Historical precedents

  And so the book became a kind of comedy, an unwitting comedy whose jokes don’t exist within the world of the story. 

I want people to laugh (among other things) as they read it.  But I don’t want them to laugh comfortably, from a position of comfortable superiority, snickering at the deluded inhabitants of the past.  I want, I hope for, the nervous laughter of fellow-feeling.  We should laugh like what we are: people whom the observers of 2060 will be able to see are naively going about our business beneath our own monstrous overhang of consequences.  Whatever it is.¹

Francis Spufford, "Hindsight", a commentary on soviet cybernetics

The Venus Project makes a big deal of how using cybernetics to organize ourselves is a revolutionary idea that has never been tried before.

Actually a pretty old trick in new-ish clothing, that lived and fizzled away half a century ago.

Cybernetics is an old thing, but it really took off with the best-selling by novel, "The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society" by Norbert Weiner, which would generate a craze for the subject in the following 2 decades.

In the US, this would make capitalist HR people do various stunts using stuff like system integration to improve production, that would either turn out to be overhyped gimmicks, or actually be so efficient they became part of the background.

In South America, this would take the form of Project Cybersyn, which Argentina tried to implement to restructure it's socialist economy, using computers to control factory production.

On the other side of the world, Moscow tried to be more radical, and do pretty much a beta version of what the Venus Project is trying.

Let us take a look at the last 2:

Project Cybersyn

 As an alternative to a Soviet style centrally planned economy, Allende’s government instead looked for another route through which to replace the market. 

At the heart of this strategy was Project Cybersyn, a prototype internet system designed to link together the needs of the economy via a cybernetic ‘central nervous system’ devised by British cyberneticist, Stafford Beer.²

Stafford Beer

 Building on the insights of Norbert Wiener, the founding father of cybernetics, Stafford’s vision entailed a radical experiment in grass-roots networking. Aiming to directly involve workers at all levels of production and distribution in the organic management of the economy.

It was to feature holistic system design, decentralized management, human-computer interaction, a national telex network, near real-time control of the growing industrial sector, and modeling the behavior of dynamic systems.³

 

It looked quite high-tech as well, with a hexagonal room, with 7 Star-Trek like chairs(to prevent ties when making decision), and lack of a central table, to discourage paper shuffling.

 

It's interactions were to be done through the buttons in the chair's armrests(which also had places for your glass of gin, and an ashtray for your cigars) to be transparently used by both workers and management, since they had intimate knowledge of the factories, allowing almost near-real-time status of the entire economy, and allowing both of them to plan for ways to improve it, and see problems before they became apparent, like supplies running low in a factory, or how a strike might disrupt production across multiple companies.

A 3D model of the operations room, from which CyberSyn was to be coordinated

So far, so good.

So, what happened?

Well, 2 things.

For one, for all the hype about computers, the one available to the Argentinian government was...lackluster.

 

Stafford Beer and the team he had assembled set about creating a computer network that would connect all of the factories in Chile. This was a really novel concept for the time, but there was a problem: it was the 1970s—there weren’t many computers in Chile. Stafford Beer was only able to get one computer to create his network.⁴

Their solution was to use telex machines. A telex is like a typewriter connected to a phone line. So if one factory had a telex, they could type out a message, and send it to another telex. The messages might contain data about shortages in raw material or how many workers were showing up to their shifts. This data would be entered into the computer and analyzed, and subsequently, decisions could be made about how to address problems.

And remember that near-real-time overview of the economy?
Well, it was actually ducktaped together by a system of levers bringing pre-made slides, that were outdated by a day or two, to the screen.

Nevertheless, it was a great idea, and Project Cybersyn reached an advanced prototype stage before the network’s destruction in the military coup led by Augusto Pinochet on September 11th, 1973, in which it allegedly helped the government distribute material despite a strike by truck workers.

Said coup would be drawn at the instigation of the CIA, during Operation Condor, a United States–backed campaign of political repression and state terror involving intelligence operations and assassination of opponents, meant to counter soviet infiltration and subversion in South America.
Similar operations would occur throughout Western Europe(Operation Gladio), and the Middle East, involving the toppling of the governments of Iran and Syria(the repetition is not lost on me) by Islamic rebels, and the backing of a Saddam Hussein led Iraq during the Cold War.

