Ep 9: Cybersyn in Silicon Valley | The Santiago Boys

I'm Evgeny Morozov, and this is the  final episode of the Santiago Boys. Today we're heading straight to the  belly of the beast: Silicon Valley. It's certainly not where our protagonists  were planning to end up when they took over the Catholic University in Santiago back in 1967.  But their lives took a dramatic turn afterward, most of it due to Allende’s surprising rise to  the presidency. And Project Cybersyn, Allende’s radical experiment to transform Chile’s economy  through computers, play

ed a major role as well. And now, with Allende gone, some of the  Santiago Boys stand ready to trade Che Guevara for Steve Jobs, the socialist  revolution for the digital one. Others, however, do remain faithful to their original  ideals. And then, there’s Stafford Beer himself, who goes on a very different journey.  More on that later. Stay with us. It is hard to imagine a more depressing  time in Chile than the early 1980s. The country is still under the brutal  dictatorship of Pinochet. The k

illing of Orlando Letelier did lead to the  demise of DINA and the demotion of Pinochet’s top henchman, Manuel Contreras.  But state repression persists nonetheless. Even more shocking is that while Chileans are  suffering, some people in other countries are admiring this terrible regime. They’re even  looking up on Chile as a model of economic success. They’re impressed by how Pinochet and his  Chicago Boys have implemented all these radical free-market reforms – reforms that have supposedly  t

urned Chile into a true economic miracle. The Guardian’s Andy Beckett explains: AB: we have to remember that, especially in the late 70s and even in the early 80s, there  were very few examples around the world of kind of neoliberal governments…So if you were a kind  of rightwing government looking for these ideas, Chile was a very intriguing experiment to follow…  and because it was an authoritarian regime, it meant that Pinochet could try things  that were unpopular and it didn’t matter… The B

ritish elites are particularly  enamored of this free market utopia. Andy Beckett notes the irony: AB: So, there's a kind of idealization of the Pinochet government that happens on the  right in the 1970s. A bit like the way the left, earlier in the decade, idealized Allende.  So there's a kind of idea around on the right in Britain that democracy Britain in  might be failing and the alternative might have to be some kind of authoritarian government. One prominent British economist is really in

love with the Chicago Boys. And their free-market  utopias. He's got quite the advantage, too, being very close to Margaret  Thatcher. His name is Alan Walters. But who exactly is he? Well, there’s an  interesting connection to our story here. Walters is actually a one-time business partner  of Stafford Beer. Yes, they even tried to do some business together in Allende’s Chile...That,  of course, tells us that Stafford Beer could have found himself a comfortable consulting gig  even under someon

e like Pinochet. To his credit, he never wanted that. Andy Beckett has the details on this Alan Walters guy: AB: He visited Chile after Pinochet had taken power and was rather intrigued and  impressed by the kind of free market reforms that were happening and then once Margaret Thatcher  became prime minister, Alan Walters went backwards and forwards to Chile quite a few times . The Irony Lady loves the Chilean model. She wants the UK to look very much like the market utopia  that Pinochet has b

een building in Santiago: AB: Semi officially, Margaret Thatcher was  very interested in what he told her about what the government there was doing,  but she told him to keep it quiet, to not talk publicly about the fact that he  was going to Chile, because she was worried, obviously, about the image that the regime had. As Thatcher takes the reins of power in Britain, the country quickly emerges as the  main defender of Pinochet in Europe. Watching all of that unfold must have been a  truly gut

-wrenching experience for Stafford Beer. His own government cozying  up to the brutal dictator? Well, that must be an affront  to everything he stands for. Enrique Farne vividly recalls the meeting  that Stafford had with him around that time. EF: he had a friend who… a lady friend…  who was a member of the Tory party. After this lady makes some frivolous remarks  about communists, Enrique loses his temper: EF: I reacted to that. I said, Don’t say that.  I’ve seen that happening. I’ve seen peopl

e killing. After that, I gave her a political pitch… Stafford Beer's reaction? Well, let's just say it is quite dramatic. He begs Enrique - and it  seems that, in begging Enrique, he is talking to the whole country of Chile - for forgiveness. EF: Stafford stood and kneeled in front of me. And this lady was also very embarrassed  and I…i don’t know what I said. Stafford’s laid-back, hippie-like  demeanor does raise some eyebrows; he no longer looks like a distinguished member  of the Athenaeum lu

b. And to make matters worse, his political beliefs don't exactly align with  those of polite society. As if that wasn't enough, he's also made it clear that he's not  interested in working for British clients. Here is what Vanilla Beer told me: VB: They were busy torturing people in Northern Ireland, and he just wouldn't  work for the Brits. So he really, his whose work pool was really shrinking  as the world got more and more unpleasant, but he was a man… a man of principle. Nor would he touch

anything involving the military-industrial complex.  Here is Stafford reflecting upon his own post-Chilean radicalization in a  session recorded in that busy Welsh pub. Apologies, once again, for the sound quality. SB: I never got any funds for anything because I, wouldn't. I took a conscious decision that I would  not work for this military-industrial complex, nor would I work for big business and  nobody else was offering anything anyway. Rather than rubbing elbows with the  cream of the crop

in British society, he's chosen to isolate  himself in his Welsh cottage. The days of caviar, lobsters, and champagne are  long gone. Now he is surviving on a meager diet of trout and mashed potatoes. And that's on  a lucky day. And the respectable world – all those consulting clients and universities and  the media that, in the past, never left him alone - are not exactly seeking his opinions: SB: I've noticed that people don't ask me to talk to managers much these days… But for anyone in the

know, this is not exactly a mystery.  Having worked for Allende - a man whose reputation was tarnished by a sustained  propaganda effort against him - Stafford has become a black sheep of sorts. And a  dangerous one at that. An unpredictable one. While some might get lost  in the philosophical weeds, Fernando is all about taking in his ideas  and putting them into action. He's got a well-rounded plan that includes expensive  seminars, coaching sessions, consulting gigs, and even software develop

ment – all of that  to ensure that he's bringing in the big bucks. Terry Winograd remembers that period: TW: So Fernando decided in his thinking about computers that computers should be used  to facilitate human language interactions, not to understand language, which is what my own  AI work had originally been, and he had this very clear sort of focus on language as commitment,  language as you make promises, you make requests. And so Fernando takes a page out of the Silicon  Valley’s playbook

and, you guessed it, founds a start-up. And then another one. And then another… TW: Fernando wanted to get people together, talk, get them to commit to things and make things  happen. Now in Chile, he did that by being a government minister; in the USA, he did  not have that option or anything close to it. So he took the same drive that he had to  get things organized and make things happen. So, yes, Fernando has all these  startups, but there's a twist: his early business partner, Werner Erhard

