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PLATFORM_FOR_CHANGE

                                                    February 6, 2018
                                                    March   22, 2018
Once upon a time, in a 1970s far away,
there was a hot shot in Operations
Research named Strafford Beer who had a
scheme to use networked computers to
coordinate the economic production of
Allende's Chile-- they got started on          If you do some web searches
trying out the idea, but this was cut          on CyberSyn you'll see some
short along with Allende.                      pictures of the snazzy control
                                               room they came up with.
                                               He was clearly a Star Trek fan.
I read one of Strafford Beer's books on 
this project, "A Platform for Change",  
and I found it notably light on any sort    
of specifics-- it didn't say a single           "Some people I've talked to,
word about "incentives".                        said it was like pulling
                                                teeth getting the factories
In some alternate universe where the Left       to send these statistics."
of the 70s was not so technophobic, you
can imagine Strafford Beer's ideas                 -- Attributed to Eden Miller,
becoming a blueprint for The Revolution.           https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2003/sep/08/sciencenews.chile

In our universe, he's a weird figure
that no one remembers, but we might           But then:
yet see a day when his ideas move
from crazy to respectable and perhaps         "David Bowie, Brian Eno and
even to conventional wisdom...                Tony Blair's new head of policy,
                                              Geoff Mulgan, have all
   Just to be clear, I have my                cited Beer as an influence."
   doubts this would be a *good*
   idea-- there's way too much                https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2003/sep/08/sciencenews.chile
   garbage being sold to people
   by sprinkling "technology"
   dust over it-- but I'm willing     The quote (above) that in 2003
   to be open-minded about it.        was attributed by the Guardian to
                                      an Eden Miller, "an American
   One of the virtures of             who is writing a PhD thesis
   market-based systems               partly about Cybersyn".
   is supposed to be a
   matter of rapid exchange                 https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2003/sep/08/sciencenews.chile
   of information about
   preferences.                       Note though, that there was an
   Hypothetically, some of            Eden Medina who published a book
   that could be automated,           named "Cybernetic Revolutionaries"
   and the result might not
   be completely evil.                      https://hqinfo.blogspot.com/2016/08/project-cybersyn-stafford-beer-in_31.html



       An old idea of mine (circa mid-90s)
       was to set-up a product search system
       that would take into account boycotts
       declared by agencies you respect,
       rather than just sort on price.






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