DSpace Repository :: Browsing by Author "Lehto, Otto"

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Designing freedom: Allende, Pinochet and the twin experiments in cyber-socialism and neoliberalism
(2025) Lehto, Otto; Paniagua, Pablo
During the twentieth century, cybernetics became entangled with the socialistand neoliberal transformations in Latin America. Both socialists and market lib-erals appealed to cybernetic ideas about multi-level decentralization and adaptivecontrol to coordinate society and promote welfare. By analyzing Chile as a casestudy, we explore the twin experiments of cyber-socialism and neoliberalismrooted in modernism and oscillating between top-down design and partial (con-strained) decentralization. We show that the modernist and cybernetic ideas of‘designing freedom’ influenced the Allende administration (1970–1973) and thePinochet regime (1973–1990). The former experimented with cyber-socialismthrough Project Cybersyn, and the latter with authoritarian neoliberalism. Focus-ing on the work of cybernetic scholars Stafford Beer and F.A. Hayek, we compareboth regimes’ different but partially overlapping approaches to the design of con-strained freedom. Several features of modernist thinking and cybernetics explainboth experiments’ appeal and shortcomings. These lessons are relevant for con-temporary debates about the future of liberal democracy, the information societyand the compatibility of freedom with artificial intelligence (AI).