, has a  shady reputation in the human potential movement, with whispers of cult-like behavior and even money  laundering. That Erhardt connection remains a thorn in Fernando's side. At least for a while. TW: I was never comfortable with him, because I think, even in the early days  when Fernando was working with him, there was a critique from the left here, right, about Werner Erhardt and what he was doing and  whether he was a cult and all those things. Eventually, Fernando does move beyond  h

is controversial past with Werner Erhard. He’s enjoyed some success building  a business – and now, some of the Santiago Boys are ready to join him in Silicon Valley. But for many of them, it’s not about the change of scenery. It’s a completely different environment. Gabriel Rodriguez, for example, becomes a vice-president in one of Fernando’s companies.  But Fernando expects him to learn on the go, the moment he lands in California.. So Gabriel  has to take on the daunting task of learning how

to use a personal computer, something he’s  never used in his life, and he finds himself lost in a sea of confusion. GR: And then he put me a PC in front of me, an Osborne… and I stayed 10  days trying to understand what the hell was that? No one explained me. So it took me something like  five days to get idea what was a word processor… I did something strange, I switched off – a switch behind my desk in the office…  and I listened to people shouting… and then I turn on and off again… I was dis

connecting  the local area network of the whole office… For this Santiago Boy, using a personal  computer proves more challenging than imagining how cybernetics could transform  the whole of the Chilean economy. Gui Bonsiepe, the German designer behind the  Operations Room, also enjoys a stint in Californian stint, all of that thanks to Fernando: GB: One day I got a letter from him from the States and he invited me to come to Berkeley  to see his new environment, what he was doing, I was very im

pressed because I had not had  the opportunity to work with computers.. There are no socialist spoons in  sight, but Gui is still loving it: GB: I was amazed, of course… it was fascinating  perspective to work with this new technology…I saw what was coming up… Apple started just to produce  its first little 9-inch portable computer…. But some Santiago Boys are  not as thrilled. Remember Enrique Farne who was very skeptical  of Fernando claiming to be like Jesus, when he wanted to share power wit

h  eveyrone? He is still skeptical even when Fernando resurfaces in Silicon Valley. EF: I went to meet Fernando when he came to San Francisco....And then he started getting involved  in all this. I don't know what's the label? Erhard was one of these. But this sort of. I don't  know. It's for me like manipulating people. People, you know, if you know how to crush the  weak...And then he started getting into that Fernando's coaching workshops do enjoy a certain  reputation, with some finding them

extremely intimidating. He's not afraid to ask the tough  questions, to make people squirm in their seats. The fact is that quite a lot of  high-powered executives attending the seminars are more than happy to pay  top dollar for a heavy dose of what seems like a heavy dose of emotional sadomasochism. And Fernando is more  than happy to provide it. Eventually, even Gabriel Rodriguez cannot bear it: GR: Working with Fernando was a not an easy experience. For me, it was not so hard because  final

ly I was a friend of him from the beginning and know him personally. But at the end,  he, he, he expelled me from his company in public in front of all the guys…and I was  working with him for more than three years…No severance pay, nothing….My relation with  Fernando starting from there was different. In the meantime, the Thatcher era  takes a terrible toll on Stafford Beer. Vanilla recalls its effects on her father : VB: there was no doubt ever in my mind that Stafford was a patriot. The patri

otism only  abandoned him when Margaret Thatcher moved in. The Thatcher years were the end of all of us, all  that we understood about England and the English. Everyone around him seems to be with Thatcher. Even his ex-wife, Vanilla’s mother… VB: She was mummy's role model. It was awful. I mean they even have the  same hairdresser as far as I can see. … And Stafford’s brother, Ian, is not far behind: VB: Stafford discovered that his brother had spent Christmas at Checkers, the prime  minister's

house, with Margaret Thatcher, and he said to his brother. "You were alone  with that woman, and you did not strangle her?" It was not Uncle Ian's style to strangle prime  ministers, he loved Margaret Thatcher, of course. By 1989, Stafford has had enough of  Thatcherism. During an important lecture, he even goes on the offensive . MJ: I was one of the chairs of the conference and I invited Stafford to do  the after-dinner speech at the conference, and my job was therefore to sit next to  him and

to keep him topped up with wine. I had to be on my toes. As everybody knows, even  in later in life, he gave up brandy, but he liked to be topped up through wine. So he got through  two-three bottles in the course of the speech. This is Michael C. Jackson, a professor of  management and an acquaintance of Stafford’s. The lecture starts off as a ferocious attack on  Thatcher's government. Stafford accuses it of systematically destroying Great Britain. MJ: He was worried, and he constantly allude

d to the fact to me that this  was going to lead him to be arrested. Michael still finds Stafford’s  reaction hard to parse: MJ: he seriously believed that the special  branch was going to come in to arrest him during the course of this speech, because it was  such an amazing attack on Thatcherism, Thatcher’s government. Let me tell you where we were. We were  in the confines of Queen’s College, Cambridge, having an absolutely fantastic meal – this is  another way in which the radicals are bough

t by the status quo and by the establishment…  There was not a slightest chance that the special branch would come in to arrest Stafford… His passion is unmistakable during that speech, with Stafford taking aim at the American hegemony,  the IMF, and the World Bank. But despite his best efforts, it feels like he's talking to a brick  wall. His audience doesn’t seem to be moved. They are not joining any hippie commune any  time soon. So, once again, not a surprise. By then, his disdain for corpor

