Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende's Chile
Abstract
In Cybernetic Revolutionaries, Eden Medina tells the history of two intersecting utopian visions, one political and one technological. The first was Chile’s experiment with peaceful socialist change under Salvador Allende; the second was the simultaneous attempt to build a computer system that would manage Chile’s economy. Neither vision was fully realized—Allende’s government ended with a violent military coup; the system, known as Project Cybersyn, was never completely implemented—but they hold lessons for today about the relationship between technology and politics.
Drawing on extensive archival material and interviews, Medina examines the cybernetic system envisioned by the Chilean government—which was to feature holistic system design, decentralized management, human-computer interaction, a national telex network, near real-time control of the growing industrial sector, and modeling the behavior of dynamic systems. She also describes, and documents with photographs, the network’s Star Trek-like operations room, which featured swivel chairs with armrest control panels, a wall of screens displaying data, and flashing red lights to indicate economic emergencies.
Studying project Cybersyn today helps us understand not only the technological ambitions of a government in the midst of political change but also the limitations of the Chilean revolution. This history further shows how human attempts to combine the political and the technological with the goal of creating a more just society can open new technological, intellectual, and political possibilities. Technologies, Medina writes, are historical texts; when we read them we are reading history.
... He understood that local wealth should not be handed over to these foreign corporations. (Medina, 2014) (Osorio & Nafría, 2016) The first year of Allende's government saw a GDP growth of 7% and a good rise in production. By 1971, many private industries and mining companies were nationalized. ...
... Allende was very aware of the need for advance technology for his vision and hence the Chilean government approached the field of cybernetics in 1971. (Medina, 2014) (Osorio & Nafría, 2016) The agency in charge of nationalization of industry was Corporation for the Promotion of Production. ...
... (Osorio & Nafría, 2016) (Beer, 1995) Allende referred to System 5 as 'the people'. (Medina, 2014) (Pills, 2021) After development of theoretical model, a network of telex machines was put in place to receive real time reports about the industry. There were only four mainframe computers in the country at that time. ...
Cybernetics 2006082 Theory Tutor: Ng. Provides March Urban Design, RC14 The Bartlett School of Architecture 2 Acknowledgements I would like to thank my professor Ms. Provides for imparting her knowledge, providing support and guidance. Her constant push and encouragement helped me pursue this research. I would like to further thank all the RC14 tutors of the Bartlett School of Architecture for their suggestions and directions at various stages of this thesis. 3 Abstract For years the food supply chain has been putting tremendous pressure on our environment. We are now facing indirect consequences in the form of climate change as well as direct consequences such as food shortage crises. This thesis focuses on the city of London and the United Kingdom. Due to historical decisions over the management of the city there is now a huge gap between consumption and production activities. The research question of this thesis is which food system model-centralized, distributed, or decentralized-is best suited for promoting a food-centric community? Alongside this, it investigates whether local communities should manage the food-system themselves. The methodology adopted for comparing the models is complexity theory where network theory is one of the main factors. The management of the food system by the society is understood through second-order cybernetics. This thesis then delves further into the future applications of decentralized systems such as Blockchain and Decentralized Autonomous Organizations and their relevance to the food supply chain. There have been various initiatives by the government to train communities to grow food in the city, which we also call urban agriculture. Due to these trends and the advancement in technologies used the thesis argues for a mixed used land use planning in the future cities which has production spaces spread out and controlled by autonomous methods and a meta-economy.
... UDTs are ultimately supposed to digitally represent and simulate scenarios based on a continuous feed of real-time sensor data, allowing distributed actuators within the city to automatically act on their predictions. Endeavors like the Cybersyn project (Espejo, 2014;Medina, 2011) and the City Brain (Liu et al., 2022;Zhang et al., 2019) are aligned with holistic visions for UDTs that entail leveraging ubiquitous sensing and relying on autonomous machines to infer and perpetrate urban management activities. ...
