![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
Notes
1. I am now co-authoring with Michael Lemon a more detailed literature review of technology history in Latin America. This essay is scheduled to appear in the edited volume STS in Latin America: Beyond Imported Magic (working title) under contract with MIT Press and scheduled for publication in 2014. I am co-editing the volume with Ivan da Costa Marques and Christina Holmes.
2. This includes members of the general public in Chile. Cybernetic Revolutionaries is being translated and will be published in Spanish by the Chilean press LOM Ediciones in 2013.
3. Bowker, ‘How to be Universal.’
4. For example see van der Vleuten, ‘Toward a Transnational History of Technology.’
5. See Irive and Saunier, The Palgrave Dictionary of Transnational History.
6. For example, the British Journal for the History of Science published a special issue in 2012 on transnational or global perspectives in science history. See Turchetti, Herran, and Boudia. ‘Introduction’ for an overview. In addition to this special issue, see Roberts ‘Situating Science.’
7. Moreover, accounts of this history from a British perspective already exist. See Beer, Brain of the Firm and Pickering, The Cybernetic Brain.
8. Winner, ‘Do Artifacts have Politics?’
9. This clarification comes from additional correspondence with Kline about his remarks.
10. Edwards, The Closed World.
11. Joerges, ‘Do Politics have Artifacts?’
12. See for example Kline’s reference to Dubarle’s machine à gouverner, the Soviet centralized approach to economic cybernetics described by Gerovitch in From Newspeak to Cyberspeak, Wiener’s discussion of the “new industrial revolution” in the Human Use of Human Beings (chapter 9), and chapter 6 of Cybernetic Revolutionaries.
13. See Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air Pump, Ezrahi, Descent of Icarus, Jasanoff, States of Knowledge, and Latour, We Have Never Been Modern.
14. As I write in the introduction “I use the history of a technical system to open this black box of politics, just as I use politics to open this black box of technology.” Medina, Cybernetic Revolutionaries, 7.
15. Miller Medina, ‘The State Machine.’
16. Nevertheless, it does address how computer and tabulating technology shaped the form of the Chilean bureaucracy prior to Beer’s arrival. I argue that the Chilean government’s earlier investment in computers and tabulating machines, which began in the 1920s, was necessary for Cybersyn’s creation. Like Project Cybersyn, this earlier history of Chilean government computing is international and brings together multinational computer companies such as IBM, funding from the U.S.-led Alliance for Progress, innovations such as British O&M, and French dirigisme. The creation of the Chilean State Computer Enterprise ECOM in the late-1960s proved particularly instrumental to Beer’s securing of the technological and human resources that Project Cybersyn required.
17. Macondo is the name of the fictional Colombian town in Gabriel García Márquez’s book One Hundred Years of Solitude.
18. I did research and locate as much of the Spanish language literature on the history of twentieth century technology as I could find, especially in Chile. A more complete bibliography of that literature appears in Miller Medina, ‘The State Machine.’
19. See for example Escobar, ‘Worlds and Knowledges Otherwise.’
20. My research on the history of Project Cybersyn first appeared in the Chilean media in 2003 as part of a series of events commemorating the 30-year anniversary of Allende’s death. A more detailed explanation of how the Project Cybersyn history has contributed to public understandings of the Allende period appears in Medina, ‘Computer Memory, Collective Memory.’
21. For example, my work on this history has also inspired a historical exhibit in the Cultural Center of the Chilean Presidential Palace and a science fiction book. The former illustrates how Chileans have used the history to connect technological prowess to Chilean culture. The latter shows how Chileans have used the Cybersyn story as a way to reimagine, and by extension engage with, both the Allende and Pinochet periods.
22. See for example Paz Soldán and Castillo, Latin American Literature and Mass Media and Brown, ‘Tecno-escritura.’
23. This is a central goal of the volume STS in Latin America: Beyond Imported Magic that I am now co-editing.