From Russia with love: The All-State Automated System

As a result of the creation of ARPANET, the US military's precursor to the Internet, and combined with the brief liberalization brought by Nikita Khrushchev's famous and shocking rebuttal of the old regime, and the cult of personality surrounding Stalin, new ideas started flowing around the USSR, and a popular thought among the bright minds in the USSR was the wiring up of the soviet factories into one computer network, to streamline and technologically upgrade the entire planned economy. This system would still make economic decisions by state plans, not market prices, but sped up by computer modelling to predict equilibria before they happen.⁵

 
Abundance with centralized command economies via cybernetics seemed like an appealing solution on how to transition to pure marxism, where everything is shared, there is no money, and everything is automatized.⁶

Seem familiar?

This idea went through 2 stages:

Alpha version: Economic Automated Management System.

The first one was called the Economic Automated Management System, an idea created by a member of the Red Army called Anatoly Ivanovich Kitov.

This guy

Discovering a copy of Weiner's book, he sent a letter to Khrushchev, proposing that he piggyback off the Army's resources of computational power, doing the calculations at night, when the military was at a lull of activity, to proactively plan the soviet economy.

Said letter was intercepted by said army leaders, who weren't thrilled about sharing their network (whom Kitov described as starting to be outdated) with civvies, and who promptly sent Kitov in front of a military tribunal, stripped him of his Party membership, and threw him out of the Army.⁷

Cybernetics Part 2: Soviet Bugaloo 

Appealing ideas tend to stick, and resurface.

Such it was with cybernetic marxist-leninism, and the work of a young Kiev resident called Viktor Mikhailovich Glushkov.

Seen here, teaching about enterprise management

In it's most ambitious proposals, one central computer centre in Moscow would connect to as many as 200 mid-level computer centres in prominent cities, which would in turn link to as many as 20,000 computer terminals distributed across key production sites in the national economy, stretched across ALL of Russia(all 17.100.000 km² of it).

Other proposals included "automata theory, the paperless office, and natural language programming that would let humans communicate with computers semantically, not just syntactically as programmers do today. Most ambitiously, Glushkov and his students theorised ‘information immortality’, a concept we might call ‘mind uploading’ with Isaac Asimov or Arthur C Clarke in hand."

So, what happened?
Politics.
For all this, he needed lots of funding, and the Politburo was the only way to do it.
But his adversary was the minister of finance, Vasily Garbuzov, who believed it was too big a step(and may have wanted the resources for his own ministry).

In the following decades, the mighty envisioned system would devolve into a patchwork of dozens and hundreds of factory local-area control systems, before finally being dismantled along with the state that birthed it. ⁸

In the end, instead of outproducing capitalists, and integrating the latest and greatest technology, the project would end up falling farther and farther away, trying to imitate outdated tech off the Western market, especially the IBM-360 chips.⁹

So, why am i drawing attention to this?

All three movements show that attempts to fundamentally restructure society using cybernetics are not new, and that any project, while ambitious, can find itself mired in internal rivalry, external campaigns to put it down, and increasingly distant attempts to achieve parity with the current technological development, ultimately resulting in a solution, that even if completed, ends up an underwhelming and outdated contraption compared to what the free market is at that point.

The Venus Project is the final remnant of that cybernetic craze from the middle of the last century, but bizarrely, one with the biggest goals and promises yet, and the least to show for it, while simultaneously glossing over any internal or external difficulties it might encounter, telling us all their coordination and problem-solving challenges will be brushed over easily, and their opponents are simply going to either step up aside, or gleefully join them, and offer everything they own to the project.¹⁰

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1 https://web.archive.org/web/20130108162110/http://www.redplenty.com:80/Red_Plenty/Hindsight.html^↩
2 http://cybersalon.org/project-cybersyn-chile-the-socialist-internet/^↩
3 https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/cybernetic-revolutionaries^↩
4 https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/project-cybersyn/^↩
5 http://madan.org.il/en/news/soviet-inter-nyet^↩
6 https://web.archive.org/web/20131003102842/http://redplenty.com/Red_Plenty/Front_page.html^↩
7 https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-soviets-invented-the-internet-and-why-it-didn-t-work^↩
8 idem^↩
9 https://web.archive.org/web/20130108162120/http://www.redplenty.com:80/Red_Plenty/Logic.html^↩
10 https://www.thevenusproject.com/faq/Wouldn't there be Resistance by the Rich and Powerful?^↩