ations  runs very deep. He goes so far as to call them - and I quote - "deeply  corrupt." So, with an attitude like this, it’s no wonder that the business world has turned  its back on its foremost management theorist. So as Stafford steps away from the  cutthroat business world, his protégé, Fernando, emerges as a force to be truly reckoned  with. He is good at making money. Really good. But he has bigger dreams than that. He wants  to change the way we think about computers. So Fernando teams

up with that star professor  at Stanford that he met earlier, Terry Winograd, and together, the two write Understanding  Computers and Cognition, a fundamental book that challenges almost everything we  thought we knew about artificial intelligence, and computers. Winograd and Flores ask us  to imagine a different kind of technology, or at least a different approach to thinking and  designing technology. They want technologies that somehow improve and facilitate and coordinate  our actions, not

trying to replace them outright, as a lot of these artificial intelligence  dreamers have been thinking about. They even build software called The  Coordinator to show precisely that, to show that technology can augment our  abilities rather than replace them entirely. It’s all about coordination, not automation. Terry Winograd explains. TW: So it was one of the first  messaging systems that used PCs and computer networks of the more primitive kind. It’s a bit like a primitive version of Outlook

with strict protocols for communication, of  course. And it proves to be like the Wild West of emails, with some companies swearing  by it while others preferring to steer clear. TW: you got these stories like people, throwing it  out over their cubicle walls and stuff like that. The critics of The Coordinator say that  it's too focused on hierarchy and order, and doesn't leave enough room for  the emotional side of communication. TW: it basically privileges  one dimension of communication. So

if you wanted to say: "I want you to deliver  this by tomorrow,” it's great. If you say: "How are you feeling?” there's nowhere to do that. Some even argue that The Coordinator wrongly assumes that the opinions of the managers are to  be universally accepted. All the while Fernando's rather abstract musings on language and biology  and hermeneutics only serve as a veil – a veil that conceals that there’s actually a lot of  conflict and contention inside every workplace. Gabriel Rodriguez is stil

l around when those  controversial reactions start popping up: GR: I remember an article written by the editor  of PC Computing. That was the most important magazine at the time, saying this is the fascist  software, saying you are giving instructions, etc, etc. And this comes from Mr.  Flores, who was a minister of Allende, a communist president, etc, etc, etc… And Cybersyn, remarkably, also comes under fire in the 80s. One prominent critic comes along  and says, basically: ‘Wait a minute. This

is not democracy. This is more like fascism.’ Yes, he  is actually saying that Cybersyn is taking away workers’ freedoms and letting some unelected  experts, who are completely unaccountable to anyone, tell these workers what to do. So yes he  does call it - and I quote - ‘managerial fascism.’ And he’s not some nobody. He’s a big deal in  philosophy circles, this philosophy critic. Once again, Stafford Beer, as this conflict  unfolds, finds himself in the hot seat. He has to defend his creation

. And, once  again, he fails to understand the point. The critics of Cybersyn have been voicing  their concerns for more than a decade now. They have been arguing that Stafford’s cybernetics  expertise, however extensive and impressive it is, does not automatically translate  into a good understanding of the complexities of particular workplaces. So take the Quantified Flow Chart that he’s been proud of, for example. It may be a cool  invention, but is it the only tool? Or the best? Why does Sta

fford want to impose it on  the workers instead of listening to how they would go about collecting the data,  analyzing it, and improving the enterprise? Shouldn’t they be designing what the Quantified  Flow Chart should look like, and not just contributing data to its various components? In fact, Stafford’s beloved field of "management  cybernetics" - one you look at it close enough - is a bit of an oxymoron, if you look at  it closely. It seeks to dress up the political maneuverings of managem

ent with a scientific  patina of some kind. But it's hard to fully buy into the idea. If we truly want a fair workplace,  we must constantly question those in charge. We must constantly ask: What is their authority based  on? And it cannot simply be based on saying: hey, I know about requisite variety, I know about  feedback mechanisms, I know about algedonic meters. It cannot be based on expertise  alone - not when it comes to management. Of course, the goal of Cybersyn was  never to achieve so

me pinnacle of democratic decision-making. So some of that  criticism is not fair. Instead, Cybersyn set out to provide support to managers. But, even  when Stafford Beer tries to engage citizens, and not just workers and managers, his attempts  at democratic politics are a little bit ambiguous. Take Project Cyberfolk in Chile, that little  sibling to Project Cybersyn, where he wanted to measure public opinion by having citizens  move knobs on a gadget that his son designed, to show what they re

ally feel about policies  and what they hear discussed on television. You remember that Stafford did want citizens  to react to what the president has been saying and then to have the president react to  what the people are saying about he is saying - and almost infinitely so, with all  these cybernetic loops on top of each other? So, it's certainly impressive if you  think about it. But is it enough for citizens to just turn a dial to express  what they really think about politics? Don't we wan

t more – robust discourse,  engaged debate, democratic deliberation, and all of that happening in the public sphere,  not reducible to a number you can pick? Somehow, Stafford is completely mum about these aspects.  He just really believes that one can - and not just can, but should - reduce politics and  critique to a measured scale between one and ten, or whatever that scale might be in a particular  case. That does sound a little bit simplistic. So, over time, a few of the Santiago  Boys star

t having doubts about Cybersyn. Enrique Farne, for example, is curious  about what kinds of conversation might have taken place in those cybernetic chairs. EF: With my experience today, it was a bit naïve, because you forget other things.. The one that  talks more is not necessarily the most able. There are things like charisma. .. Mario Grandi brings up another fascinating  point. Who will even sit in those chairs? MG: io mi sono sempre domandato ma chi entrava  nella sala delle operazioni? Set

te persone, no? Which ministers will sit in those chairs?  Which heads of parties? Which workers? How will they be selected? None of  those questions have been answered. It's true that during times of war,  questions like these don't typically arise. That's why Operations Rooms are so popular in that  context. The same goes for police departments and the CIA, where the chain of command is usually  very well-defined. However, as Mario Grandi notes, politics doesn't work like a military  headquart

ers. At least not in a democracy. Of course, it's fascinating how Stafford and  Fernando have caught flak for their work and in remarkably similar ways. But isn't it  also curious that they haven't actually joined forces to combat their critics, and  I don’t know, write an essay or perform defending management cybernetics or whatever  the label might be in the case of Fernando? But that doesn’t happen. In the first five  or seven years after the coup, the two remain rather cordial towards each o

