Before the internet existed, a British cybernetician and a socialist president tried to wire an entire national economy into a single hexagonal control room full of Star Trek swivel chairs. Data flowed in nightly from factories across a 3,000-mile country over a network of second-hand telex machines — and then, one morning in September, tanks rolled up to the palace and it was all gone.
Chile, 1971–73: a distributed system to steer a nationalized economy, built from an economic simulator, custom software, a national telex net, and one legendary operations room. Start here.
The whole arc in one film — the utopian ambition, how it actually worked, and how it collided with the 1973 coup that ended Allende's government. The best single deep-dive.
The startling detail almost nobody expects: the screens weren't hooked to computers at all. Chile's best graphic designers hand-drew every chart the futuristic control room displayed.
Inside the room itself — swivel chairs with armrest buttons, an ashtray and a place for your whiskey, walls of screens, and red lights that would flash when the economy hit a crisis.
How 500 telex machines — found abandoned in a warehouse — became a national nervous system feeding near-real-time factory data to a single mainframe in Santiago.
The wildest part of the plan: 'Project Cyberfolk,' a scheme to give every citizen a dial to broadcast their happiness to the government in real time — direct democracy as a feedback loop.
Meet the cigar-smoking, yoga-practicing British 'father of management cybernetics' who believed a factory, a body, and a nation could all be steered by the same mathematical laws.