Although urban digital twins are still at an embryonic stage of development, their use cases are multiple, ranging from big data aggregation to simulations. Additionally, predictions can be rendered and quickly implemented using actuators to transform physical environments and influence urban life. In this article, we investigate the potential of an agent-based model in a smart city setting to predict emergent behavior in relation to the suppression of civil violence by implementing crowd management practices. To this end, we designed a simulation environment that includes cameras in public spaces and wearable sensors, and considers nudging and self-nudging processes supported by a surveillance apparatus. Building on Epstein’s threshold-based model of civil violence, the proposed simulation is informed by surveillance theories and contemplates methods for crowd monitoring and social control. The experiments’ results provide insights into how specific measures and combined actions may influence the suppression of civil violence in public spaces and can be useful to inform crowd management activities and policymaking. Moreover, we use the simulation to reflect upon the potentials and limitations of integrating agent-based models into urban digital twins and emphasize the imminent risks for individuals and democratic societies of employing a ubiquitous surveillance apparatus endowed with the autonomy to trigger actuators.
... Outro aspecto, a partir dos anos 2000 estudado de forma aprofundada, foi o papel vanguardista dos soviéticos em oferecer propostas de um sistema de computadores que pretendiam centralizar as informações produzidas no país. Essas propostas, mesmo pouco divulgadas na época e no fim ou rejeitadas ou utilizadas de forma fragmentada, chamaram a atenção de organismos estadunidenses, influenciando parcialmente a consolidação da ARPANET no final da década de 1960 e no Chile durante o governo de Salvador Allende (1970)(1971)(1972)(1973), no qual desenvolveu um complexo e ambicioso projeto de interligação computacional chamada Cybersyn (GEROVITCH 2009;MEDINA, 2011) Redes (2020). 5 Contudo, a literatura acadêmica apresenta um número crescente de análises sobre a história da computação estadunidense e o surgimento da internet no país. ...
analysis about the evolution and development of the projects related to a computer system / network in the Soviet Union between the 1950s to 1980s. The research focus on the proposal made by Anatoly Kitov in the end of the 1950s and the ambitious project presented by Viktor Glushkov, based on the National Automated System for Computation (OGAS), consisted in a complex computer network around the USSR, discussed between 1962-1970, and partially rejected by the soviet government. It was also discussed some located initiatives presented by the communist party in the 1970s and 1980s. The research identifies that, despite the pioneer aspect of the soviet proposals, years before to the initiatives made by the United States, the projects suffer from the excessive economic and administrative centralization in the USSR, and the opposition of some ministries, affecting directly the rejection of OGAS.
... The background of the main activists who developed these projects was in the Indymedia scene in the 1990s, the free and open software movement, the anti-globalization movement, and the pink tide in Latin America (Bria and Morozov 2022). These efforts to create innovative forms of digital democracy were inspired by the desire to learn from the experiences of Project Cybersyn in Chile (1971-73)-an attempt to create a digital network for the democratic control of the national economy during the presidency of Salvador Allende (Medina 2011). Francesca Bria, then Barcelona's chief technology and innovation officer, was the project coordinator for both projects and played a key role in their development. ...
This article examines the role of digital technology in enabling and enhancing democratic practices and forms of governance. It contributes to emerging debates on democratic innovations by proposing a novel theoretical account of decentralized participatory democracy. To develop our account, we draw on the experience of two EU-funded projects, D-CENT and DECODE, which produced innovative citizen participation platforms and digital public infrastructure. Bringing democratic theory into conversation with critical data studies and the new municipalism movement, we theorize how these projects advanced three political aims: organizing political communities to build collective power, empowering citizens through direct participation in decision making, and transforming political institutions. The article then analyzes the strengths and limitations of these projects to draw lessons for policy makers and practitioners for future digital democratic experiments.
