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Nineteen Seventy Three • Damn Interesting

"Thanks to dubiously motivated foreign interference, it is now impossible to say whether Cybersyn could have revolutionized the Chilean economy. Given its utopian ambitiousness, quite possibly not.

1:11 PM Oct 19 2012

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I would have loved to live in this world:

The brilliant Brit was essentially suggesting that Chile’s entire economy -- transportation, banking, manufacturing, mining, and more -- could all be wired to feed realtime data into a central computer mainframe where specialized cybernetic software could help the country to manage resources, to detect problems before they arise, and to experiment with economic policies on a sophisticated simulator before applying them to reality. With such a pioneering system, Beer suggested, the impoverished Chile could become an exceedingly wealthy nation.

In the early 1970s the scale of Beer’s proposed network was unprecedented.

3:12 PM Oct 19 2012

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our phones have more power than his network. I do not want to give over an economy to a phone.

6:33 PM Oct 19 2012

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I now know the real reason Allende was overthrown.... Black Turtlenecks... pro or con, i dunno... but it was all about the black turtlenecks.

9:18 PM Oct 19 2012

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His network would have kept improving over time though, right?

9:31 PM Oct 19 2012

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Sadly, even your average 10 person startup doesn't have a useful company dashboard. I can't imagine being able to produce one for an entire country.

7:13 AM Oct 20 2012

I'm guessing Google Analytics doesn't count (for the startup)?

A country dashboard would be really, really cool.

10:18 AM Oct 20 2012

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