(no subject)

Lately, I've been reading this about the attempt to use computers and cybernetics in general for organizing the economic system in Chile in the days of the Allende government.

Though I know the outcome, it's still sad to read between the lines, to see how things gets just a little worse every day, the population and state a little more polarized, sliding towards that end that has to come. Yet there is nothing one can do - history is history, the past is set.

Both the left and center have their stories as to why the coup happened. Either Allende was not radical enough (in not preparing the bottom-up established cordones or factory alliances to oppose the military, for instance), or he was too radical (in using executive order to counter Congress to the point where the latter appealed to the military to fix things, for instance). In either case, my impression is he (and the limitations given by the transition approach) were too in-between to work in the end - a compromise where sticking to one of the sides was needed. Elsewhere, this misjudgment may have led to a change of policy under another party; there, one got decades of authoritarianism.

The cybernetics parts are interesting - but I keep thinking what might have been.