Does technology set people free — or does it control them?
A true story about cybernetics, power, and a future that never was.
In 1960, two opposing visions of the future collide: Aldous Huxley warns of a society held under perfect technological control. The British cyberneticist Stafford Beer believes the opposite — that intelligent machines could dissolve hierarchies and set people free. Ten years later, Beer gets the chance to test his utopia on an entire state.
Chile, 1971. President Salvador Allende is searching for a third way between Soviet central planning and American capitalism. With just two computers, a nationwide telex network and a futuristic control room, Beer builds Project Cybersyn: a digital nervous system meant to steer a national economy in near real time — decentralised, democratic, from the bottom up.
During the truck drivers’ strike of 1972, the system proves itself. Yet Beer’s liberation machine also reveals its paradox: whoever sits in the control room holds the power. On 11 September 1973, Pinochet’s military coup destroys the experiment. What remains is a question more urgent today than ever: who owns the algorithms?
From Cybersyn the film moves into the present: to Palantir, AI and algorithmic government. The same tools can strengthen autonomy or centralise power. Europe has to decide which path it takes.
The reconstructed control room is both stage and memory. On its monitors, archive footage, the present day and clearly labelled AI reconstructions of historical voices meet. The vastness of Chile forms the visual counterpoint.
Filmmaker & AI Architect.