The Planning Machine Project Cybersyn and the origins of the Big Data nation. By Evgeny Morozov New Yorker, October 6, 201Evgeny Morozov on how the ideas behind Project Cybersyn, a futuristic experiment in cybernetics from nineteen-seventies Chile, still shapes technology. "...central planning had been powerfully criticized for being unresponsive to shifting realities, notably by the free-market champion Friedrich Hayek. The efforts of socialist planners, he argued, were bound to fail, because they could not do what the free market’s price system could: aggregate the poorly codified knowledge that implicitly guides the behavior of market participants. Beer and Hayek knew each other; as Beer noted in his diary, Hayek even complimented him on his vision for the cybernetic factory, after Beer presented it at a 1960 conference in Illinois. (Hayek, too, ended up in Chile, advising Augusto Pinochet.) But they never agreed about planning. Beer believed that technology could help integrate workers’ informal knowledge into the national planning process while lessening information overload."

"When, in 1975, Beer argued that “information is a national resource,” he was ahead of his time in treating the question of ownership—just who gets to own the means of data production, not to mention the data?—as a political issue that cannot be reduced to its technological dimensions."

In his later years, Beer tried to re-create Cybersyn in other countries—Uruguay, Venezuela, Canada—but was invariably foiled by local bureaucrats. In 1980, he wrote to Robert Mugabe, of Zimbabwe, to gauge his interest in creating “a national information network (operating with decentralized nodes using cheap microcomputers) to make the country more governable in every modality.” Mugabe, apparently, had no use for algedonic meters.

For all its utopianism and scientism, its algedonic meters and hand-drawn graphs, Project Cybersyn got some aspects of its politics right: it started with the needs of the citizens and went from there. The problem with today’s digital utopianism is that it typically starts with a PowerPoint slide in a venture capitalist’s pitch deck.