Why is SYNCO – CYBERSYN still important?

To achieve the self-driven economic project, Allende requested the national innovation office with the Chilean Fernando Flores as head of the service, a system that can make the citizens communicate and command the progress of the country, as well as the main offices to interconnect industrial production. Important people from Cybernetics and design, like Stafford Beer and Gui Bonsiepe, led a team of designers and engineers on a conceptual adaptation of how factories work but adapted to a country and its challenges. Regarding the political projects of each country, SYNCO – CYBERSYN is still an example of integrated productive areas and social interaction having one path for the whole country: progress and democracy.

Present and Future of CYBERSYN

Today, anything related to “Allende’s proto-internet” or “Allende’s futuristic command center” have an important value for supporters of the Unidad Popular (People’s Unity) or historians, engineers, designers, architects, public service workers, or any other research area. Although the highest develope stage was a mockup, aiding the promotion of a bigger plan and its prototyped experience, Chileans still wonder: What would it be if that project had been finished? or What kind of needs would a modern Cybersyn would cover? Or even What current technologies and platforms are close equivalents to the features that such a project was addressing. 

Some of the topics presented and discussed during our presentation “SYNCO – CYBERSYN: Diseño, Función y Actualidad del Centro de Comando de la Unidad Popular” were the Communication Divisions of the civil state, established and adapted by the Viable System Model theory of Stafford Beer, and his 5 simplified principles:

 1) Gobierno is equal to the People helping themself, in other words Participation. 

 2) Help equals Now, meaning inmediate commitement.

 3) Visible Path, or a expedite and non-bureaucratic system.

 4) With a face and a name, everything will have their visible responsibility.

 5) The Future starts today; let’s plan for a definitive form.

At the end of the presentation, a few examples of the SMART COUNTRY concept were presented, showing how some countries have already implemented integrated systems around public services for their citizens, giving the chance to value some of the digital public services provided by the Chilean State, although not including decisions making nor supplies chains, yet.

This presentation was closed with an open question: 

If this methodology meant to make the country work as a factory, what does this factory suppost to produce? Does countries have a transformative and defined role over the habitants, organizations or goods?.

Communications at the Unidad Popular (U.P.)- Theme Table

The thematic table gathered a diversity of topics and approaches, the activity lead by profesor Antoine Faure (School of Journalism – USACH), along the talks of Joseph Antoin Bander Rivera on “Psicoanalisis of Press Media during the U.P.”; profesor Pedro Santander, journalist and lingüist, at PUCV over Allende’s discourse analysis; and the phd candidate Rita Torres Vásquez, graphic designer who presented her research about design and printing aspects of former Universidad Técnica del Estado magazine. Fallowed by a round of questions about current challenges of media and how each research topic could address such problem. By our part, and considering the phisical analogies that our approach have set we can say that “an strident message travel further” and that will always need measurements to reduce the impact of such stridency, specially if they are under fake premises and lead to missinformation.