How Chile (almost) democratised Big Tech | Audio Long Read

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The New Statesman

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🗓️ 16 September 2023

⏱️ 24 minutes

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Summary

Fifty years after Salvador Allende was ousted, might his greatest legacy be his battle with the emerging tech giants?

On 1 August 1973, a seemingly mundane diplomatic summit took place in Lima, Peru. But there was nothing mundane about its revolutionary agenda. The attendees – diplomats from Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru – aspired to create a more just technological world order, one that might have prevented the future dominance of Silicon Valley. As the Chilean foreign minister lamented even then: “500 multinational corporations control 90 per cent of the world’s productive technology”. Could a new international institution - a tech equivalent of the IMF - ensure that developing countries had access to all the benefits of technological progress? Six weeks later, Salvador Allende’s government was toppled, paving the way for General Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship of Chile.

In this week’s audio long read, the author and podcaster Evgeny Morozov considers Allende’s legacy. Often viewed as a tragic but hapless figure, his government in fact oversaw a number of radical and utopian initiatives - many of them to do with technology. Might Chile under Allende have evolved into the South Korea or Taiwan of South America?

Read by Catharine Hughes and written by Evgeny Morozov, who hosts The Santiago Boys: the Tech World that Might Have Been podcast series. This article was originally published on newstateman.com on 9 September 2023; you can read the text version here.

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Transcript

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0:22.0	Busy is good for business. We'll be with you on that.
0:26.0	Such accept amics today.
0:28.0	Enrollment acquired 18-plus season C supply.
0:34.0	The New Statesman
0:40.0	You're listening to audio-long reads from the New Statesman.
0:42.0	The best of our reported features and essays read aloud.
0:46.0	In this episode, how chilly, almost democratized, big-tack.
0:51.0	Written by Evgeny Morozov. And read by me, Catherine Hughes.
0:57.0	The link to read the article online is in the show notes.
1:03.0	On the 1st of August 1973, a seemingly mundane diplomatic summit took place in Lima, Peru.
1:09.0	But there was nothing remotely mundane about the summit's revolutionary agenda.
1:13.0	The attendees, mostly high-ranking diplomats from Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru,
1:19.0	aspired to create a more just technological world order.
1:23.0	A world order that may have prevented the rise of Silicon Valley and of big tech along with it.
1:29.0	A good first step, they thought, was to join forces and explore ways to curb the growing influence of multinational corporations.
1:37.0	This was particularly pressing in the realm of advanced technologies, the majority of which originated from the US and Western Europe.
1:44.0	These technologies often had to be imported to Latin America at exceedingly high costs.
	...

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