Ted:
Medina’s "Cybernetic Revolutionaries” (2011) is definitely a substantial account of
Cybersyn, built on years of archival work and extensive fieldwork and interviews with the
people who were actually involved in running the system. However, Morozov's "The
Santiago Boys", besides the 10 hours of audio storytelling, was also a product of years
of original research: more than a hundred interviews, alongside fresh archival work. And it is
unusually well-documented on its website (the-santiago-boys.com), including a substantial
bibliography, transcribed interviews, and a good deal of the archival material the series
draws on (for some reason, it seems that the website is currently “under maintenance” and the
material is unavailable right now).
But I won't say it's Morozov or Medina when we mention Cybersyn. We need to
widen the lens. Well before 2011, in 2007, Chileans Enrique Rivera and Catalina
Ossa had been recovering Cybersyn from inside Chile — reconstructing the
operations room chair (part of the ZKM collection:
https://zkm.de/en/artworks/multinodemetagame), interviewing/recording surviving
participants, and assembling an unusually rich body of material around the
project (https://www.youtube.com/@enriquedetongoy). On the other side of the
Atlantic, Andrew Pickering had already placed Beer and Cybersyn as a
substantial part of his analysis in his book “The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of
Another Future Book” (2010).
Besides that, I want to zoom out a bit and mention that Beer's Latin American
work didn't end with Cybersyn: there was URUCIB in Uruguay, and his engagements
in Venezuela, Colombia and Mexico, none of which have received close to the
same attention (I tried to systematise part of that history in this article:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11213-025-09717-2 and URUCIB is
documented extensively in a book written by its project head, Víctor Ganón:
https://books.apple.com/au/book/urucib-uruguay-cibernetico-successfully-implementing/id6746205803).
And beyond Beer and Cybersyn altogether, the wider and original development of
cybernetics across the Latin American region remains poorly documented and
scattered across archives, languages and articles.
I think these clarifications are important because Nosthoff says in the interview that there
is "no clear transition phase" in the slow disappearance of cybernetics with the
exception of the Chilean Cybersyn episode. It seems that Cybersyn stands alone as the single
“exotic exception". But this was not the case. It was one node in a vast number of
continental cybernetic projects in the Latin American region that, for roughly two decades,
provided ideas on feedback, planning, and modelling that were directly incorporated into
State-baked and think-tank projects. A few coordinates:
- In Argentina, Manuel Sadosky's Instituto de Cálculo at the Universidad de
Buenos Aires turned computation into an instrument of public planning (1960s).
- Oscar Varsavsky was already using numerical experimentation to model alternative
"styles of development", treating the computer as a way to rehearse models for
societies in Latin America that did not yet exist (1960s and 1970s).
- At Fundación Bariloche, Latin American World Model answered the Club of
Rome's Limits to Growth by insisting the limits were not physical but
political, and built a model around the satisfaction of basic needs rather than
LtG's management of scarcity (1970s).
..there are lots more….
But what happened with all these projects? They did indeed disappear by force:
the Chilean 1973 military coup, the Argentine, Uruguayan and Brazilian
dictatorships, Operation Condor, among others. Then in the 80s the Washington
Consensus recoded its central terms: Planning became inefficient, autonomy
became protectionism, and society was transformed to markets. Chile was taken
over as a laboratory by The Chicago Boys for neoliberal reforms which followed
a series of “structural adjustments” in most of Latin America and that program
destroyed alternative economic, political and social imaginaries. In that
sense, Nosthoff rightly argues that we need to cultivate a different
sociotechnical imaginary that involves the perspectives of those most affected.
In that sense, histories from Latin America have much to offer and may guide
us to new sociotechnical imaginaries.
José-Carlos Mariátegui
On 14 Jun 2026, at 03:05, GM - tedbyfield via nettime-l
<[email protected]> wrote:
On Jun 13, 2026 at 7:00 AM -0400, Geert Lovink wrote:
It is remarkable that there is no clear transition phase—with the exception of
the Stafford Beer/Chilean Cybersyn episode in the early 1970s, so brilliantly
brought back to life in Eugene Morozov’s podcast series.
Geert, since you put some effort into praising Morozov’s work on Cybersyn, it
needs to be said that there’s a pretty messy history behind it.
The first time Morozov wrote about Beer and Cybersyn was an October 2014 piece
for the _New Yorker_.[1] In that piece, about a third of the way through, he
mentioned Eden Medina and her book _Cybernetic Revolutionaries_, which MIT had
published a few years earlier.[2] Her work was quite well known by the time of
his piece: she had published an excerpt in _Cabinet_,[3] which got lots of
attention, and her manuscript had won a few prominent history awards and been
nominated for at least one more.
In his _New Yorker_ piece, Morozov mentioned Medina only once, when he
patronizingly described her book as “her entertaining history of Project
Cybersyn.” But the majority of his own piece book was little more than a
stylish retelling of Medina’s work, so he got quite a bit of flak for being so
glib, especially from some historians affiliated with SIGCIS (Special Interest
Group for Computing, Information, and Society).
Morozov dismissed the criticisms in ways that ranged from dismissive to trollish. For
example, on Tumblr he variously defended his piece from blunt accusations of plagiarism
by arguing that it “a book review essay, and I do mention the book under review” (well
then!). But he undermined that defense when he wrote (also on Tumblr) that "In a
sense, I was lucky because there's an excellent — and yes, entertaining — history of
Project Cybersyn. It's Cybernetic Revolutionaries by Eden Medina." On Twitter, he
shared a photo of a few research files on a cart, saying “The Stafford Beer archive says
‘hello’.” When asked about how he kept track of his sources, he replied, “I am afraid I
am old school: most of is in my head and occasional notes in OpenOffice. I am blessed
with good memory.”[4]
That debate got pretty hot, but I know of another instance when some SIGCIS
people went on the warpath against another writer, Brian Dear, over perceived
gender issues in his book about the early time-sharing PLATO system, _The
Friendly Orange Glow_. In my view, Dear was solidly in the right and his
critics went waaaay overboard. The fact that Morozov was accused doesn’t mean
he was guilty. But it seems like the general consensus is that his behavior in
and around Cybersyn was really shitty.
His podcast was a good opportunity to set things right, but — unless I missed
something — he burned through ten hours of audio without mentioning her even
once. So, if he won’t acknowledge the importance of Medina’s work, the others
ought to.
Cheers,
Ted
https://counter.ink
- - -
[1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/10/13/planning-machine
[2] https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262525961/cybernetic-revolutionaries/
[3] https://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/46/medina.php
[4]
https://leevinsel.com/blog/2014/10/11/an-unresolved-issue-evgeny-morozov-the-new-yorker-and-the-perils-of-highbrow-journalism
[5]
https://etherwave.wordpress.com/2014/10/11/on-the-cybersyn-article-controversy-we-need-best-practices/
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