Category: Internet Culture and Technology

Cybersyn: Before the Coup, Chile Tried to Find the Right Software for Socialism

Image of Cybersyn Opsroom

In New York for my last f2f meeting of the MLA Committee on Information Technology I got a New York Times with an intriguing article about a Chilean management system, Cybersyn, titled Before the Coup, Chile Tried to Find the Right Software for Socialism.

Cybersyn was born in July 1971 when Fernando Flores, then a 28-year-old government technocrat, sent a letter to Mr. Beer seeking his help in organizing Mr. Allende’s economy by applying cybernetic concepts. Mr. Beer was excited by the prospect of being able to test his ideas.

He wanted to use the telex communications system – a network of teletypewriters – to gather data from factories on variables like daily output, energy use and labor “in real time,” and then use a computer to filter out the important pieces of economic information the government needed to make decisions.

Cybersyn was apparently semi-functional before the coup that overthrew Allende’s government and it was used to help manage around the small-business and truckers strike in 1972. I don’t think the Opsroom pictured above was ever fully operational, but visualization screens were important even if at the time they were hand-drawn slides that were projected rather than computer generated visualizations (see http://varnelis.net/blog/kazys/project_cybersyn on the chairs of the Opsroom.) Beer and the Chileans wanted Cybersyn to help them implement an alternative socialist economy that was managed in real time rather than “free” and chaotic or planned in the heavy handed way of most socialist economies of the time.

Rooting around, I found a good article about Cybersyn and the English visionary designer Stafford Beer from 2003 in the Guardian by Andy Beckett, Santiago Dreaming. It turns out that Beer gave the Massey Lectures in 1971 and they have been reprinted by Anansi as Designing Freedom. He also moved part-time to Toronto in the 80s where his last partner, Dr. Allenna Leonard of Metaphorum still resides. He died in 2002.

Another interesting thread is Fernando Flores who was the political lead of Cybersyn and the person that recruited Beer for the project. After the coup, Flores went to the US and got a Ph.D. in Computer Science collaborating with Terry Winograd, and being influenced by Maturana, also Chilean. That’s right – the Flores of Understanding Computers and Cognition. He is now back in Chile as a senator and supports various projects there.

The common thread is that Beer, Flores and Maturana all seem interested in viable systems in different spheres. They were applying cybernetics.

Addiction to internet ‘is an illness’

According to an article in the Guardian Observer, Addiction to internet ‘is an illness’ (David Smith, Sunday March 23 2008). The story mentions research by Dr. Jerald Block and case studies from South Korea. Internet addiction has these components:

  • Excessive use, often associated with a loss of sense of time or a neglect of basic drives;
  • Withdrawal, including feelings of anger, tension and/or depression when the computer is inaccessible;
  • The need for better computers, more software, or more hours of use;
  • Negative repercussions, including arguments, lying, poor achievement, social isolation and fatigue.

Is blogging an addiction?

FlowingData: 17 Ways to Visualize the Twitter Universe

Twitter Visualization

Peter sent me to a neat blog, FlowingData that is partly about visualization. Nathan, the author, posts longish notes like 17 Ways to Visualize the Twitter Universe. He also has a good one on 21 Ways to Visualize and Explore Your Email Inbox which has some creative ways to handle spam like Alex Dragulescu’s Spam Architecture that takes spam and generates “three-dimensional modeling gestures”! (I want to be a 3D modeling gesture!)

Ong: Secondary Orality and Secondary Visualism

Wandering some more through the Notes from the Walter Ong Collection blog I came across an intriguing note on Revising Secondary Orality and Secondary Visualism. The Walter J. Ong Collection at Saint Louis University has PDFs of lectures including one on Secondary Orality and Secondary Visualism (PDF). In the lecture Ong seems to be thinking about virtual reality as a form of secondary visuality just as radio and television are a secondary orality. If secondary orality is orality which is scripted (while appearing spontaneous like the oral), secondary visuality would be planned while being visually spontaneous. Perhaps the scripting or planning in this case would be the code that makes virtual spaces available rather than the scripting of the humans in the space.

