The Challenger Explosion

25 years ago today, I was in 6th grade (I think). Everyone was excited because the Space Shuttle Challenger was set to launch and teacher Christa McAuliffe was on board. This was a big deal. I loved space. Most kids did. Or at least, they thought the Space Shuttle was pretty awesome. We gathered in the library to watch it, or at least some of us did. I was there anyway and pretty close to the TV.

And then it blew up.

That really did change everything. The space program never recovered. Americans never cared much about space again. When the Columbia exploded upon reentry into the atmosphere in 2003, Americans were sad, but relatively indifferent. We had stopped looking to space as the final frontier. It made for good TV, but it didn't make very much sense for us to be there and besides, the Moon is nothing but a ball of rock. The Hubble telescope is pretty cool because it makes pretty pictures, but there's not too much emphasis on humans exploring the universe anymore.

It also changed our relationships with technology. The space program, along I think with the Manhattan Project and subsequent Cold War nuclear technologies, made us believe in the government as the generator of technology that would save freedom, expand America, and make us all rich. It protected us from the Soviets and could expand our empire into space. I'm hardly suggested a monocausal transition here, but along with the Cold War's decline, the Challenger explosion helped move our faith in technology from the government and big centralized technologies to personalized devices that could make our lives more fun. Computers, VCRs, video games--these all meant more to my generation of Americans than seeing if we could put a man on Mars.

This then affected our national relationship with the military, where so much earlier technology had originated. Certainly after 9/11 but even in the first Gulf War, Americans viewed war through their experience with video games rather than an all-encompassing threat to American freedom. We could go kill people without threat to our own lives, just like playing at home.

Perhaps I'm overstating this change.

But I can say something that almost no respectable American would have said in 1986--the entire space program is a gigantic waste of money predicated on a small group of scientists and engineers believing so strongly in their own work that they ignore safety precautions or even the obvious likelihood of frequent explosions when you hurl gigantic manned vehicles into space. NASA still receives ridiculous amounts of money when it's primary mission in the 21st century should be facilitating consumer technology, predicting weather, and, perhaps, spying on our enemies. In any case, none of this ever needs to be manned. There is nothing out there we can use. We are stuck on this planet and with the resources of this planet. And we've had to start dealing with this reality for the first time in American history.

Historical Image of the Day

A bicycle built for two, in front of the White House, 1886

Nuclear Energy

President Obama's recent announcement $8.3 billion in loan guarantees for building the nation's first nuclear power plants in over 30 years.

This has caused consternation among many environmentalists, who like many progressives are extremely disappointed in the president. Of course, Obama has been a proponent of nuclear energy for many years, so this isn't that surprising.

An anti-nuclear mantra has dominated environmentalism for a very long time. The 1970s and 1980s saw a mass movement develop against nuclear, culminating in the nearly simultaneous release of the film The China Syndrome and the Three Mile Island near-meltdown in 1979. Three Mile Island crippled the nuclear industry and the Chernobyl disaster drove the final nail in the coffin.

But some environmentalists have pushed for a renewal of nuclear energy for the last decade. Dave Johnson offers a measured approval of nuclear energy here. Because nuclear energy does not emit any climate changing carbon dioxide, we might consider it clean energy. If fighting climate change is our #1 priority, shouldn't we use all the tools we can?

I'm torn on this. There is no single fuel that will replace fossil fuels. We might need a package of wind, solar, hydrogen, biofuel, and nuclear. Taking one fuel away makes our necessary weaning from coal and petroleum all the more difficult. Nuclear doesn't lead to climate change and that's a good thing. If it's safe, it's really quite clean.

But to choose nuclear means a reliance on technology that I not comfortable with. To no small extent, choosing nuclear means you have to make 2 very large assumptions. First, that technology will solve our problems and second, that government oversight will ensure our safety. The second should be a no-brainer.  But the anti-government fantacism that has overwhelmed the U.S. in the last thirty years makes any assurances of proper regulation quite hard to believe. The Republicans will say support limited regulation and claim the free-market will solve the problem. Safety was a big problem in the 1970s and it would likely be an even bigger problem today. One mistake and you have Chernobyl. I believe in government's ability to manage the oversight, but only an activist and well-funded government can do it. Do we have that today? I don't think so.

Even more problematic is our blind faith in technology. Supporting nuclear means we see an unlimited future in technology. If power went down for a long period of time, the reactor core would melt down and you'd have a Chernobyl Plus event. Eventually, 10 years, 100 years, or 1000 years from now, the United States will be no more. Some disaster will strike, war and famine will occur, and social and political instability will undermine our infrastructure. When that happens, as someday it must, each and every nuclear power plant will release massive amounts of radiation into the atmosphere. This absolutely WILL happen someday.