... Let's focus on the actuality of Ilyenkov's critique of cybernetics, leaving aside for a moment the issue of neo-positivism. In both the West and the East, cybernetics underwent a period of growth and success until approximately the 1970s, when Allende's ambitious project of cybernetic socialism (Medina 2011) was executed by tanks during Pinochet's coup d'état, and cybernetic projects were transformed and became a component of reactionary Californian ideology, namely a set of beliefs that emerged from the fusion of cybernetics, free market economics, and counter-culture libertarianism in Silicon Valley (Barbrook 2007). Cybernetics, alongside systems theory, certain interpretations of Neo-Darwinism, 5 and the misuse of the ecosystem metaphor (as seen in Adam Curtis's hypnotic documentary All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace)-combined with the "Californian ideology"-led to the legitimization of neoliberalism in the 1990s, as well as the belief that reality would "organize itself" through the "free market." ...
The text introduces a translation of Ilyenkov’s famous text “On the State of Philosophy,” which was meant as a letter to the Central Committee of the CPSU and expressed his exasperation with the development of Soviet philosophy. In our introduction, we describe the historical context of the emergence of the letter, including the main changes in Soviet philosophy in the 1960s (esp. rise in popularity of cybernetics), and the institutional details of Ilyenkov’s biography. We point to the contemporary relevance of the letter by emphasizing how Ilyenkov’s dialectical account of science can enrich contemporary discussions in the sociology of science and STS.
... Such mechanism could be deployed to connect the ecological statistical apparatus to private business central planning systems, thus allowing the gathering of data and provision of concrete paths to align sourcing and distribution practices with the overall objective of planning. Cybernetic loops of the kind envisioned in the Cybersyn Chilean project, a project conceived for the management of the national economy during Salvador Allende's term, would facilitate to directly link producers and consumers via immediate feedback, real-time centralization, and the shared diffusion of relevant metrics (Medina, 2011). Governments can mobilize economic and material resources via various policy tools, such as public investment, industrial policy, public budgeting, credit policy (Monnet, 2018), experts' appointment policy, etc. Monetary-fiscal coordination and other innovative monetary policies could be effective to pursue qualitative developmental objectives such as funding needs for investment in cleaner production and the dismantling of dirty activities (Kedward et al., 2022;Olk et al., 2023). ...
... Según Andrés Sanfuentes (1983), esto se debió a varios factores, entre ellos: el predominio de un sesgo economicista en la política del gobierno; el rol preponderante de los economistas y administradores, tanto en el poder ejecutivo como en el sector privado; la posibilidad de un cierto debate público en la esfera fueron desmantelados y cancelados. Icónico en este sentido es el proyecto Cybersin/Synco (Medina, 2011). económica, cerrado en otros campos; y las altas remuneraciones que obtuvieron los profesionales en estas disciplinas. ...
... De forma reciente han surgido muchas voces que han manifestado la importancia de sostener el argumento de la existencia de una pluralidad tecnológica, como punto de partida para crear nuevas historias, teorías y marcos de análisis sobre la tecnología. En el ámbito de Latinoamérica, trabajos como los de Edén Medina (2014;Medina, da Costa Marques y Holmes, 2014), María Fernández (2018), Claire Taylor (2014;Taylor y Pitman, 2007), Hilda Chacón (2019) o Anita Say Chan (2013) han dado un paso importante por reconstruir la historia de la tecnología y de los medios en esta región, y para contrapuntear las narrativas dominantes sobre la tecnología. ...
El presente ensayo comprende la barroquización como una táctica que ejemplifica las formas en que la apropiación tecnológica aparece en el contexto latinoamericano, como una manera de negociación con la modernidad. A través de este argumento, el ensayo busca problematizar las concepciones comunes sobre apropiación tecnológica y extender el significado de esta práctica hacia una dimensión estética de resignificación de la tecnología y de una reorientación hacia versiones alternativas de la modernidad. Siguiendo el concepto de ethos barroco, del filósofo ecuatoriano-mexicano Bolívar Echeverría, lo barroco se explica como una sobrecodificación que restituye el valor de uso de los objetos, frente a la racionalidad moderna del capitalismo. El ensayo propone que la apropiación tecnológica es una táctica que permite abrir la tecnología hacia nuevas formas de producción y organización material y simbólica, la cual se amplía hacia un horizonte epistemológico. El artículo concluye formulando una resignificación de la apropiación tecnológica orientada hacia la dimensión estética de la tecnología.
