Re: <nettime> Interview with German Media Theorist Anna-Verena Nosthoff on Cybernetics and Criticism

[Jose-Carlos Mariategui via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

Ted: 

Medina’s "Cybernetic Revolutionaries” (2011) is definitely a substantial account of Cybersyn, built on years of archival work and extensive fieldwork and interviews with the people who were actually involved in running the system.   However, Morozov's "The Santiago Boys", besides the 10 hours of audio storytelling, was also a product of years of original research: more than a hundred interviews, alongside fresh archival work. And it is unusually well-documented on its website (the-santiago-boys.com), including a substantial bibliography, transcribed interviews, and a good deal of the archival material the series draws on (for some reason, it seems that the website is currently “under maintenance” and the material is unavailable right now). 

But I won't say it's Morozov or Medina when we mention Cybersyn.  We need to widen the lens. Well before 2011, in 2007, Chileans Enrique Rivera and Catalina Ossa had been recovering Cybersyn from inside Chile — reconstructing the operations room chair (part of the ZKM collection: https://zkm.de/en/artworks/multinodemetagame), interviewing/recording surviving participants, and assembling an unusually rich body of material around the project (https://www.youtube.com/@enriquedetongoy). On the other side of the Atlantic, Andrew Pickering had already placed Beer and Cybersyn as a substantial part of his analysis in his book “The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future Book” (2010).  

Besides that, I want to zoom out a bit and mention that Beer's Latin American work didn't end with Cybersyn: there was URUCIB in Uruguay, and his engagements in Venezuela, Colombia and Mexico, none of which have received close to the same attention (I tried to systematise part of that history in this article: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11213-025-09717-2 and URUCIB is documented extensively in a book written by its project head, Víctor Ganón: https://books.apple.com/au/book/urucib-uruguay-cibernetico-successfully-implementing/id6746205803). And beyond Beer and Cybersyn altogether, the wider and original development of cybernetics across the Latin American region remains poorly documented and scattered across archives, languages and articles.  

I think these clarifications are important because Nosthoff says in the interview that there is "no clear transition phase" in the slow disappearance of cybernetics with the exception of the Chilean Cybersyn episode.  It seems that Cybersyn stands alone as the single “exotic exception".  But this was not the case. It was one node in a vast number of continental cybernetic projects in the Latin American region that, for roughly two decades, provided ideas on feedback, planning, and modelling that were directly incorporated into State-baked and think-tank projects. A few coordinates: 

- In Argentina, Manuel Sadosky's Instituto de Cálculo at the Universidad de Buenos Aires turned computation into an instrument of public planning (1960s).  
- Oscar Varsavsky was already using numerical experimentation to model alternative "styles of development", treating the computer as a way to rehearse models for societies in Latin America that did not yet exist (1960s and 1970s).
- At Fundación Bariloche, Latin American World Model answered the Club of Rome's Limits to Growth by insisting the limits were not physical but political, and built a model around the satisfaction of basic needs rather than LtG's management of scarcity (1970s).
..there are lots more….

But what happened with all these projects?  They did indeed disappear by force:  the Chilean 1973 military coup, the Argentine, Uruguayan and Brazilian dictatorships, Operation Condor, among others.  Then in the 80s the Washington Consensus recoded its central terms: Planning became inefficient, autonomy became protectionism, and society was transformed to markets.  Chile was taken over as a laboratory by The Chicago Boys for neoliberal reforms which followed a series of “structural adjustments” in most of Latin America and that program destroyed alternative economic, political and social imaginaries.  In that sense, Nosthoff rightly argues that we need to cultivate a different sociotechnical imaginary that involves the perspectives of those most affected.  In that sense, histories from Latin America have much to offer and may guide us to new sociotechnical imaginaries. 



José-Carlos Mariátegui







> On 14 Jun 2026, at 03:05, GM - tedbyfield via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org> wrote:
> 
> On Jun 13, 2026 at 7:00 AM -0400, Geert Lovink wrote:
> 
>> It is remarkable that there is no clear transition phase—with the exception of the Stafford Beer/Chilean Cybersyn episode in the early 1970s, so brilliantly brought back to life in Eugene Morozov’s podcast series.
> 
> Geert, since you put some effort into praising Morozov’s work on Cybersyn, it needs to be said that there’s a pretty messy history behind it.
> 
> The first time Morozov wrote about Beer and Cybersyn was an October 2014 piece for the _New Yorker_.[1] In that piece, about a third of the way through, he mentioned Eden Medina and her book _Cybernetic Revolutionaries_, which MIT had published a few years earlier.[2] Her work was quite well known by the time of his piece: she had published an excerpt in _Cabinet_,[3] which got lots of attention, and her manuscript had won a few prominent history awards and been nominated for at least one more.
> 
> In his _New Yorker_ piece, Morozov mentioned Medina only once, when he patronizingly described her book as “her entertaining history of Project Cybersyn.” But the majority of his own piece book was little more than a stylish retelling of Medina’s work, so he got quite a bit of flak for being so glib, especially from some historians affiliated with SIGCIS (Special Interest Group for Computing, Information, and Society).
> 
> Morozov dismissed the criticisms in ways that ranged from dismissive to trollish. For example, on Tumblr he variously defended his piece from blunt accusations of plagiarism by arguing that it “a book review essay, and I do mention the book under review” (well then!). But he undermined that defense when he wrote (also on Tumblr) that "In a sense, I was lucky because there's an excellent — and yes, entertaining — history of Project Cybersyn. It's Cybernetic Revolutionaries by Eden Medina." On Twitter, he shared a photo of a few research files on a cart, saying “The Stafford Beer archive says ‘hello’.” When asked about how he kept track of his sources, he replied, “I am afraid I am old school: most of is in my head and occasional notes in OpenOffice. I am blessed with good memory.”[4]
> 
> That debate got pretty hot, but I know of another instance when some SIGCIS people went on the warpath against another writer, Brian Dear, over perceived gender issues in his book about the early time-sharing PLATO system, _The Friendly Orange Glow_. In my view, Dear was solidly in the right and his critics went waaaay overboard. The fact that Morozov was accused doesn’t mean he was guilty. But it seems like the general consensus is that his behavior in and around Cybersyn was really shitty.
> 
> His podcast was a good opportunity to set things right, but — unless I missed something — he burned through ten hours of audio without mentioning her even once. So, if he won’t acknowledge the importance of Medina’s work, the others ought to.
> 
> Cheers,
> Ted
> https://counter.ink
> - - -
> [1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/10/13/planning-machine
> [2] https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262525961/cybernetic-revolutionaries/
> [3] https://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/46/medina.php
> [4] https://leevinsel.com/blog/2014/10/11/an-unresolved-issue-evgeny-morozov-the-new-yorker-and-the-perils-of-highbrow-journalism
> [5] https://etherwave.wordpress.com/2014/10/11/on-the-cybersyn-article-controversy-we-need-best-practices/
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