The question is when. Supporting nuclear energy means that someday, maybe far, far down the road, we are condemning our descendants to radiation poisoning.

The way around this is to assume that we will create the technology to store spent nuclear fuel in a way that will protect our children from harm. Perhaps that capability exists. But technology has to combine with political will to ensure this happens. Where are spent fuel rods going to go? 2010 is the 65th  year of the nuclear age. And the United States still has no comprehensive solution to spent nuclear fuel. The Yucca Mountain site in Nevada was supposed to be a solution, but widespread opposition and a lack of government funding have doomed that site and I find it unlikely it will ever fully open. People have criticized its location for its proximity to Las Vegas and its unstable fault lines. That may be true, but where should the contaminated waste go? We have to choose to put it somewhere. To this point, NIMBYism has dominated all discussions of this problem.

In the end, it may be that we need nuclear power as part of our strategy to combat climate change. There are other issues, such as the limited supply of uranium in the world, but perhaps it must play a role. However, there are also enormous problems to overcome if we are really going to return to nuclear power. Right now, I'm not seeing serious discussion about these problems. And that's very worrisome.

Forgotten American Bastard Blogging: Thomas Midgley

Americans love technology. We follow technology's lead wherever it may take us. We don't care if it destroys all notions of privacy. We don't care that it pollutes the planet. We don't care that it is produced in the backyards of poor people. We don't care that we have to despoil developing world countries to make the stuff. None of this matters. When new technology comes knocking, we always answer the door. Of course, our national technological fetish has been pushed by industry and government as much as by consumer demand.

While much of this technology has made our lives better, some of it has had disastrous effects. A surprising amount of this technology was created by one man: Thomas Midgley. Born in 1889 in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, Midgley grew up in Columbus, Ohio and graduated from Cornell University in 1911 with a degree in mechanical engineering. In 1916, he began working at the Dayton Research Laboratories. A subsidiary of General Motors, Midgley was part of a team looking to improve the performance of automobiles.

In 1921, Midgley discovered that when you added lead to gasoline, it boosted engine performance and allowed manufactures to sell edgier and faster cars. People weren't really comfortable with leaded gasoline. We forget that early cars were not always precursors to the environmental nightmare of current automobiles. Many were electric. These electric cars were largely designed for women, who were not thought able to start an engine. Sadly, the industry  left these electric cars behind when engines became easier to start; in fact, today's technology barely surpasses that of the 1910s.

The problem Midgley was working on was something called "engine knock." Basically, electrical engines were causing the engine to rattle around at high (for the time) rate of speeds, potentially destroying it. Midgley discovered that if you add tetraethyl lead to gasoline, you eliminated the knock. The automobile, oil, and lead companies celebrated.

The thing is that there were other ways to get rid of engine knock. If you burned grain alcohol in an auto engine, you didn't get engine knock at all. But there was no money in grain alcohol. People could make their own fuel. That was not a good business model for GM, Standard Oil, and other interested parties.

But they faced opposition. In 1922, William Mansfield Clark from the U.S. Public Health Service publicly explained that tetraethyl lead was extremely poisonous and could endanger public health along highways and in cities. U.S. Surgeon General H.S. Cumming wrote a letter to Pierre du Point, chairman of the DELCO, the chemical company, about leaded gasoline's health hazards. Midgley was given the task of responding. He admitted that he had done no studies, but "the average street will probably be so free from lead that it will be impossible to detect it or its absorption." At the same time, Midgley himself was recovering from lead poisoning he received working on the project.

In 1923, GM agreed to allow the U.S. Bureau of Mines to do a study of leaded gasoline, but it forged agreement with the agency that the reserachers had to submit their report to GM first for comment. This ensured nothing damaging to the company would come out. A series of studies in the 1920s claimed lead gasoline caused no harm. Some scientists publicly attacked these biased studies, but GM had its way.

Meanwhile, beginning in 1923, DELCO was producing leaded gasoline. GM, Du Pont, and Standard Oil came together in 1924 to form a company to sell ethyl gasoline and America's leaded gasoline craze began in earnest. Unfortunately, people working on the project began dropping dead. 2 died of lead poisoning in 1923. They built a new plant in New Jersey, but 8 more workers died in the next year. In response to a public health outcry and in order to prove that leaded gasoline didn't cause sickness, Midgley called a press conference where he breathed in a bottle of tetraethyl gasoline for 60 seconds. However, he kept from the media that the case of lead poisoning he suffered was so severe that it took him nearly a year to recover.