... Such mechanism could be deployed to connect the ecological statistical apparatus to private business central planning systems, thus allowing the gathering of data and provision of concrete paths to align sourcing and distribution practices with the overall objective of planning. Cybernetic loops of the kind envisioned in the Cybersyn Chilean project, a project conceived for the management of the national economy during Salvador Allende's term, would facilitate to directly link producers and consumers via immediate feedback, real-time centralization, and the shared diffusion of relevant metrics (Medina, 2011). Governments can mobilize economic and material resources via various policy tools, such as public investment, industrial policy, public budgeting, credit policy (Monnet, 2018), experts' appointment policy, etc. Monetary-fiscal coordination and other innovative monetary policies could be effective to pursue qualitative developmental objectives such as funding needs for investment in cleaner production and the dismantling of dirty activities (Kedward et al., 2022;Olk et al., 2023). ...
... With the advent of Keynesianism, everyone gradually showed a strong interest in the short-term adjustment of the economy. From comparative static analysis to dynamic analysis, it can be described in cybernetic language as follows: although the system itself has negative feedback, it can be autonomous in the long run (Medina, 2020). A steady state is reached, but due to external shocks, it often deviates from the steady state equation. ...
The relevance of the research lies in the fact that the era of technology today is spreading to the very heart of everyday life and, thanks to this, is actively involved in the intersubjective construction of realities, clearly marks the planetary triumph of the cybernetic paradigm. The purpose of the research is to consider aspects of the development of economic cybernetics in the world, as well as mathematical models and their comparative characteristics. The methodological base of the research includes the following approaches to the study of this topic: systemic, formal model , dynamic. To create an economic cybernetics model, the various concepts of management should be given clear economic meanings, taking into account the characteristics of the macroeconomic system. The macroeconomic system belongs to the category of large systems, which, as a rule, are difficult to decompose accurately. The strong connection of each subsystem often causes difficulties in mathematical processing. Optimal management of macroeconomics is affected by the subjective factors of decision makers, since employees can draw very different conclusions from the same system. The results of the research determined the generations of the development of cybernetics , as well as its economic models, including mathematical ones. The practical significance lies in the analysis of the paradigm and development models of economic cybernetics in the modern world.
This article re‐examines the history of the UK Centre for Environmental Studies (CES) between 1966 and 1975. Using archival materials and interviews, the article details the role of the CES in attempts to ‘modernize’ urban and regional research and working relationships between the academy and government. The CES is probably best known, by readers of this journal, as the initial editorial base for the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research ( IJURR ) and for its role in incubating radical urbanism. However, as we show, these activities sat alongside important early developments in both computational social science and radical experiments in the use of the social sciences in policymaking, in ways that have, hitherto, not been well understood. The article is not intended as an exercise in nostalgia but, rather, one that gestures towards what Mark Fisher termed a ‘hauntological’ form of analysis; to quote Fisher, ‘[w]hen the present has given up on the future’ there is value in listening ‘for the relics of the future in the unactivated potentials of the past’.
Systems thinking is a promise of wholeness and agency. It appears as the right approach to meet the challenges of the Anthropocene. Yet, to keep its promise, systems thinking needs to critically review itself, the wholeness it integrates and the sense of agency it informs and forms. Transcending systems thinking is a continuous process of critical systems integration. Since the 1980s, this process of further integrating systems thinking in the mirror of complex (organisational) practice has been Mike Jacksons research agenda. Today, in the light of the demands of systems change vocalised by a young generation of activists and campaigners but more so in the mirror of research in metamorphic transformation, a next chapter of critical systems integration is due. Widening the gaze and revisiting its philosophical foundations, critical systems integration dissolves distinctions in a quest for meaning and purpose and transcends in a metamodern turn the axiological struggle of the critical school. Critical systems integration embraces a wider range of lived experiences allowing itself to include the formerly excluded. It finds its confluence in a shared understanding growing from co‐reflected lived experiences. In the Tamkeen experience of metamorphic transformation, systems thinking mirrors itself and the challenges of the generation systems change growing out of itself, from itself, into itself ; and finally, it needs to answer the ultimate critical question: What's love got to do with it?
