Imagine the democratically elected socialist president of a Latin
American country who really wanted to impose socialism. Imagine a stateagency of an imperialist country which does everything possible to make
this project fail: manipulation, disinformation, vote buying, espionage,
plots... ---- Imagine young engineers having taken part in revolts
students from the end of the 1960s and who dream of putting technology
at the service of democracy and common well-being and not the market.
Imagine a country of less than 10 million inhabitants which is embarking
on a nationalization project in the face of large capitalist groups.
Finally, imagine that this same country seeks to build its own socialist
Internet. This pitch for a novel of political history during the Cold
War is, however, a true story!
It is not a fiction that Evgeny Morozov, a researcher specializing in
the political and social implications of technical and digital progress,
offers us, but rather an investigation carried out at the pace of a
science fiction novel. All the actors of the Cold War are present here:
the CIA, Cuba, the USSR, F. Castro, R. Nixon, G. H. W. Bush, H.
Kissinger... and especially Salvador Allende. This story is what the
author calls Allende's "Santiago Boys" (in reference to Pinochet's
"Chicago Boys", these ultraliberal Chilean economists trained in
Chicago). Utopian engineers who wanted to put technology at the service
of a democratic socialist project by emancipating themselves from the
technologies of the United States and a completely crazy project:
Project Cybersyn. Putting cybernetic thinking at the service of a
socialist economy, nothing less.
The work, peppered with numerous extracts from interviews, would already
be interesting if it remained to retrace the history of these Santiago
Boys but the author takes us further and, over the pages, it is to a
real reflection on our social uses of the new technologies that we are
confronted with.
David (UCL Savoies)
Evgeny Morozov, The Santiago Boys: a technological utopia, Divergences,
April 2024, 250 pages, 17 euros
https://www.unioncommunistelibertaire.org/?Lire-Evgeny-Morozov-Les-Santiago-Boys-une-utopie-technologique
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