Cybersyn, big data, variety engineering and governance

Abstract

This contribution offers reflections about Chilean Cybersyn, 50 years ago. In recent years, Cybersyn, has received significant attention. It was the brainchild of Stafford Beer, who conceived it to support the transformation of the Chilean economy from its bureaucratic history to hopefully create a vibrant and modern society, driven by cybernetic tools. These aspects have received much attention in recent times; however, in this contribution, I want to discuss how working in Cybersyn influenced my work after the coup of 1973. Perhaps, for me, its major influence was in the management of complexity, through what I refer here as variety engineering and through the Viable System Model VSM as a paradigm to the management of relationships with implications to enterprises, society and the economy. After the 1973 coup major interest was in technological aspects of Cybersyn such as real-time management and its contribution to decision support and executive information systems. In the late 70s I was personally influenced by information management, but by the early 1980s my work moved towards methodological aspects of how to use the VSM. By 1989 I had created the VIPLAN method (Espejo, 1989). Key questions I attempted to answer were, how to model the complexity of enterprises and their interactions with environmental agents. Later on, in the 1990s and 2000s, the main direction of my work was epistemological, ontological and methodological towards second-order cybernetics and relationships. Only in recent decades the political transformations proposed by Cybersyn have captured the imagination of many commentators. The confluence of social and cultural changes with information technology, data models, artificial intelligence, algorithms and several additional technological developments have challenged the excesses of capitalism, particularly after the banking crisis of 2008-2009. The purpose in this paper is discussing this evolution in the light of those early days in Chile.

Keywords: Cybersyn; Economic cybernetics; Governance; Management cybernetics; Real time management; Variety engineering; Viplan.

Fig. 1

Quantified flowchart of the industrial economy. Own source, according 1973 INTEC Corfo

Fig. 2

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Fig. 3

Variety engineering of environment, organization (BB) and management interactions with variety imbalances within the environment and the organization). Source, Espejo and Reyes (2011)

Fig. 4

Management of complexity and requisite variety. Own source

Fig. 5

Operational descriptions: VSM focus on relationships. Own source

Fig. 6

The Viplan methodology and problem situations ( adapted from Espejo 2020)

Fig. 7

A cybernetic model of contemporary capitalism. Own source