In this article I analyze Salvador Allende’s economic program and policies. I argue that the explosion of inflation during his administration (above 1,500% on a six-month annualized measure) was predictable, and I show that the government’s response to it was political. I postulate that runaway inflation generated major disaffection among the middle class and that that unhappiness paved the way to Pinochet’s coup d’état in 1973.
Protocols for Postcapitalist Expression , the Economic Space Agency’s latest experiment in radical economic design, explores the possibility of designing a digitally native economy that is geared towards care, the arts, and the environment, and which not only refuses to give up on the financial frontiers of contemporary capitalism, but actively seeks to marshal them towards innovative ends. The architecture of a novel economic space comes into view through a set of protocols, which integrate economic information within a social value framework. This ‘Economic Space Protocol’ involves crafting a new grammar for economic information production processes that have traditionally been tied to competitive market behavior. This essay interrogates the place of finance in the book, emphasizing price discovery’s generativity with regards to information. What is necessary in the imagination of any postcapitalist future are radical design initiatives that contend with both the necessity and the limits of the price discovery process.
The special issue ‘Rethinking Economic Planning’ contributes to the emerging literature on economic planning in the age of digitalization and climate crisis. This introduction will first situate the new planning debate in the context of the historical socialist calculation debate. We will then provide an overview of the current literature on democratic economic planning, elaborate on the contributions of this special issue and its individual papers against this background, and summarize the six texts. We close with a brief section on gaps in the debate.
Misinformation is a complex and urgent sociotechnical problem that requires meaningful governance, in addition to technical efforts aimed at detection or classification and intervention or literacy efforts aimed at promoting awareness and identification. This review draws on interdisciplinary literature—spanning information science, computer science, management, law, political science, public policy, journalism, communications, psychology, and sociology—to deliver an adaptable, descriptive governance model synthesized from past scholarship on the governance of misinformation. Crossing disciplines and contexts of study and cases, we characterize: the complexity and impact of misinformation as a governance challenge, what has been managed and governed relative to misinformation, the institutional structure of different governance parameters, and empirically identified sources of success and failure in different governance models. Our approach to support this review is based on systematic, structured literature review methods to synthesize and compare insights drawn from conceptual, qualitative, and quantitative empirical works published in or translated into English from 1991 to the present. This review contributes a model for misinformation governance research, an agenda for future research, and recommendations for contextually‐responsive and holistic governance.
Mises’ and Hayek’s arguments against central economic planning have long been taken as definitive proof that a centrally planned economy managed by the government would be impossible. Today, however, the exponential rise in the capacities of AI has opened up the possibility that supercomputers could have what it takes to plan the national economy. The ‘economic calculation debate’ has thus reignited. Arguably, this is because neither Mises nor Hayek have given a clear and conclusive argument why central planning of the economy is impossible in principle. The paper frames the problem of economic planning as an agent–environment interaction, offering a taxonomy of the different sets of agents at play a) in a market economy and b) in a centrally planned economy equipped with the most sophisticated AI technology. The argument is that public institutions as planning bodies cannot replace the market order, no matter the AI technology behind them, for the elimination of the market entails the elimination of crucial kinds of agents that cannot be recreated or emulated through AI or careful social planning: the proactive action of entrepreneurs driving market allocation.