ther. When Fernando  is imprisoned, Stafford fights tooth and nail for his release and even tries to arrange for him  to enroll into a PhD program. And when Stafford is down on his luck, and Fernando is already  making some serious money in Silicon Valley, Fernando also extends a helping hand. FF: I hired him for a small project for me. I wanted to help him. He was not  good for business. That was another impressive thing. He was a dreamer, a poet. A big-shot entrepreneur, Fernando throws Staffo

rd a bone, giving him a little consulting  job, for example. Alas, not much comes out of it. When they reunite in Canada though, much-much  later, the tension between the two is palpable, as Stafford’s partner Allena Leonard recalls: AL: One of the things that Stafford mentioned was that Flores told him, "I don't understand why  you have less respect for me now than you did back in Chile, when I was much younger,"  and Stafford said, "Well, in Chile, you were the minister of economics; now you'r

e  a consultant. The same kind of thing that I do; I have no need to give you extra  respect on the basis of your title." It's tempting to brush off that tension as just  two very opinioned guys working in different paradigms, as Fernando seems to imply when I  talk to him about it. Stafford does stay true to cybernetics, his paradigm, while Fernando moves  far far beyond it, doing things that are truly on the cutting-edge, even for Silicon Valley. FF: Later, when we talked in Canada I talked ab

out my book with him, Understanding Computers and  Cognition, and he really was very happy that I was able to be... But at the same time disappointed  that I was not a cybernetic believer...He still was in his ideas... But I don’t think it’s just a matter of two irreconcilable paradigms.  Something else is going on here. MG: Lui ha avuto sempre un bruttissimo vizio…. Mario Grandi eventually hired Fernando for several big projects for Italian firms.  So he gets to know him relatively well, even a

fter Chile, after Cybersyn. Fernando’s  terrible vice, says Mario, is refusing to pay all of his intellectual debts in full. MG: Per lui non esiste la gratitudine…. According to Mario, Fernando doesn’t do  much gratitude or loyalty. So by the time he reaches the top, it’s normal that  many of the Santiago Boys, who initially were rooting for Fernando’s  success, are no longer willing to support him. And then things get personal. Stafford dedicates  his published account of the Cybersyn adventure

to none other than Fernando himself, the man  who started it all. It's a heartfelt gesture, with the dedication reading, "To Fernando,  for our friendship." And there's even a beautiful and very moving aphorism in  Spanish that follows that dedication. Fernando, too, is very grateful – at least today: FF: I believe that without the Cybersyn, I will never have the question  that I have after and without Stafford too, not only without Cybersyn … And, to his credit, he doesn't downplay the signifi

cance that Cybersyn had on his own career. FF: I don't believe that I would have been minister of economics and finance, and  any of these things without the project. I didn’t have any stature in the political  arena before. I was a young engineer. That’s what he says now, anyway.  But what did he say back then? Five years after Stafford’s account of Cybersyn  gets published, Fernando’s big book with Terry Winograd finally hits the shelves. FF: I know that Stafford had a certain disappointment t

hat when I published  a book with Terry, Understanding Computers and Cognition, where I gave a thank-you  to him but didn’t put a chapter about him. Fernando, however, is mistaken. Stafford’s name  doesn’t surface in the book's Acknowledgments does. That of Werner Erhard, for example,  does. Stafford’s name appears only in minor footnotes. And very few of them.  That's all the play he gets in that book. As it happens, at some point in the  late 80s, Stafford was, in fact, asked what he thought a

bout the book that  Flores and Winograd published together. And his response was , let’s just say, rather ambiguous. SB: I find that there is a very strong ethical imperative built into that system. It has to me  some of the overtones of religious revivalism, which says either you are for us or against us. Forty years have gone by, but there's no question in Fernando's mind as  to who wrote the better book: FF: Computers and Cognition was more successful  than all of the books that Stafford was

doing. This apprentice is definitely  not a humiliated one. I've often wondered if there's more to the story  of Stafford and Fernando than what meets the eye. They look so different – and yet, so similar. As fate would have it, while researching for this podcast, I stumbled upon a British  software engineer, a guy called Trevor Hilder. In the 1990s, Trevor tried to build a  Stafford-inspired killer app of some kind, for Windows, but that didn’t work all that well.  And Trevor is quite opinionat

ed about these two men, and he doesn’t exactly mince words  when I ask him about Fernando and Stafford: TH: they come from a background where  particularly middle-aged and old men expect to be listened to by everybody  else, and they are the dominant figures. Trevor, as you can hear, is  quite harsh on both of them: TH: They grew up to be egomaniacs. They  were competitive people who were expected to show off all the time and show  how clever they are all the time. So, when it comes to this stra

nge duo,  it's clear that Stafford plays the good cop to Fernando’s bad one. It's hard to  envision Stafford screaming something like “hope is the raw material of losers" as  Fernando has done in his corporate workshops. But then I’ve noticed another similarity between  the two. Stafford and Fernando have both built their consulting careers and reputations by  claiming to see things others simply don't. These two are not your run-of-the-mill eggheads  who don’t know how to deal with tunnel visio

n. These two deal with big-picture ideas - systems,  emotions, philosophy – and not just this boring, quantitative stuff of models and spreadsheets.  And when they prophesize the future, that future is always bold, radical, unexpected. Isn’t it what we want in our thinkers, anyway? Not everyone is so sure. WT: There's a question as to who's the bigger technocrat. Is it the  systems thinkers or is it the people who are more concerned with optimization algorithms? This is historian Will Thomas. He

's written about technocracy, in both government and business.  And according to Will, the eggheads are often the humble types: they usually know their place,  aware of the limitations of the algorithms. The Big Picture guys, on the  other hand, are different. Guys like Stafford and Fernando have aspirations  that are much grander. They are usually the ones advising the CEOs, not some heads of, I don't  know, marketing or finance departments. They won’t even be wasting time with these junior peo

ple. WT: …the people who are systems thinkers...- and this includes people who  are involved in cybernetics, certainly Stafford Beer, - wanted to remain  engaged at that level of the executive suite, but they coached what they were  doing in you know certain rubrics, like cybernetics and like systems thinking. And it’s usually the Big Picture types who are blind to their politics: WT: That might not be a technocracy of the flavor that they imagine technocracy to exhibit  itself as, but you know,

