Capitalism and socialism took different paths for 50 years, but both led to the same destination: algorithmic coordination at global scale.....End your software chaos and try Odoo for free on me: http://www.odoo.com/artoftheproblem. Contact your lawmakers about AI extinction risk in 60s: http://www.controlai.com/art
This video traces how cybernetic thinking: the science of control and communication in complex systems—shaped both corporate hierarchies and socialist planning experiments. The Soviets tried centralized computer planning through Project OGAS. Chile's Salvador Allende tested real-time economic coordination through Cybersyn. America bet on market mechanisms and competition.
Today, all paths converge on AI algorithms making decisions for billions of people. your smartphone became the "dial in every home" that Stafford Beer envisioned for Chile in 1971, constantly feeding preferences into systems that decide what you see, buy, and think about.
The question isn't capitalism vs socialism anymore. It's about cybernetic coordination itself: who controls the objective function that guides these systems? Market signals emerging from millions of individual choices, or goals designed by small groups of humans? Both approaches now rely on the same underlying infrastructure of algorithmic decision-making.
Beer warned decades ago: "we may find that the computer has invented a strategy beyond our own ability to understand." Whether guided by profit or by planning, we've built coordination systems that increasingly coordinate us.
Support this program: https://www.patreon.com/c/artoftheproblem
key references:
Eden Medina - Cybernetic Revolutionaries (2011)
Stafford Beer - Brain of the Firm (1981)
Stafford Beer - Designing Freedom (1974)
Norbert Wiener - Cybernetics (1948)
W. Ross Ashby - Introduction to Cybernetics (1956)
The Battle of Chile - Patricio Guzmán (1979)
Salvador Allende documentary - Patricio Guzmán (2004)
U.S. Senate - Covert Action in Chile 1964-1973 (1975)
Peter Kornbluh - The Pinochet File (2003)
Ronald Coase - The Nature of the Firm (1937)
Santiago Boys Podcast
0:00 Introduction: The False Choice
2:00 Military Origins: How Both Sides Copied War Strategy
10:30 Cybernetics
12:10 Project Cybersyn
15:40 ARPANET
17:30 Birth of Amazon
22:35 Strange Convergence of Capitalism & Socialism