Library System
Project Cybersyn
Stafford Beer's real-time cybernetic system for managing the Chilean economy, built for Salvador Allende's government, 1971–73.
Built at the invitation of Salvador Allende’s government, Project Cybersyn (Proyecto Synco) linked around 500 telex machines in factories and government offices across Chile to a mainframe in Santiago, feeding production data into economic models that flagged variables needing attention — an attempt to run a national economy in something like real time, applying Stafford Beer’s Viable System Model at the scale of a state. Gordon Pask contributed the operations room’s instrumentation, including an early “algedonic meter” meant to register public satisfaction directly into the system. The project reached an advanced prototype stage before the September 1973 coup ended it.