"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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

A country dashboard would be really, really cool.