The Santiago Boys is a tremendous effort to show how things would have developed. It is a what of history – but anchored in deep inequalities and offering a real existing alternative when second order cybernetics seemed to offer a genuine collectivized way ahead. This was a politicized and centralized effort of really dealing with technology and development against tremendous odds.
This is the clarion call – or wakeup out of the current noise, torpor and hype surrounding the AI. There is a backlog on computing, cybernetics, organisational theory, theory of development, political economy, Alphabet agencies (NSA, FBI, CIA etc) during the Cold War, now that we start talking about the Cold War 2.0. It is a big zoom in – expect lots of details, interviews and a non-linear, jumpy and uneven technological, sociological and political history. Chile is important, it is doubly important because it was at the forefront of the CIA-directed coup and Allende realized that. After Pinochet took over – it became an unlikely laboratory of the neoliberal world we currently live in. The Santiago Boys completly changes the optic +it foregrounds the Red Engineers – those that where responsable with anticipating the future using scoți methods. This is a breath of air – considering how much od the discourse gives too much space to the Chicago Boys, the neoliberal followup.
The world of Big Tech, of deregulation, corporate rule and unfettered trust in the markets to solve things out is still with us, but it is not exclusive, it didn’t follow automatically. Basically artificial intelligence developing in another way did not get a chance, did not grow in the interestnof fhe people because a central intelligence agency decided otherwise.
-Based on two years of intensive research (more than 200 interviews + archival work). -Reinterprets the legacy of Salvador Allende in light of today’s debates about Big Tech. -Recovers the forgotten story of Latin America’s struggle against ITT, the tech giant of the day. -Traces how Allende’s enemies used “Dark Tech” – the tools of surveillance, propaganda, and control – to overthrow his government. -Argues that the focus on neoliberal economists around Pinochet – the Chicago Boys – is misplaced. Instead, it foregrounds the Santiago Boys, the socialist engineers around Allende. -Explores the uncanny similarity between the set-up of Allende’s Project Cybersyn, a pioneering effort to use telexes and computers to manage the national economy, and Pinochet-era Operation Condor, which used similar set-up to hunt down leftist dissidents. -Offers a new perspective on what exactly happened on the day of the coup of September 11, 1973, and the role that “Dark Tech” played in it. -Explores the complicity of American and British actors in the coup and subsequent legitimation of Pinochet’s regime. -Uncovers some unexpected influences behind the broader political project of The Santiago Boys, from dependency theory to the Bauhaus-inspired theories of design. -Uses the story of Project Cybersyn to explore the broader themes of technocracy and class; the ambiguities of democratizing technology and expertise; and the invisible impact of Cold War on today’s digital landscape.
Synopsis This is a nine-part exploration of the unlikely effort of Salvador Allende’s youthful technocrats and engineers (the Santiago Boys) to build their own socialist Internet. They do so by recruiting a prominent British tech guru, Stafford Beer, to help them. (all taken from the media brief)
I do not have much to add to what Zimbabwean writer, filmmaker, and leftwing cultural critic Charles Mudede noted in his The Stranger column (this is how I basically found out about it) titled “What Is More Surreal, Boots Riley’s I’m a Virgo or Capitalism?”. Read it!
Boots Riley is another one of those directors that straddles the divide btw musical video and cinema, smuggling technologies from one media into the other with various visual styles, animation and practical effects. A the same time I wonder if it actually manages to play with instances of what Steven Shaviro has calledpost-cinematic affect a while ago. In short:
Post-Cinematic Affect is about what it feels like to live in the affluent West in the early 21st century. Specifically, it explores the structure of feeling that is emerging today in tandem with new digital technologies, together with economic globalization and the financialization of more and more human activities.