Midgley also invented Freon, the world's first chlorofluorocarbon, in 1930.While the discovery of CFC's helped make Midgley a rich man and gave Americans air conditioning and hairspray cans, CFC's also put a huge hole in the ozone layer. After over fifty years of unregulated CFC use, a giant hole in the ozone layer developed over Antarctica that was definitively linked to CFC usage. Luckily, we have found this one environmental problem relatively fixable, as the hole has generally not grown in the last 20 years as most of the world has cut back on its CFC usage. Nevertheless, Midgely's invention proved spectacularly ruinous to the environment for most of the 20th century.

With his developed of both lead gasoline and CFC's one environmental historian noted that Midgley "had more impact on the atmosphere than any other single organism in earth history."

Somewhat ironically, Midgley died from one of his own inventions, though not the ones that would kill so many others. In 1940, he contracted polio. He fought that terrible illness, designing a series of pulleys that would drag him from his bed. However, in 1944, he got caught up in the ropes and they strangled him.

Say Hello To Your "Eco-Friendly" Technology

What everyone needs to know about supposed eco-friendly technology, much of which is horribly damaging to the environment.

In Washington, Congress is fretting about the United States military’s dependence on Chinese rare earths, and has just ordered a study of potential alternatives.

Here in Guyun Village, a small community in southeastern China fringed by lush bamboo groves and banana trees, the environmental damage can be seen in the red-brown scars of barren clay that run down narrow valleys and the dead lands below, where emerald rice fields once grew.

Miners scrape off the topsoil and shovel golden-flecked clay into dirt pits, using acids to extract the rare earths. The acids ultimately wash into streams and rivers, destroying rice paddies and fish farms and tainting water supplies.

There are 17 rare-earth elements — some of which, despite the name, are not particularly rare — but two heavy rare earths, dysprosium and terbium, are in especially short supply, mainly because they have emerged as the miracle ingredients of green energy products. Tiny quantities of dysprosium can make magnets in electric motors lighter by 90 percent, while terbium can help cut the electricity usage of lights by 80 percent. Dysprosium prices have climbed nearly sevenfold since 2003, to $53 a pound. Terbium prices quadrupled from 2003 to 2008, peaking at $407 a pound, before slumping in the global economic crisis to $205 a pound.

The biggest user of heavy rare earths in the years ahead could be large wind turbines, which need much lighter magnets for the five-ton generators at the top of ever-taller towers. Vestas, a Danish company that has become the world’s biggest wind turbine manufacturer, said that prototypes for its next generation used dysprosium, and that the company was studying the sustainability of the supply. Goldwind, the biggest Chinese turbine maker, has switched from conventional magnets to rare-earth magnets.

Executives in the $1.3 billion rare-earths mining industry say that less environmentally damaging mining is needed, given the importance of their product for green energy technologies. Developers hope to open mines in Canada, South Africa and Australia, but all are years from large-scale production and will produce sizable quantities of light rare earths. Their output of heavy rare earths will most likely be snapped up to meet rising demand from the wind turbine industry.

RIP: CDs, 09/09/09?

The Beatles are re-releasing all of their albums on CDs this September 9th. That in and of itself is not terribly interesting or newsbreaking. However, I've seen several sites suggesting that that release date effectively marks the end of the CD. Quoth Pitchfork:

This is the final word on these [Radiohead] records, if for no other reason that the Beatles' September 9 remaster campaign is, arguably, the end of the CD era. That all of those discs are coming out at the same time, rather than being slowly and ceremoniously rolled out as they were 20-odd years ago, is a tacit acknowledgment by the music industry that they best sell non-vinyl physical products now, immediately, before the prospect of doing so is gone. With that in mind, I find it wise that many bands are wisely re-organizing their pasts, or having it done for them by their label. So long as it's done like this, I'm happy to re-purchase the stuff.

I previously had thought the impending death of the CD to be greatly overstated. I suspected it may eventually happen in practical terms, but such claims have been made since I was in undergrad and Napster was launched. I never sensed an immediacy that marked the "inevitable" decline of buying music in concrete, material form. However, even if it doesn't end up being a dead letter as of 09/10/09 (which I suspect won't happen - nobody's going to say, "OK, that's a wrap for the CD!"), when phrased in the terms above, and given the constant new innovations in digital music and DIY in a digital age, for the first time, I'm actually wondering if something I love (music not just as an aural experience, but as something tangible in my hands, too) really is about to effectively fade away. There has been a sudden burst of "collector's edition" albums that I found puzzling (why now? why so suddenly? why all at once?), and it's completely undeniable that digital music is taking over.

