He gained a passionate following in some surprising circles. A Chilean scientist later claimed that Beer came to Chile a businessman and left a hippie. He let his once carefully trimmed beard grow to Tolstoyan proportions. He separated from his wife, sold the fancy house in Surrey, and retired to a secluded cottage in rural Wales, with no running water and, for a long time, no phone line. Stafford Beer was deeply shaken by the 1973 coup, and dedicated his immediate post-Cybersyn life to helping his exiled Chilean colleagues. In 1973, Allende was overthrown by the military and the Cybersyn project all but vanished from Chilean memory.Ī self-organized system must be always alive and without finalizing, since conclusion is another name for death. Ultimately, according to Stafford, Cybersyn did not succeed because it wasn’t accepted as a network of people as well as machines, a revolution in behavior as well as in instrumental capability. Stafford had hoped to install “algedonic meters” or early warning public opinion meters in “a representative sample of Chilean homes that would allow Chilean citizens to transmit their pleasure or displeasure with televised political speeches to the government or television studio in real time.” Stafford dubbed this undertaking ‘The People’s Project’ and ‘Project Cyberfolk’ because he believed the meters would enable the government to respond rapidly to public demands, rather than repress opposing views. By analyzing troves of enterprise data, computers could warn managers of any “incipient instability.” In short, management cybernetics would allow for the reëngineering of socialism-the command-line economy.Ĭybersyn never really took off. It’s here that computers could help-flagging problems in need of immediate attention, say, or helping to simulate the long-term consequences of each decision.
Computers that merely enabled factory automation were of little use what Beer called the “cussedness of things” required human involvement.
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How was he to nationalize hundreds of companies, reorient their production toward social needs, and replace the price system with central planning, all while fostering the worker participation that he had promised? Beer realized that the planning problems of business managers-how much inventory to hold, what production targets to adopt, how to redeploy idle equipment-were similar to those of central planners. He is best known for his work in the fields of operational research and management cybernetics, as well as the architect of Cybersyn, a Chilean project from 1971-73 during the presidency of Salvador Allende which aimed at constructing a distributed decision support system to aid in the management of the national economy.Īs Eden Medina shows in “Cybernetic Revolutionaries,” her entertaining history of Project Cybersyn, Beer set out to solve an acute dilemma that Allende faced. Stafford Beer (25 September 1926 – 23 August 2002) was a British theorist, consultant and professor. You then ride on the dynamics of the system in the direction you want to go.” As he asks in Designing Freedom, “What should be done with cybernetics? … Should we all stand by complaining and wait for someone malevolent to take it over and enslave us? An electronic mafia lurks around that corner.” Beer explains this "surveillance capitalism" in a one page drawing, from "The Risk of an Electronic Mafia" (1973).
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This was demanding: his mind moved quickly.” One of Eno’s favorite quotes would be a fundamental guiding principle for his work: “instead of trying to specify in full detail,” Beer wrote in his book The Brain of the Firm, “you specify it only somewhat. He spoke to me not as a student but as a peer.
He believed that cybernetics (what he called “the science of effective organization”) represented a new frontier in institutional and organizational design, a powerful tool that would inevitably be taken up if not by the forces of democracy and freedom then by their enemies, authoritarians of either the corporate or government variety (if not both).īrian Eno described him lovingly, “he was all hair and brains: full of life, fuller of opinions, intimidatingly fast and yet encouraging. “The purpose of a system is what it does.” - Stafford Beerīeer was an eclectic 20th century British theorist who achieved remarkable innovations in the seemingly disparate fields of capitalist management consulting and state-sponsored socialism. Please allow 10 working days to process before shipping