “rift between theory and practice” in implementing components of the Cybersyn project. In your view, what primarily caused this rift?
- Beer refers to cybernetics as a “neutral language” that “should not develop its own ideology; but it should attest to one.” Is Beer’s cybernetics neutral? What ideologies did the Cybersyn project attest to?
- In the most recent Jacobian, Eden Medina lists 5 lessons from The Cybersyn Revolution. What lessons did you take from reading?