This article aims to trace epistemological connections between cybernetics and German media theory by emphasizing the notion of forgetting. This notion is presented as a central condition for problematizing, first, the human-machine coupling pointed out by cybernetics and, second, the rise of the machines that has concerned German media theory for decades. To this end, the article draws a line connecting an early text by Friedrich Kittler and Heinz von Foerster’s work on memory—a connection that will also be discussed in the light of findings and statements by Moritz Hiller and Jan Müggenburg. Finally, this article will outline a (still hypothetical) way to problematize the techno-epistemological scope of Project Cybersyn through the lens of such a notion
Background: Internet scholars are uncovering and connecting histories of early internets across the globe, but the Canadian context remains underexplored. Drawing on unpublished and declassified documents of the Canadian Armed Forces at Ottawa’s Directorate of History and Heritage, this article investigates the history and significance of SAMSON (Strategic Automatic Message Switching Operational Network), an early Canadian internet that experienced a series of setbacks beginning almost immediately at its advent in 1965, until the project was completed in 1984.
Analysis: Canada’s internet infrastructural techno-politics are examined through Brian Larkin’s framework of examining technical ways through which the political is constituted.
Conclusions and implications: This paper shows how this early internet was a techno-political system that shaped and was shaped by Canada’s pursuit of its national identity amid fears of U.S. influence and rising demands for self-determination within the Québécois and Indigenous nations.
Successful human societies and successful humans are good at problem-solving because it brings benefits. In doing so, they deploy socially honed learning faculties (language, cognition, recall memory, consciousness) unique to the human species. Problem-solving is inseparable from progress since solutions to one set of problems give rise to the next set: there is no status in social problem-solving. Humans build on general, transferable theoretical knowledge and craft skills, learned in logic-of-practice, coupled with context-specific knowledge (subjective and emotional), expanding the stock of solved problems and mobilising new capabilities.
The ‘e’ in the title refers to electronic as in e-commerce and e-Government. Reflecting on our own development, only 25 years ago avant-garde public officials were citing Castells’ (1997) idea that we might be entering a network society and Frances Cairncross (1997) predicted the death of distance.
Latin America stands as one of the most unequal regions globally, where economic and social crises persist regardless of the ideological leanings of the ruling governments. Many countries in the region grapple with pervasive issues such as corruption, impunity, and a lack of adherence to the rule of law. In this context of generalized crisis, governments have turned to discourses of innovation and technological progress to justify their actions, advocating for the incorporation of automated systems into public administration. Algorithmic governmentality, the government of the social world through the algorithmic processing of data, emerges as a political rationality. Drawing from recent contributions in the theory of governmentality and critical data studies, our commentary centers on three critical dimensions: algorithmic governmentality as political rationality manifested in sociotechnical imaginaries; as an expression of soft power wielded by the U.S. government over the region; and the means by which regional governments automate social asymmetries and social control. This commentary delves into the intricate dynamics of algorithmic governmentality in Latin America, shedding light on its multifaceted implications for governance, democracy, and social structures in the region.
The author discusses their long-form, multipart composition series Cybersyn, which uses group and individual improvisation, live electronics, performance based technology, and live interactive video. The piece intends to expand the role of all the elements involved, bringing together compositional frameworks, free improvisation, interactive electronics, and collaboration with various artistic mediums to create a flexible and adaptable system for each performance situation. Cybersyn explores the merging of the roles of musician, composer, improviser with technology and machines that moves toward a cybernetic process in artistic practice. The author expands upon the influences and creative process around the series of pieces, exploring the various historical, philosophical, pedagogical, and cultural influences that informed the work.
El presente artículo trata de revisar las ideas de Ivan Illich en la cuestión del desarrollo. Como punto de partida se toma la publicación en 1992 de The Dictionary of Development de W. Sachs (2009) donde se reúnen diversas perspectivas críticas, entre las que se incluye las de Illich con su artículo “Needs”. El libro se ha convertido en un referente de los estudios contemporáneos sobre el decrecimiento. Se establece la dificultad para definir qué sea una necesidad desde el pensamiento clásico y se lo compara con las propuestas de Maslow y otros autores. Se define la situación de las necesidades en el mundo contemporáneo tras la caída del comunismo y las diferentes alternativas que se dan desde el decrecimiento y otras escuelas alternativas.