So I ask our dear readers - do you think the death of the CD really this imminent now? And if so, what suggestions could you make to us...er....those dinosaurs who have mild contempt for technology and love our albums as physical objects? What kind of environmental impact are we looking at if the landfills start filling up somewhat with what I imagine are pretty non-biodegradable plastic products like CDs? What other issues will the supposed "death of CDs" raise? Comments are welcome and encouraged....

Twitter, WAM, and covering the story

So I wrote about my WAM experience over at Bust, but the thing that I've really been thinking about since the weekend was the Twitter coverage.

Not everyone has the finances or the ability to go to conferences, but the Web allows for the experience to be shared more widely. In addition to video coverage that will apparently be available on the web soon, the running Twitter stream managed to pull people who could not attend the event into the conversation.

The conversation started with a basic hashtag: #wam09. Conference attendees tagged their Twitter updates with #wam09 and a Twitter search for the hashtag allowed attendees and anyone else to see all public updates with the hashtag. As soon as I started tweeting with the hashtag, I got new Twitter followers.

From there, though, the conversation multiplied. At the first panel I attended, on Gender Non-Conformity and the Media, Jack from Feministe wrote a panel-specific hashtag on the board: #wam09gnc. We used that tag for our tweets from this panel, and I had the main search page, which automatically updates, open while I was listening and tweeting comments from the panel I was in.

This might sound like it requires an intense attention span, but I'm used to running three programs at once on a normal day.

On top of that, other WAMmers would retweet comments from others at other panels, spreading the discussion out further.

I met people through Twitter during panels, reading their Twitter feeds and then stopping to introduce myself at the end of the panel, and added new people to follow while picking up new followers and joining discussions on varying topics. In the final panel I attended, Women and the Economic Crisis: Getting Beyond the Corporate Media Narrative, (#wam09ec) we seemed to have perfected the process, googling and instantly tweeting links to organizations, books, and other sites referenced during the discussion in real time.

Twitter is ideally suited to events like WAM, where a large number of people are covering a specific event with several different parts happening simultaneously. Information was spread through Twitter--one attendee was stranded and needed donations, and the request for cash spread quickly across the Net, getting her home. Livetweeting one single event--like the presidential press conference or the debates--is fun, but often many people comment on the same things. The inauguration tweets were more useful because directions, warnings, and other information could be exchanged in real time.

But for an event like WAM--or many other conferences--this technology is perfectly suited. I'm sort of thinking on screen here, but I wonder what other events/issues could be covered this way?

Legitimate Technological Concerns

I think Josh Marshall is right on about some of the problems with embracing new media technologies. In particular, he expresses his concerns about electronic books:

The common book requires a threshold level of eyesight and literacy in the given language. Given those two abilities in the owner, once a book comes off the publisher's press, it takes on a life of its own. And as long as it's kept on a shelf, relatively free of moisture and out of reach of small children, even a cheap pulp book can easily last a hundred years. Quality bound books, meanwhile, can last many centuries. Today, though, I can't easily access even papers I wrote in college, which is a touch less than twenty years ago, because they're on floppy disks that few computers can any longer read and written on programs (remember Word Perfect?) accessible only through imperfect conversion utilities. If big swathes of book publishing go the electronic route, how many 'books' will have only a short window of existence before they get marooned in derelict and outmoded technology? Tomorrow's equivalent of Betamax, 8 Track and and now videotapes. Physical books, for all their other shortcomings, can still be read today and tomorrow regardless of technology progress or, as the case may be, regress.

I really agree with this. Now, I'm far from the most technologically adept person writing at this site, and I'll be curious for Sarah and Karthika's opinions on this. But the lack of a universal technology and that new incarnations of particularly technologies have made older versions not only outdated but unusable worries me greatly. I'll be sticking to my real books, tree killing or not, pretty much forever. Maybe that makes me old and out of touch. But I know that I can go back in 30 years and read the same books I have now. I like that guarantee.

These fresh, new bloggers are really green!

I’ve been in India this past week, and contrary to what most Indians do here, I’ve surrounded myself with intense green foliage and very little technology, but today I decided to combine the two - or rather a Japanese scientist decided to combine the two, and I decided to write about it.

What would a plant blog about if it could?