I think that certainly, there is a sort of new age technocratic element  to it. They wouldn't think of themselves as technocrats but they're certainly casting  themselves as a particular kind of expert. Speaking of New Age, there’s quite a lot  of it in the latter chapters of our story. While Fernando flirts with Werner Erhard's  followers in California, Stafford undergoes his own spiritual awakening in Toronto. His  turn to new age results in a somewhat esoteric refine approach to management,

and one would have  thought that it would hurt him as a consultant, but somehow it doesn’t. In fact, this new approach  keeps earning him some consulting contracts and it also makes him into an intellectual icon for a  very prominent consulting firm in Switzerland. But this transformation of Stafford also leaves  some of his longtime fans – including people like Brian Eno, for example – truly scratching  their heads about what is going on with him. BE: he more and more assumed the sort of guru 

figure. That was both in his appearance and in his way of speaking, for example. Stafford's once-scientific theories now seem to be much more mystical in nature. BE: As time went on, I realized that there was something much more… I almost hesitate to use the word, but I have  to, occultish in what he was interested in. Brian is still not sure what it all means: BE: I still don't know what to think about all of that, because I don't want  to say it was a wrong direction, but it was one that didn'

t  offer much to me, I must say. As Stafford takes a break, perhaps from teaching  Tantric yoga, as he often does in Toronto, he gets an unexpected visit from an old  friend from his consulting days. A guy called Francisco Sagasti. At the time, Sagasti  is just a modest bureaucrat. But you may have heard his name since, because much later, he  became president of Peru. Yes, weird things happen to the friends of Stafford Beer. The Stafford he meets in Toronto is not the same sharp business execut

ive  that greeted him in London’s office. FS: he had moved to the more mythic, more esoteric  sides. […] He really went not to the dark side, but to the otherworldly side in a sense and lose  connect lost connection with the other things. But Stafford’s legacy, for all the  mythical escapades, is still solid: FS: He was at that time a mythic figure,  a tragic figure, someone who inspired us, who showed a way, and we all appreciated  that... at least people like me. It’s not all esotericism, of c

ourse. In  his later years, Stafford also has some radical – and still relevant – ideas. SB: Has anybody heard of green money? That doesn't mean greenbacks, you’ve  heard of those…. This is money which is artificial. It's created in  computers by a barter system, so you can mend roofs, but I want my roof  mended, but I have no money to pay you, see, but you like pictures, I can paint pictures… Was he really into a better version of cryptocurrencies as early as the late 1980s? SB: if you've got a

computer in a community, you can do this on a very complex scale  and you build up green money credit. So by now you probably know that there's  something undeniably captivating about the way Stafford oscillates - oscillates between the  worlds of science on the one hand and the world of mysticism on the other. And this, I think, is  what makes him so appealing to so many people. TH: He wasn’t a unified human being and I'm  not I mean I have deepest respect for the guy, but he was not a unified

human being. This is his disciple Trevor Hilder: TH: He was rich and complex and a lot of  the richness and complexity that he reflects reflects the troubles of the 20th  century that he was living in and there's a sense in which I think the  reason why he is such an interesting figure is precisely because different parts of him  are different players in the dynamics of all the things that were going on, on all  sorts of different levels of recursion. But what becomes of the man who overthrew 

Allende? Well, in 1988, Pinochet suffers a humiliating defeat in a referendum, and  two years later, he resigns as president. Stafford is elated to hear the news and we are  lucky enough to have a clip of him on the very day when Pinochet leaves office: SB: I live to see this morning, something I thought would never happen:  Mister Pinochet removing his sash in Chile. Eight years later, Pinochet steps down  as commander of the Chilean armed forces. But will he ever face justice? Curiously, over

time, Pinochet develops a  peculiar fondness for Britain, which also becomes his undoing. Probably all these fans of  the Chicago Boys and of Pinochet himself probably get into his brain. And, oddly this fascination  with Britain, paves the way to his undoing. Andy Beckett of the Guardian explains: AB: When Pinochet was coming to Britain, from the early 90s onwards, quite regularly, the  part of the country that he was most drawn to was Piccadilly, in London, which is a quite elegant,  kind of e

xpensive part of London. Traditionally, an area for ... private clubs, for...  often people on the far right of politics to ... gather and quietly ... conspire. Ironically, it’s the same area that Fernando Flores, then a young bureaucrat with the  Chilean government, visited when he went to his first meeting with Stafford Beer. AB: When he made his fatal trip in 1998, he was actually wearing the kind of clothes  that you still see now on a certain kind of elderly English gentleman in Piccadilly.

He was  wearing this kind of brown and black tweed checked jacket and a kind of smart tie, and apart from the  fact that maybe his shoes were a bit too perfect, you could have thought this is just like  another old, maybe ex-military, English guy spending time in Piccadilly. But it’s not just Piccadilly. Pinochet is staying at the Athenaeum Club, yes,  the same club beloved by the Santiago Boys and Stafford Beer. The club where Cybersyn was born. AB: the idea of a kind of gentleman's club was s

omething that was quite appealing to him. Note the irony of the situation: Stafford,  with his Chilean post-coup trauma, is doing everything in his powers to leave  his old world behind. Meanwhile, Pinochet is frantically trying to fit into that world. Well, Pinochet does get arrested on that very trip. What follows is a complicated legal case  that spans three countries: Spain, Britain, and Chile. And the person mostly responsible for  trapping him? It’s none other than Joan Garces, Allende's p

olitical advisor. Someone that we  heard a lot from on this podcast. The guy who left La Moneda shortly before the bombing and  was told by Allende to keep on fighting and tell the Chilean story to the world. It's almost  like cosmic justice has finally been served. But in Chile, even with Pinochet gone,  justice sometimes take a while to arrive. This is how one day, Gabriel Rodriguez finds  himself face to face with Manuel Contreras, the feared director of DINA,  the intelligence service. Remem