Post-Cinematic Affect, 2010
DIVIDE AND REBRAND
What can we add after more than 10 years? And why bother in 2023 with the “affluent West” that doesn’t give a hoot about the vast majority living on the planet (especially read Dean Baker’s recent sanguine article “The Chinese Need to Stay Poor because the United States Has Done So Much to Destroy the Planet“? Why make MARXsplaing a superpower in a world where knowledge about exploitation and anti-unionization by the Big Tech is not novelty nor is it chains: it is all widely available. I enjoyed this series like I never enjoyed any other lately, but I am also puzzled by how little it expresses of the wider concerns of a world in which we today. Is it just me or is Oakland, and California in particular – left as the only microcosm of everything everywhere? This is why I need to look what is missing or what does not fit into this patchwork.
Today it is easy to think the Euroatlantic as one single bloc (precisely because of Sweden and Finland joining NATO) but lines of demarcation are becoming clearer and clearer. The funny shitty thing is that Romania (together with Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia) joined this military alliance in 2004. This was the reinvention of this military alliance – having the former East join not just EU but a Cold War relict. The East was happy and willing. Nowadys this “security measure” does not fare well at the moment. We know that the US is awash in guns and that violence and the militarization of the police. After 9/11 War Come Home is here to stay. But now Ukraine and the whole region is bound to become a sort of Texas awash in cluster bombs, mines and weaponry. In a sense NATO was in need of a facelift, either expansion or going to the history’s “dustbin of history”. My point is that what is happening with NATO nowadays is also happening with the Big Tech nowadays. They are in bad need of a rebrading to prove their worth to their shareholders.
MUSKISM AND TOY FOUNDERS
We live in a world of founders. They dominate our mediaspace, our news, even the most extra-terrestrial spaces. They are the biggest polluters on the planet, wrecker of civilizations, SF fans and longtermism sponsors. What to make of the recent baptizing of Google into Alphabet, and Facebook into Meta or Twitter into X. Are they tired or bored with themselves?
On a larger scale, there is talk about trade wars, about decoupling and moving SC manufacturing back from ASia and dressing up evrything as “de-risking”. In the liberalized, privatized and fragmented East, in the meantime, the questioning of so-called Western values did not come out of nowhere. The East has been leading the far right and Euroskepticism wave, adopting anti-immigration policies, anti-abortion ethno-politics with Poland and Hungary being the closests examples and this should also be seen as part of the economic globalization and financialization of the planet. This brings the East closer to the US, but not primarily because of NATO integration or via military bases & black sites, but by joining the right wing culture wars from across the Altantic and their anti-woke measures.
Clearly the East is not sticking to the rules, or to the role it has been dealt by recent history. Instead of being this pacified, at the Portal of Balkans, the Milk and Honey (in a Karl May turn-of-speech) region where freedom and pacifism follows automatically from free markets, it is now producing havoc on the world markets and famine in Africa. it is bombarding its own people. It is split in a hundred nationalisms. It still does not want to get compared with the Near East, with the Syrian War or the Lybian post-Ghadafi warlordism, altough Eastern Europe (specifically Eastern Ukraine) makes everything look like a unsuccessful series of Orange Revolutions.
What is hard to accept is that the East stopped being the orphan street child glue sniffer or the problem-child of Transition years – and now appears in the Western media as either the bombarded, abused, victimized of war-crimes or the criminal hoodlum. Is the East affluent? Not really but it is a place where the ner-equivalent of the Big Tech founder is the oligarch (or the seller of SHIT in Triangle of Saddness movie), that most despicable of the plutocrats, basically the nouveau riche to the West’s old money. Yes, the CEO figure founder is also one of the most memorable villains in recent history, and he a Bezos and Musk turned vigilante, or Batman being the good capitalist. But in the end all of them are Mattel CEOs – toy figure, precious collectibles that is actually completely absurdly concentrating immense wealth and power.
BLACKOUTS IN THE WEST AND EAST
When I’m a Virgo speaks to Eastern Europes it speaks in fast foods. It is not the place of where the poor eat shitty unhealthy food, but places of luxury. After 1989 the MacDonalds and Burger Kings where received like Kings and ambassadors in the East, people of the rising middle classes enjoyed having a burger there. It was American Living – the highest standard of living in the world no?