"Today was a sunny day and I was able to sunbathe a lot... I had quite a bit of fun today," chimed one member of the plant kingdom from a café near Tokyo.

The plant's leaves, which respond to light and human touch, are attached to a sensor that measures bio-electric signals. These are then translated into blog posts using a computer algorithm. The plant entertains visitors to the café by talking about its health and mood on any given day. This is part of an effort from scientists at Keio University, who are studying communication with plants.

The site is somewhat lost in translation, what with its sole member being a plant talking in Japanese and all, but you could check it out yourself.

Since everything’s supposedly going green these days, why leave out the blogosphere?

Going back to Natural Intelligence for a change

Ever typed a phrase into the Google search box only to scroll down to the 15th page of the one million hits returned to find what you were looking for? If you haven’t been living under a rock these past few years you probably have.

While it is relieving for us egotistical human beings to find that Google might not be infallible after all, there’s even better news to be had. The antidote to Google’s lack of discretion is not a computer, but rather the good old, archaic human mind.

Even in this seemingly post-natural world, a search tab cannot quite rival the precision of a human brain in its ability to discern information. Which is exactly why the increasingly popular search engine, ‘Ask ChaCha’, is manned by real people. Under the guise of the now familiar search box, thousands of human beings offer answers to questions, typing away at their computers.

Some binary code has to be transmitted somewhere in the universe before you can find out how many majors Tiger Woods has won, only you no longer have to battle with a confounded computer program to do so. The search engine also allows the option of different media forms. For those of us not yet savvy enough to own a BlackBerry, there is a number to call or text for that pressing 64 thousand dollar question that pops up on the subway ride home. ChaCha comes back with the reply in seconds. Think the phone-a-friend lifeline on ‘Who wants to be a Millionaire.’ This is like having a thousand smart friends, all at once.

Chacha however, as NPR’s Mark Phillips learned, is not quite as objective as a search engine might be. Anything that involves a human being couldn’t possibly come devoid of feelings and emotion and judgment. So while it can give you the name of the restaurant that serves the best thin-crust pizza in your town, and decide who will win the Superbowl this season, it also has the audacity to proclaim that homosexuality is wrong!

But even the seemingly innocuous Google search box is subjective in its own way – it picks out answers biased by statistics, location, and search history. Now, what's wrong with adding a little human subjectivity to that mix?

“Artificial artificial intelligence” for tasks that the human mind can perform better than a computer was first launched by Amazon in 2005; cleverly named Mechanical Turk for the 18th century human chess-maestro, who masqueraded as a machine, the site recruits people to perform ‘human intelligence tasks’ for small sums of money. Companies employ Turk for wide-ranging jobs, such as comparing two similar products or picking up visual cues from a video.

Prioritization, judgment and reasoning after all are the hallmarks of the human mind. It is no surprise then, that scientific research, which is increasingly being performed by computers, could never match the theoretical prowess of that nerdy scientist who sits at his bench for hours putting together an experiment. As Chris Anderson writes in Wired, while a computer saves a human brain the task of theoretizing, it does so by sidestepping the processes of analysis and causation. It churns up spools of data, and merely uses patterns and statistics to correlate. This task, while cumbersome, is still far easier than innovating scientific experiments to answer basic questions – something the brain has done for decades.

But it is the same haphazard human mind that dreams up a foolproof experiment that also believes in ghosts and goblins and aliens. So, ChaCha might occasionally tell you that being gay is a sin or give you the wrong schedule for a sports team, and sometimes, as Jason Pontin found, even simply throw up its hands in despair.

But that’s why we love it. It’s fallible, and it knows it. On a good day, it learns from its mistakes. On a bad day it screams in frustration.

My computer on the other hand, no matter how hard I hit it, just sits there gleaming.

Digitizing the last chapter in the analog world

Seems like just a few years ago paper was considered the lesser of the two evils at your local grocery store. From paper or plastic, the battle’s now down to paper or celluloid. Paper is fast becoming the culprit, as its electronic version begins to replace it: from e-mails to e-bills to now the e-book. Yesterday McGraw Hill launched its free e-book, becoming the first major publisher to offer a book entirely electronically and entirely free. Fittingly the book is about the future of free digital distribution.

While I certainly appreciate not having the clutter of paper statements staring ominously from my coffee table, the thought of loading up my favorite book on a little electronic tablet and getting on a plane gives me shivers. And I am no traditionalist. I often pass up the paper version of an article to use the “find>edit” option on the computer screen, and prefer my desktop calendar to post-its. My Webster’s New World College Dictionary is gathering dust on my book shelf because dictionary.com is not only physically closer to the document I’m typing, but also lets me move horizontally from one word list to another allowing a limitless array of words at my disposal.

