Vital Systems Security

Not really, but almost. The Times today has a truly amazing article about an attempt during the Allende administration to use computers to manage the Chilean economy. For those of us who have spent time thinking about OEP, it will all seem familiar, if strangely displaced. Seems that beginning in 1971 the government set out to use a network of telex machines and an IBM 360/50 to manage the Chilean economy. The telex machines were used to rapidly collect information about the “real” economy — daily output, energy use, and labor — in order to manage crises. The system was called Cybersyn.

(Image from the website of Eden Medina)

One success, the article claims, was management of a strike by truckers and retailers in 1972:

Cybersyn’s turning point came in October 1972, when a strike by truckers and retailers nearly paralyzed the economy. The interconnected telex machines, exchanging 2,000 messages a day, were a potent instrument, enabling the government to identify and organize alternative transportation resources that kept the economy moving.

The strike ended within a week. While it weakened Mr. Allende’s Popular Unity party, the government survived, and Cybersyn was praised for playing a major role. “From that point on the communications center became part of whatever was happening,” Mr. Espejo said.

On the one hand, this is a classic logistics problem of the type many economic planning organizations inherited from military planning: identify bottlenecks in a system of material production and flow, and find ways to overcome them. This was economic planning as in WWI, as in the Soviet 1920s, as in WWII, with different levels of technical formalization, of course, in each case. It also resonates with the kind of economic crisis management through an information system that was imagined by OEP in the wage-price freeze, which precisely relied on a dispersed network of data collection points to inform centralized decision-making.

One interesting contrast that might be worth thinking through more is the difference between managing “real” flows (physical output, labor, etc.) versus “nominal” flows — i.e. prices. OEP was actually trying to deal with inflation, of course, not production bottlenecks, and the object domain was prices (particularly of labor). In this sense, although the information network sounds very much like what OEP tried to produce, it was actually closer to Soviet planning in its substance. What the different experiences shared was the informatics system, and, no doubt, much of the underlying math. Onur can tell us more.

A couple more notes of interest. First, apparently the group of specialists operating the system did not have a specific political orientation. Despite the purportedly “leftist” orientation of the Allende government, this was a very technocratic operation. A good reminder that this kind of planning was not a political project of left or right per se:

Most of the Cybersyn team scrupulously avoided talking about politics, and some even had far-right-wing views, said Isaquino Benadof, who led the team of Chilean engineers designing the Cybersyn software.

Second, it is useful to bear in mind what happened after Allende. After the coup, Pinochet and the military leadership actually did not have very clear ideas about economic policy. But as we all know, a group of economists from the Catholic University, trained at and supported by the University of Chicago (and notoriously aided directly by Milton Friedman), soon gained the ear of the military government and sent Chile on the path of a very early experiment in “neoliberal” economics (for details a good book is Pinochet’s Economists by Juan Gabriel Valdez). This economics, of course, inherited from Hayek and others an emphasis on the price system in a market economy as a system for communicating the “subjective” preferences of economic agents. From this perspective, the kind of “substantive” planning being attempted under Allende was incoherent, both because the computational challenges were overwhelming, and, more importantly, because it inevitably rested on an incoherent theory of value.

Third, a key figure in this story is a guy named Stafford Beer, a British Cybernetician, the key figure in the field of management cybernetics. This would be a very interesting example of something that we have talked about a lot: namely, that techniques used for modeling and managing “the economy” are discredited in this function, but continue to become incredibly significant in other domains. Clearly the area of disaster modeling is one example of this, and more continue to emerge.

For more on this, someone named Eden Medina, who is an Assistant Professor of Informatics at Indiana University, has written on Cybersyn, including a recent article in the Journal of Latin American studies on the Cybersyn project, and an upcoming book on computing and government in Chile from the 1960s to the early 1970s. (Chris Kelty may be familiar with Medina, who has written on free software in Chile as well.)

DemfromCT — a blogger on DailyKos — has another interesting post on school closure and pandemic preparedness. It is about many things, among more information on exercises that show that in the US school closure may not be in time to help much, and an interesting comparison with a recent minor outbreak in Hong Kong, where, apparently, parents held students home from school in a “precautionary” fashion before a decision was taken to close schools. Also interesting is the mention of the role that blogs and the internet more generally would play in a pandemic.

