Nineteen Seventy Three

On 12 November 1971, in the presidential palace in the Republic of
Chile, President Salvador Allende and a British theorist named
Stafford Beer engaged in a highly improbable conversation. Beer was
a world-renowned cybernetician and Allende was the newly elected
leader of the impoverished republic. Beer, a towering middle-aged
man with a long beard, sat face to face with the horn-rimmed,
mustachioed, grandfatherly president and spoke at great length in
the solemn palace. A translator whispered the substance of Beer’s
extraordinary proposition into Allende’s ear. The brilliant Brit
was essentially suggesting that Chile’s entire
economy–transportation, banking, manufacturing, mining, and
more–could all be wired to feed realtime data into a central
computer mainframe where specialized cybernetic software could help
the country to manage resources, to detect problems before they
arise, and to experiment with economic policies on a sophisticated
simulator before applying them to reality. With such a pioneering
system, Beer suggested, the impoverished Chile could become an
exceedingly wealthy nation. In the early 1970s the scale of Beer’s
proposed network was unprecedented. One of the largest computer
networks of the day was a mere fifteen machines in the US, the
military progenitor to the Internet known as ARPANET. Beer was
suggesting a network with hundreds or thousands of endpoints.
Moreover, the computational complexity of his concept eclipsed even
that of the Apollo moon missions, which were still ongoing at that
time. After a few hours of conversation President Allende responded
to the audacious proposition: Chile must indeed become the world’s
first cybernetic government, for the good of the people. Work was
to start straight away. Stafford Beer practically ran across the
street to share the news with his awaiting technical team, and much
celebratory drinking occurred that evening. But the ambitious
cybernetic network would never become fully operational if the CIA
had anything to say about it.