Meanwhile the wheels have turned and the fragmented East pays back the US, inspiring the anti-woke US conservatives and crack-up capitalists. Boots Riley cannot address these things, yet we can ask why they ring closer to home? In the 1980s, basically my teenie years, in Socialist Romania, severe austerity measures where imposed in order to pay out the external debt incurred by the state in the 1970s. Blackouts where part of this and using candles or not having heating became normalized. There is a grim kind of blackout solidarity, of course not addressed by the series, but a very familiar to me and others.
After the 1989 revolutions, blackouts continued, and they even affected entire hoods at the time. They where also part and parcel of a decaying public infrastructure that could not keep up with the demand. What was evident to me at that time was that the new malls and their parking lots had electricity during the blackouts. The Blackout did not have to do with an energy crisis, with green transition or rising prices but had to do with development in some part and unequal and simultaneous underdevelopment in many others. The distribution of the blackout followed a strange map drawn by the market economy and the way infrastructures responded to various stresses.
Like Cootie, in Eastern Europe we have been fed on US goods since early childhood and have been using all sorts of clothes, mostly recycled from the West (Germany, US, Italy etc.) in my case. Nothing fits, and nothing seemed to fit for a long time. Everything had to be adopted, changes. Everything had to be refitted and customized, and the effect is often hilarious or embarassing. People where drawing their own versions of superheroes in the early 1990s (like a comics from the mountain city of Brashow with Bravman as a local hero). T-shirt with band names such as AC/DC got drawn by hand and worn because everyone secretly wanted to be part of the sports or music culture of the US. This ended up with various mismeasures, and while this whole series is about black bodies and the systemic racism of today, it is also about the feeling like a contemporary Alice in a US Capitalalaand.
After 1989, in the East (and not he East Coast) but in Eastern Europe, everything was made to feel Pantagruelic and not only in the sense of Bakthin. We started riding huge SUV, Jeeps and HUMMER cars. Cars that where bigger than our badly maintained streets. Bigger than the available parking lots, and mostly pushing a lifestyle dependent on a fossil economy that prioritised car culture over public transport, highways over biking or pedestrian walking. I also remember basketball truly arriving at our shool and breakbeat. It also arrived with the “popular kid” pressure – being popular started being important in the early 1990s and the most popular kids in the class where vying for Chicago Bulls vs LA Lakers (they also had the T-shirts). Everything started being upside down, oversized or undersized. You went to Pizza Hut to celebrate with mom and dad. Houses started being built up for luxury real estate reasons not for housing purposes. It got important to have luxurious facades, luxury elevators in run-down communist bloc trying to attract the “proper” clientelle. This brings me back to entire buildings go up and down while the CEO does not move an inch. The CEO figure in the East is actually someone who is allied with the American-Romanian University.
That being said, in order to make sense of the world we live in, maybe there is less and less sense in taking refuge from in Marvel superhero blockbuster (where you might end up being the villain), but find some sort of communal hysteria living beside and with the wacky, the mindfucked and the mad surreal absurdist wokers of Sorry To Bother You (2018) that manage to make a parody of a parody. All certitudes are left behind in this unhinged and normal abnormal world of bullshit jobs and false consciousness we live in. Including the sense and the remaingin fact that Amazon Prime has made I’m A Virgo another toy in its toy collection, an inhabitant of Amazon (sub)Prime-land that togheting with Netflix, Apple+ Disney+ making it more difficult for all of us to inhabit the world.
spacetime coordinates: In 2026, a wormhole portal, the Ark, to an ancient city on Mars is discovered deep below the Nevada desert. 2046, the 85 personnelat the Union Aerospace Corporation (UAC) research facility & archaeological dig at “Olduvai” on Marsare attacked by an unknown assailant.
spacetime coordinates: Arctic Void (2022) was shot by 16 people in 16 days entirely on location at Pyramiden / Пирами́да, an abandoned Sovietcoal mining settlement (closed in 1998) on the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, and Longyearbyen.
The plot of the film follows college professor Ira Kane (Duchovny) and geologist Harry Block (Jones), who investigate a large meteor crash in Arizona. They discover that the meteor harbours extra-terrestrial lifeforms, which are evolving very quickly into large, diverse and outlandish creatures. (wiki)
TimeSpace Warps 