Project Cybersyn Shows All Tech is Political

Paris Marx is joined by Eden Medina to discuss Project Cybersyn, a technological system created by Chile’s socialist government in the 1970s to manage production, and what it can teach us about political technology and innovation outside the Global North.

Eden Medina is the author of “Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende's Chile.” She’s also an associate professor at MIT and the Rita E. Hauser Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. Follow Eden on Twitter as @edenmedina.

• In 2020, Marian Schlotterbeck spoke to Jacobin about the fifty year anniversary of Salvador Allende’s election.
• Independent and left-wing delegates won major victories in the election for Chile’s constitutional assembly, making it hard for right-wing delegates to stall the process.
• In October 2020, Chileans voted overwhelmingly to draft a new constitution, following protests that began in 2019.
• Dictator Augusto Pinochet oversaw a brutal regime from 1973 to 1990, and the crimes of that period are still being prosecuted.

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