Technologies are political. So we see that different political and historical context set the

stage for the creation of technologies that are different from those that we have in the United States. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us.

I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Eden Medina.

Eden is the author of Cybernetic Revolutionaries Technology and Politics in Iandez, Chile.

She's also an associate professor at MIT and a Rita

Houser Fellow at Radcliffe University for Advanced Study at Harvard University. In this week's

conversation, we discuss Project Cybersyn, a network technology that was created in the early

1970s in Chile, after Salvador Aende was elected as the country's first socialist president and then

undertook a campaign of nationalizing key industries to take them under state control, but then the

government needed a way to organize and manage that production to make sure that, you know,

levels didn't just stay the same, but rose as wages also increased and Chileans expected a higher

standard of living under this new socialist government. So Fernando Flores, who was part of this government,

set out to use technologies, to use computers in order to help plan the production of these newly

nationalized industries and contacted Stafford Beer, a British consultant who

had written a lot on this topic to come and help the Chilean government.

But, and this is a really important point, this was not just an example of British knowledge

coming in and creating a system and then leaving.

It was really the Chileans kind of driving the project and making use of foreign

knowledge where they didn't have it to build up their own skills and then to build on that

information that came from a way and to continue innovating in a space where, you know, it was not

only outside the global north, but also didn't have the same level of technologies or the same number of

computers as, say, the United States of the United Kingdom. And so they had to be really innovative

...