Beer, Stafford. 1972. Brain of the Firm (NY: Wiley. 2nd ed. 1981). 246: "I myself was proceeding with many affairs, when a letter arrived from Chile. It is true that I had had vicarious dealings with Chile before, since my (then) consulting firm SIGMA (Science in General Management) had undertaken work for the steel industry and for the railways there in the early sixties. But although I had been concerned with that work, I had never been to Chile: teams of SIGMA people had been there for several years, but as Managing Director I did not then conceive that I had the time to go. So what now, dated 13th July 1911, was this letter from Chile? Like most Englishmen, I was aware that Dr Salvador Allende had become president of Chile the previous autumn (1970)." 247: "... the letter that I received come from there, under the signature of the Technical General Manager, by name Fernando Flores. He introduced himself also as the President of INTEC (lnstituto Technologico de Chile), which bears organizational comparison with the National Physical Laboratory in Britain -- although it is of course much smaller. This letter spoke of 'the complete reorganization of the public sector of the economy, for which it appeared its author would be primarily responsible." 248: "The primary point of which I had to convince my friends was that we should firmly take the wholly innovatory step of seeking to regulate the social economy in real time. Even the most advanced countries in the world suffer from a vast lag in the receipt of economic data, and they suffer too from the bureaucratic time it takes to process these data towards any kind of conclusion." 248: "The country's electronic technology was antiquated: there was no foreign exchange to buy a lot of computers, teleprocessing equipment, video units, and so on, even though their scientists well knew how to use them. How could we develop a system that would be twenty years ahead of its time, using equipment that was already out of date? The answer to that was that was that the rich world had never understood the managerial cybernetics of electronic technology, and had therefore absurdly misused it." 252: The code-name Cybersyn "is an abbreviation of 'cybernetic synergy'. If we were going to work in real time, we should need a communications network extending down the three thousand miles of Chile. This was nicknamed Cybernet. Cybernet was a system whereby every single factory in the country, contained within the nationalized social economy, could be in communication with a computer. Now ideally, this computer would have been a small machine, local to the factory, and at best within it, which would process whatever information turned out to be vital for that factory's management. But such computers did not exist in Chile, nor could the country afford to buy them. Therefore it was necessary to use the computer power available in Santiago: it consisted of an IBM 360/50 machine and a Burroughs 3500 machine." 252: "Chile could not afford teleprocessing equipment either. And so we resolved the problem by the only means available, namely the telex network already instituted in the country, linked together by microwave communication that had already been established for other purposes (namely the tracking of satellites). These microwave linkages existed from Arica in the far north of Chile down to Santiago, and beyond to Puerto Montt. And there were in addition radio links that could complete the network down to the world's most southerly city, Pun to Arenas. The plan for Cybernet, therefore, called for the requisitioning of telexes, and the use of the communications links to put everyone in touch with everyone else -- and with the computer system in Santiago. The plan allowed just four months for this to be accomplished." 253: "Readers of this book by now understand the concept of the triple index, which measures productivity, latency, and their product -- the overall measure of performance. But the problem remained: to which activities in factories ought these measures to be applied? Accordingly, under the direction of Raul Espejo, the Senior Project Manager in Chile, and Jorge Barrientos, another senior member of the directing group, operational research teams were to make analyses of every sector of the social economy, down to plant level. Their primary job was to construct a quantitative flow chart of activities within each factory that would highlight all important activities." 253: "We needed to measure any process that might prove to be a bottleneck in the system. And there were other standard measures too: for example, it has always been my ambition to find a measure of social unease. The best approximation to such a measure that I could envisage at this time was the ratio of employees on the payroll to those present on any given day. In short, absenteeism is some kind of measure of morale." 260-1: "President Allende wrote to me on 28th April, 1972, saying that he considered it 'of prime importance to count on your presence in Chile in a more permanent way and in a more executive role'. In May 1972 I was confirmed as Scientific Director of the work of which Fernando Flores was Political Director. It seems necessary to record this; for had it not been so, the momentum of the work at large could not have been sustained. There is a limit to what anyone can do in an advisory capacity, unless he accepts responsibility too." 261: "The Cyberstride Program Suite is to monitor information flow at all levels of recursion; to provide alerting signals to any Incipient change so that action could be taken to avert trouble before it arises."
284: "Algedonic Participation" was a technological module of the system to allow people to give immediate feedback to the system. 312: The Gremio Strike "The gremios were . for example, the owners of small fleets of lorries, by which the country's transportation system largely operated. They were also retailers, owners of local shops and small distribution centres for daily requisites. The gremios were insistent on the protectionist line; they saw themselves as threatened by the potential nationalization of transportation and distribution under the government of Popular Unity. Indeed, they had the power to paralyse both these systems on a nationwide scale; and they had made half-hearted efforts to do so before. Their problem was that they could not sustain their 'strike' action for long -- because they ran out of money." 313: "Instability continued to grow; the President declared a State of Emergency, and appointed a military governor in Santiago. From the rate at which the crisis escalated, it was evident that this was a serious attempt to pull the government down. Far from being a 'ridiculous' gesture, it was a massive assault, and it was soon obvious that external resources were being made available in its support. Fernando Flores was appointed as Coordinator of Interior Government." 313: "Within twenty-four hours messages were flowing, non-stop round the clock, at the rate of two providing the requisite variety to handle such an inundation. Two of the senior cyberneticians organized a filtration system: some signals were algedonic [pertaining to regulation in a nonnalytic mode], requiring instant decisions, while others could be attenuated into elements of the pattern that established the factual situation in real time." 313: "The ,first cybernetic point is that the huge surge of information into the loops sprang into being, and instant decisions were available. This contrasted loops sprang into being, and instant decisions were available. This contrasted with the turgid operation of the bureaucratic system, the entropy of which was close to unity -- as is so common. Secondly, the inefficiency of the existing distribution system had lead to high physical redundancy -- again, as is normal in unplanned economies (think of idle motor transport pools, railway marshalling yards, demurrage); the ability of the cybernetic regulator to survive the hostile action, derived from the effective use of the few physical facilities remaining under the government's control." Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University michael at ecst.csuchico.edu Chico, CA 95929 530-898-5321 fax 530-898-5901 www.michaelperelman.wordpress.com _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
