GM - tedbyfield via nettime-l on Sun, 14 Jun 2026 19:36:48 +0200 (CEST)


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

Jose-Carlos, this is *fantastic*. Thank you so much.
Minor point: I don’t mean to suggest Medina owns the subject, or even that Morozov hasn’t contributed real substance to it — he very clearly has, both in popularizing it and in serious research. Though I see no sign of the supporting bibliography and transcriptions you mention. I hunted around for things like that before writing my reply to Geert (based diligence, yes?) and, found among other things, that the dedicated site has been under construction pretty much since day one.
Major point: The substance of your message, the larger context, is amazing. I’ve seen brief references to a few of these projects, but only because my interest in the social sciences aspect of cybernetics, rather than the ‘hard’ sciences aspect, has shaped my reading over the years.
The marketing of cybernetics in the US (and that’s not an exaggeration at all) cast it in terms that fit seamlessly with emerging “rocket science” tropes of the time — a technocratic emphasis that cast the field as an inaccessible realm of corporatist genius. But it was the social science side of things — the focus of Steve Heims’s book _The Cybernetics Group_ — that was far more relevant and open to socialist interest in the field, for reasons that seem obvious. And there are other hidden histories there, for example, the pivotal role that Lawrence Frank played in funding the Macy conferences. He didn’t form his ideas in a vacuum, and he didn’t erase to exist once the conference cycle ended, but I’ve never seen a serious effort to track down what *he* was up to.
Geert’s interview with Nosthoff is genuinely interesting, and it’ll take me a bit of time to think through how these different threads fit together. But it seems like one areas where we agree — or, really where I’m privileged to agree with you, I think — is that simplistic heroic narratives play a huge role in how and why we’re missing all these branches and experiments. And that’s one reason I think it’s so important to question seemingly ephermal details, like banging the drums for Morozov. 

Best,
Ted
- -
https://counter.ink

On 14 Jun 2026, at 8:31, Jose-Carlos Mariategui wrote:


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.

 <…>
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