Comment by _9xrb | Hacker News Reader

Comment by _9xrb | Hacker News Reader

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This is a series of video essays about Chile's Project CyberSyn:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn

Link title massively overreaches. Cybersyn was a few hundred telex machines, aka glorified telegraphs, and one computer that aggregated daily economic statistics. It was in no way comparable to ARPANET or the Internet. The project was an interesting yet abortive effort at top-down socialist economic management. Since it never had a chance to succeed or fail on its own merits, and also since it had a really swanky-looking operations room, it's been the subject of a boatload of techno-utopian projection. Here are reflections by someone who was directly involved:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/290742382_Cyberneti...

>The emphasis of these reflections is in contrasting its rather limited achievements with its vision and relevance for our societies today. Its claims were large; it was presented as a project that achieved important results in a short period of time. The paper compares its actuality with these claims.

It’s an early ERP system. People undersell or oversell it depending on their ideological bias but that’s what it’s most comparable to imo.

It’s not particularly exciting but it was a practical idea.

It's an early ERP system that existed under a different model of economic organization; omitting that serious detail is almost, er, underselling it.

Modern Free SocietiesTM lose their minds over networked water meters; this was a near-real-time index of important metrics from the country's important industries. The actually-Marxist government used this data to wage class war against the still-private owners of eg trucking companies. We don't hold with that sort of panopticon in the West, no sir!

...Regarding corporations, obviously. Citizens dutifully endure their smartphones and smartspeakers and smartdoorbells reporting important metrics to advertisers and Amazon and the cops. The point is that ideology colours everything.

What is a required by law or your power corporation smart power meter? :) Are you sure we don't do that?

(Water meters more often than not as well.)

What are the chances your gas station does not record the plates and gas purchase data together? Or the credit card number. Or perhaps even driver's license number in some places.

Etc. Ad nauseam.

The data is just not directly available to either the consumer or the government. That does not make for good privacy though.

I don't think so. Project Cybersyn is not even possible on non centrally planned economies.

Try to calculate if Germany will run out of gas this winter. You can't . Because economy is not centrally planned.

Sure you can, it will just be an estimate.

If you had the in depth data such a network provided, the estimate would likely be more accurate.

The monitoring of this sort is done by every energy company these days, just not public or interlinked. The governments get lump values from the big companies instead.

Can they act on estimates? Can they take resources ( like gas, copper, electronics, etc... ) from one private company's storage and give it to other (more critical) company?

For example: take gas from paper-clip factory and give it to fertilizer factory?

That's not what central planning ever did, either. They changed priorities and quotas instead. And even that system (soviet version) was very short-lived.

Governments these days use pricing, including special case pricing and tax breaks to achieve a similar thing even more roughly. Unless there are shortages, in which case they intervene directly.

So, what we have now is actually much less efficient.

An early ERP system built by socialist Trekkies? (Apparently Star Trek inspired the "bridge.")

Ugh a SAP system is probably one of the most boring and user unfriendly things that have been inspired by star trek.

The second video mentions a trucking strike, and that messages were passed between telex sites on alternate shipping options.

Supposedly, this was instrumental in breaking the strike, which was not instigated by the workers, but by the owners of the trucking firms, in reaction to a move towards nationalization of some of them.

Yes, and telex machines were nothing new in 1972. They were invented in Germany in the 1930s:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telex#Development

When you boil it down to the details, Project Cybersyn really wasn't much. A lot of old telex stations, one mainframe, untested hand-wavey ideas about economic control theory, and some very nice Star Trek armchairs.

I agree, the network looks like a bunch of modems connected to a single host's tty driver.

Reminds me of the bank of modems we hung off our VAX to let employees telnet and do work from home.

It was like maybe 32 28.8 modems. My memory is so vague, and it was just a pile of cables and boxes behind the VAX. I mostly just flipped the power on and off the ones that went totally sideways and tried not to step on things. It was really cable neglect more than management.

After hours, we’d let employees use it as an ISP. It was slow, just 2xISDN from there to our ISP, but it let some employees get internet access that couldn’t afford the bill.

I know at lease one warehouse worker’s kid ended up being a developer after having that mid-90s access. I hope it helped him and maybe others.

Crazy to think, they’re probably around 40 now.

Even if they had had the tech: most projects fail, for one reason or another [*]. There has been another "internet", DECnet, but it lost. There's no reason to assume that Chile, not a country known for international influence and mastery of English, would have actually produced another internet.

Cybersyn looked like an innovative undertaking, though. A bit heavy on metaphors, it would appear from the article.

[*] edit: at becoming a success beyond its original domain.

Let's just call this phenomena redistribution of thoughts and ideas to a central power ;).

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