I am teaching a class this semester called Governing International Emergency. A ton of interesting stuff is beginning to come out, as we move from theoretical work and work focused on the United States to international questions. I will try to blog on issues of particular interest for VSS questions as they emerge, and may be able at some point to post some web pages that are being produced in connection with four ongoing projects in the class on humanitarian response, natural disasters, climate change, and global pandemic preparedness. Here is a first installment.

This week we began to work through some materials on international humanitarian response, focusing on technical protocols and organizational issues in the field. The material was organized by two students, Jen Hill and Nat Katin-Borland, who are working intensively on these problems (and who may do fieldwork on related questions this summer). There are a range of interesting things emerging, including the consolidation of professional norms around early warning, preparedness, situational awareness, and response.

One particularly interesting document that we read was a World Food Program Agenda Item from 2005 updating that organization’s definition of “emergency,” originally laid out in1970. Check out the whole thing, which is short and very much worth the read. Two highlights.

First, the document emphasizes that what has changed is not so much the understanding of emergency as the set of tools that are used to anticipate and respond to emergencies:

“This paper concludes that the existing definition, with minor adjustments, remains largely valid. What has evolved substantially over the past decades is the set of tools used by WFP to identify vulnerable people and determine the most appropriate food-aid intervention. This improved knowledge, especially in the areas of early warning, disaster preparedness, vulnerability analysis, nutritional analysis and emergency needs assessment (ENA) methodology, serves as the basis on which WFP decides whether or not to respond to emergencies. The modifications to the existing definition incorporate more recent thinking on types of emergencies and their causes. The new definition maintains flexibility for the Executive Director to respond to urgent human food needs in diverse and unpredictable situations.”

Second, as with VSS more generally, there is a strong emphasis on an all-hazards approach, one that sees “famine” as the product of multiple different types of emergency that can be understood and managed in the same frame.

“The event or series of events may comprise one or a combination of the following:

a) sudden calamities such as earthquakes, floods, locust infestations and similar unforeseen disasters;

b) human-made emergencies resulting in an influx of refugees or the internal displacement of populations or in the suffering of otherwise affected populations;

c) food scarcity conditions owing to slow-onset events such as drought, crop failures, pests, and diseases that result in an erosion of communities and vulnerable populations’ capacity to meet their food needs;

d) severe food access or availability conditions resulting from sudden economic shocks, market failure, or economic collapse — and that result in an erosion of communities’ and vulnerable populations’ capacity to meet their food needs; and

e) a complex emergency for which the Government of the affected country or the
Secretary-General of the United Nations has requested the support of WFP.”

At one level, all this is obvious, common sense. But what we are clearly seeing in formation now is a common technical space of humanitarian action — anticipation, preparedness, and response — that is consolidating around increasingly stable knowledge forms and modes of authorized expertise.

One last thing that I have been sitting on for a while: The journal Biosecurity and Bioterrorism published in late 2007 an interesting exchange between Lynn Glotz, (her piece is called “Casting a Wider Net for Countermeasure R&D Funding Decisions“) and Gerald Epstein (his response: “Security is More than Public Health.”). Klotz is basically arguing, on c0st-benefit grounds, that the U.S. has been dramatically mis-allocating its counter-measure funding, placing too much focus on bioweapons agents like anthrax and smallpox, and too little focus on other infectious disease, like AIDS and flu. She backs this up by a cost-benefit analysis that looks at likely annual deaths from each, and, thus, the relative priority that should be assigned to each in funding decisions. It is a classic effort at “budgetary rationalization” of the type I analyze in “Enacting Catastrophe.”

Epstein responds, as might be surmised from his title, that “security” cannot be reduced to the number of deaths. A weapon like smallpox, he argues, poses a potentially “existential” threat in the sense that an attack may compromise the U.S. Government’s ability to continue operations in the face of mass panic and total uncertainty about further attacks.

So this debate is a very distilled example of something that lots of us have been working on for quite some time (I am thinking particularly of Lyle and Dale’s work, which Andy and I have been thinking about recently in writing the introduction to Biosecurity Interventions). On the one hand, you have a cost-benefit approach from public health; on the other hand, a national defense view of the world, which is used to thinking about — and acting on — uncertain but potentially catastrophic events. The experts do not agree. Worth a few minutes to read the articles over.