2025/04/03 by Otto Lehto, Pablo Paniagua · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Political and Social Dynamics in Chile and Latin America
paper · pdf · doi:10.1080/03085147.2025.2513800
openalex publication_date 2025/04/03 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/08
During the twentieth century, cybernetics became entangled with the socialist and neoliberal transformations in Latin America. Both socialists and market liberals appealed to cybernetic ideas about multi-level decentralization and adaptive control to coordinate society and promote welfare. By analyzing Chile as a case study, we explore the twin experiments of cyber-socialism and neoliberalism rooted in modernism and oscillating between top-down design and partial (constrained) decentralization. We show that the modernist and cybernetic ideas of ‘designing freedom’ influenced the Allende administration (1970–1973) and the Pinochet regime (1973–1990). The former experimented with cyber-socialism through Project Cybersyn, and the latter with authoritarian neoliberalism. Focusing on the work of cybernetic scholars Stafford Beer and F.A. Hayek, we compare both regimes’ different but partially overlapping approaches to the design of constrained freedom. Several features of modernist thinking and cybernetics explain both experiments’ appeal and shortcomings. These lessons are relevant for contemporary debates about the future of liberal democracy, the information society and the compatibility of freedom with artificial intelligence (AI).