Who Controls Tech? Project Cybersyn & The Politics of Infrastructure
"Imagine if tech was socialist? Imagine what the world might have been if the CIA hadn't ruined every attempt to make it better? Up the Cowfolk for bringing us another slice of radical present-baiting world history; this doc on 70s Chilean tech exploration (and the panel discussion that follows) will open your mind to a better future."
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An event on Monday 9th November. The event starts at 18:30.
Easton Cowfolk Radical Film Club present: Project Cybersyn & The Politics of Infrastructure
Modern tech like Amazon uses cybernetic networks to maximize speed, monitor workers, and drive private profit. Project Cybersyn was the exact opposite: an attempt to design technology around human needs. Allende’s government linked factories directly to a central operations room to catch supply bottlenecks in real time, replacing slow state bureaucracy with direct, automated feedback. The experiment was destroyed in 1973 not because the system failed, but because a US-backed coup forcefully returned Chile’s resources to private capital.
Join the Easton Cowfolk Radical Film Club for a screening of Plastic Pills’ doc (Project Cybersyn & The CIA Coup in Chile), followed by a panel-led discussion on technological sovereignty, state planning, and how the left can reclaim technology from neoliberalism's systems of violence.
The feature film will be introduced by Santiago Alvarez' obituary to Victor Jara, The Tiger Leaps and Kills, But It Will Die... It Will Die... (Cuba, 1973).
This event will be the first in a series of screenings that aims to draw out the processes of domination, exploitation, and oppression that maintain the neoliberal order. By demystifying the so-called 'techno-hellscape' of late capitalism, we will discuss how we can better resist and dismantle it together.
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Food and drinks are included in the price of your ticket. If you cannot afford a ticket, please ask for one on arrival: noone turned away for lack of funds.
Entry requirements: no age restrictions