Who is in Charge? Stafford Beer’s Cybernetic Democracy and the Paradox of Control

When Stafford Beer received an invitation letter from Chile in July 1971, he was developing his cybernetic framework of the Viable System Model, which was an integration of centralized and de-centralized organization models. In the letter, Beer was invited to visit Chile to assist the elected president, Salvador Allende, and his government to manage the newly nationalized economy. Beer enthusiastically accepted the invitation and, for the next two years, he would make frequent travels between London and Santiago to build up the cybernetic management system Project Cybersyn (1971-1973). Project Cybersyn has received increased attention in recent years, at a time when the current political systems are unable to address the economic, political, and environmental crises. Despite new studies on Beer’s involvement in Project Cybersyn (Eden Medina [2006 and 2011], Andrew Pickering [2010], and Pamela Lee [2018] to name a few), I argue that there is still a gap in the scholarship to fully grasp the contradictions of Beer’s vision of cybernetic democracy. The gist of problem here is the ambiguity of control in Beer’s dispersive system of affects. To outline Beer’s understanding of control and organization, I will examine his intellectual and artistic interventions from his earlier work, the Stochastic Analogue Machine (SAM) exhibited in Cybernetic Serendipity (1968) and curated by Jasia Reichardt, to the Viable Model implemented in his later work, Project Cybersyn. My goal is to examine the development of non-hierarchical organizations in Beer’s thoughts and his works in the context of the Cold War.