In fact all this had left me pondering the limits of my digitized brain until I realized I could not read Dan Gillmor’s 200-page We The Media on google books. Believe me, I was almost relieved to find there was a limit to my digital consumption.

It’s hard to imagine that any avid book reader could ever give up the book. A book is not merely about the content; it comes with the feel, touch and smell of paper, the ability to highlight key passages or doodle on the side, the option of folding up a corner to indicate progress and of occasionally staining it with much-needed caffeine.

But the technology is catching on; the guys over at Techcrunch have estimated that 240,000 units of the Amazon Kindle have been sold since its launch in the fall of last year, and the numbers are only expected to grow. Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon says that technology is bound to overtake all forms of media. If the recent history of newspapers, magazines, radio and television are anything to go by, he’s probably right.

The one argument all us traditionalists have against the e-book is that no form of electronic device can master long-term reading. But that’s where E Ink technology comes in, which makes your electronic paper feel like real paper. The interface almost matches paper, allowing extended periods of reading. It uses the same coloring agents as normal ink, and the display is crisper than an LCD screen and about as bright as paper. In addition the electronic highlighter can mark your favorite passages and the attached keyboard lets you make notes on the side.

And it does things the traditional book can’t do, which paper-lovers will have to make their peace with; the e-book can hold about 200 books, and several hundred more on a memory card, font sizes change to suit your preference, search options allow you to look for words and phrases. It takes one-touch, and less than a minute to have a book load on the Kindle from Amazon’s vast collection. Add wireless connectivity to that mix, which allows you to access the Web and you have a virtual library in a 10-ounce device that you simply have to embrace.

In an age of distributed everything, such democratization of literature just makes sense. Anyone can become a published author because distribution of an e-book online is virtually free of cost, excepting access to the Internet. The lower overhead would of course result in cheaper prices. This combined with the ease of Internet marketing would mean greater sales and hence higher royalty fees for authors. However, much like anything else that uses the Internet, e-books have the illusion of being more democratic than they are: obviously authors with access to prominent media establishments will be able to promote their books more easily than the average joe, so will marquee writers.

The BBC warns that the technology will be limited by the availability of books in digital versions, and also the incompatibility of formats and software used in different models. So it is probably going to be a while before it gains the same prominence as say, an iPod.

Phew! A few more years then to dogear my paperback, while I get ready for something that doesn’t bend as easily. After all, it took me a couple years to outgrow the pen and paper and begin typing on Microsoft Word. Chances are, I’ll eventually come around to the book’s electronic cousin.

When Science Fiction Met Socialism

The Times has a bizarre article up today about the Cybersyn project Salvador Allende used during his presidency (1970-1973). Apparently, Cybersyn was a computer in which data was fed in and analyzed in order to try to manage the economy without relying on the Soviet model of planned economy. While successful in confusing the dictatorship of Pinochet that overthrew Allende and giving a generation of computer-geeks who wanted to use their knowledge for socialism a chance, I'm not quite clear from the article what the successes of Cybersyn were beyond that. It is an interesting idea, and may have had some influence on future computer-like ideas, but it doesn't seem to have done much for Allende. The article does mention that

Cybersyn gained stature within the Allende government for helping to outmaneuver striking workers in October 1972. That helped planners realize — as the pioneers of the modern-day Internet did — that the communications network was more important than computing power, which Chile did not have much of, anyway.

I'm not really sure what the success is here, though. I don't know which "striking workers" they are talking about (there were a number of strikes from leftist laborers who thought Allende was not proceeding down the "socialist path" fast enough, and entered strikes to try to egg him on), but I have my doubts that the computer really had that major a role in "outmaneuvering striking workers" (and indeed, I'm not even fully convinced that the government "outmaneuvered" the workers, though again, given how vague "striking workers" is, I have no way of really knowing the details here). And without any further specifics, I'm not quite sure how the planners realized "that the communications network was more important than computing power," nor how such a realization led to change in the lives of anybody but a few computer technicians who went into exile.

Still, I think the article is worth a read, if for no other reason that it shines light on one of the unknown, bizarre-yet-now-mundane aspects of the types of tools governments will try to use to better the lives of their citizens and make governing easier.

Historical Image of the Day

Image of steamboat on Mississippi River, early 1800s

Historical Image of the Day

Cyrus McCormick's Reaper