Image of VRML Dream

Secondary visuality might be like the VRML Dream – a performance of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream that was streamed over the Internet with VRML. According to a student who participated when he was younger, they had two sets of performers – the voice actors in one room and the VRML body actors in another. Or secondary visuality could be visualizations that transcode data from one sensory modality to another (from text to the visual.)

Sweding: Be Kind Rewind

Screen Image
And now for the best movie web site I’ve seen in a long time, Be Kind Rewind. The premise is that the web is erased (by Jack Black, presumably) and various other web sites have to be sweded, which has something to do with coming from Sweden (and “sweet”?). There is a two page PDF that explains it all and examples like a swede Google. It looks like paper reverse engineering of a web design.

Thanks to Calen for this.

The Charms of Wikipedia

The Charms of Wikipedia is a charming review essay about editing the Wikipedia by Nicholson Baker in the New York Review of Books (Volume 55, Number 4 · March 20, 2008). In the review essay he talks John Broughton’s Wikipedia: The Missing Manual, which is just that – a manual for editing the Wikipedia. Baker talks about trying to rescue articles proposed for deletion and concludes with,

My advice to anyone who is curious about becoming a contributor—and who is better than I am at keeping his or her contributional compulsions under control—is to get Broughton’s Missing Manual and start adding, creating, rescuing. I think I’m done for the time being. But I have a secret hope. Someone recently proposed a Wikimorgue—a bin of broken dreams where all rejects could still be read, as long as they weren’t libelous or otherwise illegal. Like other middens, it would have much to tell us over time. We could call it the Deletopedia.

This reminds me of another story about the Wikipedia and its founder, Larry Wales. It turns out that Wales has been dating the bizarre Canadian conservative Rachel Marsden (infamous in Canada for a harassment case with her SFU swim coach.) Wales apparently broke up with her on the Wikipedia and she is retaliating by selling his T-shirt on E-Bay. See the Globe and Mail story, Ms. Marsden’s cyberspace breakup: tit-for-tat-for-T-shirt by Siri Agrell, March 4, 2008. There is a longer article with links to the relevant materials from Fox, titled, Wikipedia Founder’s Fling With Columnist Ends in Nasty Public Breakup. There is some question as to whether he was using his position to sanitize her Wikipedia entry.

Obama and the Long Tail fo Politics

I went to a talk by David Theo Goldberg who also heads up the UCHRI (University of California Humanities Research Institute). His talk wasn’t about networked politics, but he repeatedly mentioned flash mobs as a new political phenomenon and then he went on to praise the long blog entry Barack Obama and The Long Tail of Politics by Isaac Garcia of Central Desktop, the company whose wiki-like collaboration software was used by Obama to organize California. The blog entry is one of the best explanations of the Obama phenomenon I’ve come across.

Productivity Illuminated by Email

An interesting story on a study from MIT. Using datamining techniques, researchers looked at corporate email use and draw some interesting conclusions on productivity — measuring information-worker productivity being an area considered particularly difficult, apparently. The specific conclusions presented in the overview aren’t breathtaking, indeed, they rather confirm the sorts of things about people I like to assume, and their broader conclusions sound slightly breathless, but plausibly move beyond mere speculation.

What is most interesting is the appearance of email as a starring player at a time when most people talking about digital communication seem to have given up on it; of further interest would be application of some ideas behind the research to non-email communication.

First found at bettercourse.org (via infovore) where more interesting comments may be found.

NYT: Cell phone novels take off in Japan

The New York Times has a story by Norimitsu Onishi,
Thumbs Race as Japan’s Best Sellers Go Cellular – New York Times, about how novels written in snippets on cell phones and posted to special blogs and then published in print were five of the top ten best-selling novels.

The boom appeared to have been fueled by a development having nothing to do with culture or novels but by cellphone companies’ decision to offer unlimited transmission of packet data, like text-messaging, as part of flat monthly rates. The largest provider, Docomo, began offering this service in mid-2004.

I wonder if the serialization over time builds anticipation and sales? Does writing them on a cell phone change the prose?