ber, this is the same man who is  responsible for sending Gabriel himself to the torture site of Villa Grimaldi and then having  him transferred to the Ritoque concentration camp. GR: I was in the restaurant with a with  the wife of Eugenio, my friend, the widow. By the way, this is the widow of Eugenio  Ruiz-Tagle, that Santiago Boy who helped with finding the space for the Operations Room,  the one who got killed by the Caravan of Death shortly after the coup: GR: And we were having lunch toge

ther. In the table side by  side with us arrived Contreras, with families, seven-eight people in the table. So that  was just such an impression for Monica, for myself that we decided to leave the restaurant. What a chilling ordeal this must have been…To see someone so culpable still enjoying live in  what is nominally the new, democratic Chile. On one of Fernando’s trips back to the new  and democratic Chile, he gives a lecture on some innocent subject, like innovation  or Silicon Valley. But t

hen a mysterious figure from his past reappears. FF: And this guy was there, and I went to piss. He was also there  and said, “oh, Fernando!” and I said, “I don’t speak with people like you.  Fuck you. That's all I said to you.” Normally, I don't do this kind of thing,  but this time I had my pleasure this time. Who is the lucky fellow? Well, he is the same  shadowy individual who attempted – you might remember that from one of the earlier episodes  – to deprive him of Cybersyn and may have play

ed a role in orchestrating the meeting  between Stafford Beer and Salvador Allende. Well, go figure. But you don’t probably  want to piss next to Fernando Flores. After years away, Fernando does make a political  comeback – and he does so with the help of his former prison mate, Sergio Bitar, whom we already  met, many times, on this podcast. So he gets elected into office, but once there, Fernando’s  career takes a surprising turn. So surprising, in fact, that even Sergio Bitar sounds  quite a

bit embarrassed by it all: BS: He made big mistakes, ... politically.  So he used to talk to people about building coordinations and organizations, and  he finally left the coalition of the government and created a new party that failed  also to support the right here and also he left. Fernando makes some ideological shifts  and rather unexpected ones as well: BS: even the right didn't recognize  him because they didn't want to have something with Allende, somebody linked  with Allende, to be in

volved with them. Even Fernando's closest confidants,  including Gabriel Rodriguez, struggle to understand his move to the right: GR: And he moved from the left to the right… Part of my fighting with Fernando was about that… Yeah,  you cannot do that when you left La Moneda during the bombardment with the Chilean flag or the white  flag…Because every knows you were with Allende. They don’t understand how you moved from there… Gabriel says that this is typical Fernando, with all of his contradict

ions: GR: He incarnates a phenomenon of communicating and transforming people. But that  capacity has been incarnated in a very simple, concrete human being with a lot of social  resentment and with a lot of difficulties in life. So it is a kind of a Greek tragedy  person… He has these contradictions in him… He is a good guy, I would say. Never do direct harm  to people, but harm a lot of people all around Eventually, Fernando gets fed up with Chile.  He is returning to California. He’s had enou

gh. The Santiago Boys has been a story of young men  – and I’m sorry for this lack of gender diversity but we work with what we’ve got – and these  men had a dream. They wanted to create a fair and democratic society in Chile. They wanted  to use cybernetics and dependency theory to achieve it all. And they had some pretty radical  ideas about how to make that happen. But then, as we all know, things went wrong. A coup d’etat  intervened. Their government was overthrown. Their leader had to comm

it suicide. Their project was  shut down. And some of them had even to flee the country or spend years in jail. It’s a sad  story, really. And by now you’ve heard most of it. But it’s also an important one. Because the  Santiago Boys were really ahead of their time. They saw something that most people didn’t see  back then – and many of them still don’t see even now. What they say is that technology and  geopolitical power are connected on a global scale. They saw how big corporations  can influ

ence governments. They saw how countries can become dependent on these  corporations without even realizing it. And they showed us how these countries can fight  back with their own tools and their own ideas. But, of course, we should not get too starry-eyed  here. The Santiago Boys were not perfect by any means. They did have a lot of blind spots. And  the fact that they were all boys is surely one of them. But that’s not all. They certainly  underestimated the perils of technocracy. Nor did th

ey think about how their own work  would affect the people who were not like them. The poor, the oppressed, the marginalized. They didn’t understand that there were forces out there that wanted to stop them. Forces that had  money, power, weapons, advanced technologies. Forces that used technology for evil purposes,  not to promote participation or create a more rational economy. Forces like ITT and the CIA.  Like Manuel Contreras and his secret police, DINA. On these points, the likes of Beatri

z  Allende and the militants MIR were far ahead of our beloved Santiago Boys and their political  party, MAPU. And they did miss a great opportunity to learn from this more radical crowd –  if only about the arts of the Dark Tech. But we shouldn’t judge them too harshly. Because  they also had something that most people don’t have: a vision. A vision of a better world.  A world where workers could control their own destiny and where computers could play a  role in national development. A world w

here middle-class experts believed in something  other than making money. Or making careers. And it’s a vision that is worth  recovering. And this is why the Santiago Boys still matter. But before we finish, let us turn back to Stafford Beer. In his later years, Stafford suffers from  terrible health problems. Here is how he puts it in a 1996 interview: [actor] “I’m a mess right now, I don’t know what to do. I’ve had one stroke  and I may keel over. I know this. I’ve got about ten books I’d like

to write but I can’t.  I can’t write any longer, my hand won’t work.” Despite his health problems, he keeps  spending time at that cottage. But why? Roger Harnden, one of his disciples, has a hunch: RH: he did start, in my view, dramatizing it as time went on. He didn't need to have the  no running water. He didn't need to have a bad telephone system. He didn't have to have no  toilet. He could have had those things… He didn't have to have an old Land Rover that he could  hardly move the clutch

of because he had bad… he had diabetes and he could hardly feel the clutch. But why not just chill in Toronto? Why not spend all his time there, with the love of his life,  Allena? Why still go to that isolated cottage in the middle of nowhere? RH: Now all those things I think were to  dramatize his situation and partly a marketing thing. They were to market that “I  have been there. I have touched… I've been, you know, I've touched the sun, I've been Icarus  and now I've plunged to earth but I