Cohen's Smart City Generational model has been the basis of understanding for the evolution of the Smart Cities movement. However, how does this model align with practitioners' conceptualization of the term? Our research focuses on Infrastructure Canada's Smart City Challenge (SCC). Through 14 primary interviews and 20 finalist applications, this research reveals that practitioners overwhelmingly understand Smart City building as a government-driven, data-centric endeavor (Smart City 2.0), as opposed to being about vendor transactions (Smart City 1.0), resident engagement (Smart City 3.0), or community co-creation (Smart City 4.0), where the specific technology is of secondary importance to project objectives. We conclude that, rather than moving through distinct generations, the smart cities movement should be understood as a gradual process of municipal public administration modernization as local governments are becoming increasingly savvy and experienced about contracting with technology firms to address urban problems.
Los fenómenos geológicos tienen una fuerte presencia visual en el paisaje de los Andes chilenos. Volcanes, aguas termales, terremotos y géiseres son fruto de una activa geología. Desde principios del siglo XX, ingenieros y geólogos comenzaron a imaginar transformar en electricidad el calor de los reservorios de agua subterránea. Sin embargo, su uso como energía eléctrica a una escala nacional ha sido una promesa inconclusa. Inspirado por la antropología de la energía e infraestructuras, Martín Fonck indaga etnográficamente en las promesas de la energía geotérmica y su abandono en los Andes chilenos.
This chapter reflects on the evolution of an analysis and practice of science education that makes the relational and material relations between the scientist and their object the heart of science education. The paper develops a framework for a science education grounded in resistance to the social relations of neoliberalism. The paper first explores my evolving thinking on guinea pig pedagogy, i.e., pedagogies that construes the object of science as agential, historical, and political. It expands upon this by considering the nature of clinical labor (e.g., plasma donation) in the lives of my students and the way that such labor provides insight the nature of contemporary science. I then examine how the politics of radicalized medics reveals dichotomized geographies of precarity within neoliberal governance and also the importance of heteroglossic/culturally entangled sciences to survival of the vulnerable. Finally, I examine STEM/science education policy and how it is disconnected from the lives of students. In its place I imagine a pedagogy that emphasizes skills for those living in precarity, focuses on the hegemonic and destructive nature of STEM/science discourses and practices, and finally reimagines science as contested, global, complex, and multicultural.
This chapter introduces readers to the transformative effects fueled by converging and overlapping patterns of design, tech and entertainment. These are in part positive and in part negative. Technology, for a start, has dramatically changed the ‘infrastructure’ of democratic systems (the number and quality of connections between citizens and public administrations, the physiognomy of the public space, and access to information). A second beneficial consequence influenced by technology, design and entertainment into democratic processes consists of the prominence gained by design-thinking and creative experimentation applied to problem-solving in public policy. On the other hand, stronger ties between technology, entertainment and design have widened the gap between citizens’ expectations of everything related to digitalization, including government, and the actual rendering of digitalized public decision-making. The decreased satisfaction in digitally based forms of democratic decision-making poses a crucial challenge to digitalised policy-making, in both national and supranational venues. Public regulators are seeing the poorest results ever recorded in terms of interest, engagement and retention despiteusing the most cutting edge and advanced technologies.KeywordsToggling taxTED conferencesMass consumption electronicsCybersyn projectDesign-thinkingInnovationExperimentalismWicked-problemsDemocratic innovationsAestheticsDigital democracyCivic engagement
While artificial intelligence (AI) as a technology has been gaining widespread media and popular attention, its historical analysis is still in its infancy. As Jon Agar noted, “There is a surprising absence in the secondary literature of survey histories of artificial intelligence written by professional historians of science” [4, p. 291].1 When we began our own project on the history of AI in the Federal Republic of Germany,2 we found that we had to agree: Each project member—there are five of us (Florian Müller, Dinah Pfau, Helen Piel, Rudolf Seising, and Jakob Tschandl)—individually investigates one subject area of AI and has often found little historical work.3 What is more, the available histories, both monographs and articles, strongly focus on US developments (occasionally including British developments, Alan Turing, and Donald Michie) and are often written by practitioners and nonhistorians [12], [14], [16], [25], [34], [42], [63]. This prevalence of practitioner (as well as popular) accounts is being replicated outside the US too [9], [10], [11], [53]. While valuable as sources, these can only be a first step toward a thorough historical analysis of AI that extends beyond its US origins. This Special Issue therefore collects several histories of AI in Europe by historians and media theorists.
