Brian Merchant: What a utopian experiment in government by computer can teach us about building a humane future
This month marked the 50th anniversary of the so-called "other 9/11" — the military coup in Chile, led by Gen. Augusto Pinochet, that ended in the death of the democratically elected president, Salvador Allende.
The milestone has spurred difficult retrospectives, commemorations and reexaminations of the ensuing decades of violent dictatorial rule, yet something else died that day too: A utopian experiment to use cutting-edge technology and the study of cybernetics to equitably — and efficiently — manage the nation's entire economy.
It was called Project Cybersyn.
Forty years before big data or smart tech became buzzwords, and decades before the rise of the open internet, Chile's engineers were building a complex information network out of spare parts and sheer will. At the time, it was a deeply futuristic idea: Factories and businesses would transmit real-time data to an operations room, or ops room, in the