suffered.” Roger grew up poor, but he is never at  ease with Stafford’s attempts to fit in with the working classes and the poor: RH: Stafford was of that same generation that loves the negative trappings of Margaret  Thatcher. Not her politics, but the trappings of Margaret Thatcher and the high church. He is  a typical, benevolent elitist in the UK context. Selling the mansion and Rolls-Royce  does not do much to him. He is still beholden to his old class. RH: it's not coldness towards the di

spossessed. It's blindness towards the dispossessed. He just  doesn't see them, you know… You quietly help them, but not because of any incipient coldness.  It's this is his own intrinsic classness, yes. Michael C. Jackson shares this view: MJ: He was an English, upper-class English public school person. Had  many of those characteristics, understood nothing about  the English working class. I think he would find it extremely difficult to  get on with ordinary English working-class people. Until

his very last day, Stafford could  not understand the British reaction to Allende – or, for that matter, to his own  work for the man. Roger Harnden explains: RH: he discovered the hard way that for  most of the society he would have grown up expecting to belong to, actually regarded him  as having betrayed them by the Chilean episode and by living the way he was living. Now  Stafford didn't actually understand that, and he was very puzzled why he wasn't  offered all sorts of chairs at universi

ties. So, Stafford's long stay in that cottage has  always puzzled me. Why stay there, given his deteriorating health? Was it his own way of  proving something to himself or to others? Was it Stafford’s own version of dying inside La Moneda? I still don’t know the answer. But it is clear is that the grand narrative of his  own life, from that luxurious mansion to that austere cottage to everything in between  really, has helped in achieving one crucial task. It has helped in creating a myth - a

myth  that still captivates and challenges us. And maybe it’s that myth more than the actual  achievements of Cybersyn as a project that is truly more important in this story. Francisco Sagasti, the former Peruvian president, seems to believe so as well: FS: He was a great myth teller, a great myth-maker. You know the importance, we all know  from Campbell and so on, the importance of myth in our lives. This is what he was good at. He could  create a story that would inspire people, that would m

ake you explore other things like that.  For those like me who are highly skeptical or some things sowed a little bit of seeds of doubt,  but at the same time I recognized what it could do There are myths, of course, and then  there is Stafford’s Cybersyn tale. It’s in a class of its own. Just think about  it. More than fifty years after it began, we're still unpacking its meaning, trying  to decipher what it all meant. It's a story that defies logic and reason, a little bit like a  surreal fabl

e from, I don’t know, Borges, maybe. Oddly enough, the world remembers Cybersyn, but  not for its success. Rather, it's a prototype that somehow becomes accepted as the real deal,  as if society chose to believe the unbelievable. So plenty of mysteries still remain but they are  probably better dealt with by psychoanalysts or sociologists, or, I don’t know, anthropologists  of myth. Still, I’ve spent many-many months inside Stafford’s head, and I must say that living there,  even as a squatter a

rmed with oral histories and archival documents, has been quite the adventure.  So I fully agree with what Stafford’s disciple Trevor Hilder had to say about the man: TH: he was a character who got trapped, not just between two worlds,  but he felt he kind of fell through the cracks between many different worlds and nobody knew  – he, I don't think he knew – where he was in these worlds and he became a marginalized figure  because he didn't know how to fit respectably into any of these worlds. S

o his experiences had  catapulted him into not fitting in anywhere, and he really found that very uncomfortable. In the end, Stafford's daughter Vanilla gets it right: VB: He was a good, fun man, you know, for all this  great heaviness and emptiness and despair. As we have finally reached the end  of our story, you might be wondering just what happened to our fascinating  cast. So let me indulge your curiosity. Let’s start with the one and only Stafford  Beer, the visionary behind it all. He die

d in 2002. While you might think that  someone like him would have lots of admirers and followers, that was not the case when he  died. His own extended family, back in 1989, didn’t even invite him to their family reunion –  and hundreds of people showed up. He did continue experimenting with art, publishing poetry, he  had an important exhibition of his paintings. But it also met with mixed success.  His one work of fiction, for example, was rejected by his publisher. And it did  dabble a littl

e bit in certain themes that, today, we might call pornographic. And when  he tried to present one of his academic books at The Athenaeum Club, the presentation had to be  cancelled for lack of interest from the audience. He did try to keep working on Cybersyn-like  projects in other Latin American countries, but he didn’t get very far. It seems that, at the  time, his ideas were simply too radical and too far-reaching for most people – and governments  – to accept. But there is one surprising p

erson who did appreciate his work: David Bowie. Yes,  that David Bowie. The rock star. He even listed Stafford Beer’s book, The Brain of the Firm  as one of his top ten favorite books ever. That must have done a lot of his book sales. But it’s’ not just the likes of Brian Eno and David Bowie who celebrated him. I already told  you that there was this Swiss consulting firm that tried to promote Stafford’s legacy in  the business world. And by the way they still hold copyright and intellectual pro

perty and  images and I must thank them for giving me the permission to quote from some of the letters.  And, in an odd twist, the Swiss consultants actually managed to successfully pitch the  operations rooms modelled on Stafford’s thinking to governments and public authorities  in places like China and Vietnam. So Stafford’s ideas might be enjoying a strange afterlife  in some socialist and communist contexts. Moving on the darker side. Pinochet passed away  in 2006, and his right-hand man, Ma

nuel Contreras, was eventually sentenced to over five centuries  in prison. More than 3,000 Chileans lost their lives to the dictatorship, and tens of thousands  were taken, imprisoned, and subjected to torture. Currently, there are still more than 1,000  people whose whereabouts and fate remain unknown. Operation Condor claimed the lives of more than  one hundred victims. And suspicions linger to this day as to whether the CIA and other agencies  may have known more about the murderous nature o

f Operation Condor than they originally let on. Here  is why. Remember in one of the last episodes I casually dropped this factoid that Brazil supplied  other countries participating in Operation Condor with this fancy encryption technology they  got from a firm in Switzerland? So, this firm, as it turns out, was actually owned by the CIA.  So it’s not impossible that all the telex traffic that all these secret agencies were exchanging –  the ones in Chile, and Brazil in Argentina – about whom t

