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Article

The Planning Machine

Evgeny Morozov · The New Yorker · 2014

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Type: Article
Author: Evgeny Morozov
Accessed: 2026-09-01

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EstablishedCybersyn had not reached routine use by the 1973 coup: the operations room was a prototype whose buttons failed to show the right slides at Allende's December 1972 visit, and reports sometimes reached managers after they had already acted.TheoryThe telex network built for Cybersyn was used during the October 1972 truckers' strike to coordinate fuel, supplies and road information; how much this helped the government survive is Medina's interpretation.TheoryCybersyn could not have addressed runaway inflation, lack of foreign credit, falling copper prices, hoarding or the threat of violence, and in practice its factory modelling was top down; accounts presenting it as a functioning ‘cybernetic socialism’ overstate what was built.