Anthropological expeditions seeking out algorithms frequently return empty-handed. They are confronted with the challenge of the object: what to study when studying algorithms? In this article, I draw together a number of literatures to outline one possible answer to the question of how to study algorithms in social science. I argue that what we should study are algorithmic ecologies. I sketch five modalities of algorithmic ecologies and review concomitant literatures: ( a) imaginaries, ( b) infrastructures, ( c) interfaces, ( d) identities, and ( e) investments and interests. The speculative propositions offered here are that algorithms are immanent to ecologies and that they are enacted across all the modalities of algorithmic ecologies.
Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Anthropology, Volume 52 is October 2023. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.
Social cybernetics is the concept of manipulation and control, and it has been reincarnated and awakened into new shapes within technological society. This study thereby focuses on the mobility of the governance of social cybernetics upon technology, education, and politics in the global political economy. This paper addresses the fundamental social cybernetics concerns through the political and philosophical history of technological development to argue whether or not the democratic principles have been globally and inappropriately rejected for the purpose of manipulation and control of the public. This paper inquiries into the background and reasoning behind the use of these new techniques, which have been orchestrated for the persistence of establishing a form of plutocratic technocratic governance existing under the guise of democratic international relations.
Connecting ethics, artificial intelligence, and human beings is of utmost importance, given their entanglements with each other today. The artificial intelligence (AI) that humans develop must be built on ethical foundations—otherwise, it could become too late to implement these, especially in the development of artificial general intelligence (AGI). As philosopher Bernard Stiegler has articulated, technology is closely linked to human development. Ethical core values should therefore be used for current AI development. This is crucial so that humans do not develop into what cybernetician Heinz von Foerster called trivial machines. Unless ethical goals are pursued alongside the development of AI, the future of humanity could be dystopian, as described by Yuval Harari. This paper discusses the multifaceted viewpoints of Stiegler, Foerster, and Harari, and ultimately argues in favour of Foerster’s humanistic attitude. Referring to concepts from epistemology and techno-science, I explore a friendly dispute between second-order cybernetical ethical thinking and questions of AI ethics, which I consider to be equally crucial for development and speculation in contemporary fields concerned with algorithmic thinking. I argue that reflection is needed not only about the ethical outcomes of AI systems, but also about the ethical implications of the development, deployment, and use of these systems. Hence, what is important is not simply to address human-machine relations but rather the algorithms humans live by—the relationships between humans and algorithms and the impact of these relationships on humanistic values.
As computing technology comes to dominate every aspect of social and political life, HCI must take greater account of History. The paper considers four different historical periods impacted by division and denunciation: the European Witch Hunts, the Soviet Purges, the McCarthy Era and the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Historians have identified patterns common to such periods including: the unity of accusation and action; condemnation as a show of virtue and defense of the accused as collusion with enemies. These patterns are mapped to findings from social media research such as: impulsive shares are easy to make but difficult to retract; angry posts travel fastest and furthest; likes and retweets express group identity and solidarity. Anachronistic memes, tweets and selfies explore what previous eras might have looked like if contemporary technology had existed in the past. It is argued that such anachronistic fiction may be a useful method for exploring the potential impact of particular design choices.
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