o kill, when to kill, ,how to kill – was  actually read by someone at the CIA, perhaps sitting in that fancy Operations Room sitting on  the seventh floor of the Langley headquarters. ITT still exists but it has lost  much of its power and influence. Remember the explosion with which we started the  story? Well, there were many others that followed, mostly in Europe. In Switzerland, in Italy, in  France, in Germany. The one new in Manhattan, just a few weeks after the coup, was claimed by the  W

eather Underground, the far-left terrorist group. And they cited the coup in Chile and ITT’s  supposed involvement in it as their motivation. Allende, on the other hand, has been voted  as Chile's best politician in history. As for his daughter, Beatriz, she resurfaced  in Havana almost immediately after the coup, hoping to continue her father’s work. However,  it proved impossible. The trauma of what happened must have been too much. So, four years after  her father’s suicide, she too killed he

rself, and she did that, reportedly, using  the very gun that Castro gave her. Today, the Allende family are still involved in  Chile’s politics. The daughter of Beatriz became the defense minister in a new progressive  government. This, too, is a remarkable development - given that her mother was trained  as a guerilla fighter and that it was the Chilean military that overthrew her grandfather. And  eventually led to his suicide. And imagine: now his granddaughter is in charge of the  military

as the minister of defense. . As for the Santiago Boys, I can  give you some brief updates about their subsequent careers as well? Some of  them made their way back into government, with Sergio Bitar, for example, serving as  minister in multiple administrations. Gabriel Rodriguez too became an ambassador for science  and technology, working in the foreign ministry. Others resurfaced in the business world. Raul  Espejo pursued an academic and consulting career. He even joined the Athenaeum Club

at  Stafford Beer’s urging. Mario Grandi and Enrique Farne pursued business careers in Europe. Gui  Bonsiepe, the designer behind the Operations Room, kept moving between Argentina and Brazil.  Carlos Senna, the Brazilian engineer who prepared that anti-torture report that got  him in trouble before he joined Cybersyn, eventually returned to his native country, in  Brazil. And there he built computer models for the governor – that’s an interesting footnote – who  dared to nationalize ITT’s holdi

ngs in his state, in the early 1960s. We mentioned him  briefly before, really in passing. As for Cybersyn, Stafford's ability to craft  a legend and a myth around it has definitely paid off, and handsomely so. The story of  Cybersyn seems to captivate millions of people around the world, even though the  project itself was never fully realized, not to the full of his extension.  Cybersyn has become a cultural phenomenon, spawning songs, blankets, and even tech  startups that now claim Stafford’

s legacy. And his ideas still attract plenty of young loyal  fans who flock to hear about them at fancy leftist conferences, which, as soon as they mention  Cybersyn among their panels, regularly sell out. But sometimes myths can get out of hand. They  can obscure the truth. They can create confusion. And I must say that I kind of feel that something  like this is happening with Cybersyn as well. And it has been going on for quite a few years  now. I particularly enjoyed one telling anecdote tha

t Fernando Flores shared with me. He mentioned  a very prominent global public intellectual, whose name I am not going to mention, who  once approached him, and, on discovering that Fernando was from Chile, had asked him if  he – Fernando – had ever heard about Project Cybersyn. That was one way to hurt his ego. As for Fernando, he is not done yet. He says he has more secrets to share about Cybersyn, the  coup, the real relationship between Pinochet, Prats, and Allende and so much more.  And he

will probably do that in his next book – a book that will surely sell more  copies than all of Stafford’s combined. For now, the website of Fernando's  latest business venture features a glowing testimonial from someone formerly in the  US military. This will probably not earn him any extra admiration with the one-time Chilean  leftists who so admired and supported him. And here is the most bizarre anecdote of them  all. Remember Terry Winograd? Fernando’s colleague at Stanford University - the

one who says he  owes Fernando a huge intellectual debt? Well, he went on to mentor none other than Larry  Page, the co-founder of Google. And other tech moguls sat in on his classes too. He was even the  master's program advisor to the young Peter Thiel. So a specter might, in fact, be haunting  California – the specter of Cybersyn. But without a visionary leader like Allende or  a genius tech mythmaker like Stafford Beer, it remains just that: a specter. A  socialist ghost in the cybernetic ma

chine. So this is where we leave you today,  with one last question to ponder. Whatever happened to that  futuristic room in Santiago? Did the dictatorship blow it up? Did they sell it  for parts? Well, I heard from a reliable source that the room was still there, untouched, in  May of '74. So good 8 months after the coup. And then we lost trace of it. It disappeared.  Just like that. No one knows how or why or who did it. Or where it went. Maybe it’s  still out there, waiting to be discovered.

And what about those cool chairs and  fancy screens? Where did they end up? Could they be in some exotic place, like a  beach house in Las Cruces or a cottage in Wales? I, for one, wouldn’t’ be surprised to hear  that they ended up somewhere like that. But, at the end of the day, that’s a kind of thought  – a tantalizing one – that would keep some of us guessing late into the night. And, perhaps, that’s  what Stafford himself would have wanted… It’s the kind of puzzle he would have loved – he lo

ved  ambiguity. So, perhaps, it’s better to leave this question unanswered. SB: I don't know what the future holds. I am a great  proponent of ambiguity. It's partly because I'm as interested in art, as I am in science. The potency  of poetry and of painting quite clearly has to do with this very ambiguity, and I think that an  understanding the future has to have the same kind of feel about it. Most of the mistakes,  after all, that we have made in trying to adapt to the future in our kind of a

ge and civilization  have been entirely due to misclassifying what was going on… The Santiago Boys is a co-production of Chora Media  and Post-Utopia. Writing, research, development and presentation: Evgeny  Morozov. Music main theme: Luca Micheli. Audio editing and post-production: Emanuele  Moscatelli. Music supervisor: Luca Micheli. Post production assistant: Luca Possi.  Post-production producer: Matteo Scelsa. The people helping me organize, record, and  process hundreds of interviews are u

nfortunately too many to name here but I'd like  to extend special thanks to Chiara di Leone, Ekaitz Cancela, Nikolai Maximchuk and  Matteo Miavaldi, all of whom helped me in more than one way. Full credits are also available  on the podcast website: the-santiago-boys.com.