Tangential, but reminded me of Project Cybersyn
An electronic country/society-wide dashboard devised in the early 70s for the Chilean government
An electronic country/society-wide dashboard devised in the early 70s for the Chilean government
There's plenty of pieces talking it up. And plenty demonizing American CIA actions around those time periods. But the effort itself was such a incredibly simple lo fi system, such a style over substance effort. The screen was literally manually painstakingly updated ahead of time.
As an idea I see why Cybersyn was so successful & enrapturing. And CCRU is quite in that mold, was far and away first & foremost a vibe (albeit I think Chile & the people working on the project would have been mortally insulted to have that said at the time). I appreciate that CCRU was engaged in deliberate mythologization of technology, of cybernetics. Where-as a shallow "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain" act like Cybersyn getting so outsizedly mythologized, being so popularized: that fires my cynicism up.
The logistical, design underpinnings of how ultimately the men behind the curtains got the information to draw on the screen was the real improvement - effectively, it was the real "ugly scripts, notebooks and excel spreadsheets" of today even if the end result is sold to management through fancy looking visualizations that someone has to painstakingly manually edit.
In many ways, some of the ideas behind Cybersyn combine quite well with Toyota production system, except done on much larger scale. And unlike failing nearly by design soviet GosPlan, it incorporated the idea of shortening feedback loops instead of trying to deal with combinatorical explosion of variables at the top.
You can actually read the code for Cybersyn on GitHub somewhere.
Jodorowsky’s Dune