Fifty years ago, on this day, September 11, 1973, the planes started bombing the Parliament, the troops started shooting, and the elected leader of Chile, Salvador Allende, was killed.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 329ppm. As of 2023 it is 423ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that Allende had been in the rifle sites for a while. “Make the economy scream”, Nixon had said. Meanwhile, various theorists of technology were trying to figure out how you could have the advantages of automation computers feedback loops without creating a dictatorship of the higher order. So how could technology be used to make smarter more democratic decisions? One of the people thinking in these terms was Stafford Beer who was trying to get a program around this going in in Chile. Would it have worked? Almost certainly not. But it would have been nice to learn from the failures and try again and again until there were ways it could succeed? Yes.
What I think we can learn from this is that in general socialist democracy scared the s*** out of Nixon, Kissinger ITT etc. The threat of a good example and all that… And it reminds me of that anecdote from Carl Rogers about the experimental factory where profits remain high but managers realise they would have to give up a lot of their power and they don’t want to.
What happened next is that Pinochet ruled until 1990. He made the mistake of holding a referendum, believing he was popular… He was then pursued legally and and of course the Blair government was never going to let him be extradited to Spain because they were doing what the Americans wanted. Pinochet would have blown the gaff and put the spotlight on Nixon who by this time was dead but also on Kissinger who was still very much alive. There would have been teachable moments about the CIA and its behaviour.
Stafford Beer, well he died in 2002. Cybersyn never took off.
What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Please do comment on this post, unless you are a denialist, obvs..
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