The Stack On Software and Sovereignty · 第 58 页

1. Stacks That Were and Might Have Been

In 1970, British cybernetician Stafford Beer was commissioned by Unidad Popular, the new socialist Chilean government of Salvador Allende, to design the platform for a new computer-controlled economy, a project that came to be known as Project Cybersin (the name is a conjunction of “ cybernetics ” and “ synergy ” ). ²⁴ The proposed network would have organized the entire Chilean economy according to, among others techniques, a twelve-layer concentric platform model, running from the worker himself (center layer), to successive layers of the crew, workshop, department, firm, line, sector, branch, industry, state economy, central government, and finally enveloped by the twelfth, and final, layer of the whole nation. As seen in Beer ’ s diagrams, layers in the system could recursively influence layers it surrounded, with any one factory floor or shipping port location sending status information regularly into the platform by a network of telex machines. This feedback loop seems like rocks and sticks compared to today ’ s multivariate stochastic logistical lattices, but in the early 1970s, it was practically science fiction. Neither that Cybersin network nor its planned control room straight from Captain Kirk ’ s bachelor pad survived the Pinochet coup. The Chilean army and its sponsors apparently didn ’ t see much value in flat, decentralized economic ecologies sutured by cutting-edge information networks. Hmm. ²⁵ Beer ’ s “ stack ” was based on his viable system model, “ a five-tier structure based on the human nervous system, which Beer believed existed in all stable organizations — biological, mechanical, and social. ” Biological system metaphors map onto modern social theory in diverse ways and while some emphasize equilibrium, others emphasize emergence. ²⁶ For Beer ’ s Project Cybersin, it was the latter. The aspiration of the platform was to constitute and compose a systemic state condition, literally a socialist nation-state condition, and bring it into being. The platform sovereignty attempted by his stack was generative ex nihilo. Unlike the deeply centralized planning mechanisms of the Soviet Gosplan, the reporting, planning, and coordination of Cybersin ’ s architecture was meant to be decentralized and democratic. Beer himself was less interested in Marxian theory of history than in the revolutionary potential of autopoietic cybernetics as a form of governance, and the presumed effect of information flows to make systems less hierarchical, more composable, more vital and durable.

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Platform and Stack, Model and Machine