Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 6.14.
Operations room of Project Cybersyn. Source: Beer 1974a, 330,
fig. 12.1.
work had grown by devious routes out of his World War II work at the Servo-
mechanisms Laboratory at MIT and was just about to become famous, or no-
torious, with the publication of the Club of Rome's
Limits to Growth
report,
which, on the basis of DYNAMO simulations, predicted an imminent collapse
of the global economy and ecosystems.
30
Work in London and Chile under
Chilean direction had developed a tentative version of the Checo (for Chilean
economy) program by June 1972, and by September a better model was run-
ning. “I wanted to inject information
in real time
into the Checo program
via
Cyberstride. Thus any model of the economy, whether macro or micro, would
find its base, and make its basic predictions, in terms of aggregations of low-
level data—as has often been done. But Checo would be updated every day by
the output from Systems 1-2-3, and would promptly rerun a ten-year simula-
tion; and this has never been done. This was one of my fundamental solutions
to the creation of an effective Three-Four homeostat; it remains so, but it
remains a dream unfulfilled” (268). This continual updating was the way in
which Checo simulations were foreseen as evolving in time, responsively to
real-time input, thus exemplifying the performative epistemology of the VSM
discussed in general terms in the previous section.
The system 4 operations room loomed ever larger as potentially the visible
symbol, the icon, of Project Cybersyn (fig. 6.14). Detailed design was turned
over to Gui Bonsiepe in Chile, from which emerged a plan for an octagonal
room ten meters wide that would serve as an “information environment.” In-
formation on any aspect of the functioning of the economy at the desired
level of recursion would be displayed visually on panels on the walls, includ-
ing flashing warning signals that registered the algedonic “cries of pain” from
lower levels, mentioned above, and an animated Checo simulation of the
