In California, in the 1970s, the US government and a group of universities were working on the fastest possible way to connect unwieldy mainframe computers separated by thousands of miles. Their work, the ARPANET, would become the basis for the modern internet. The networks we now depend on still reflect the purpose and worldview of its time and place: open, uncontrolled, and uncontrollable.
But there is another story. A hemisphere away, a group of programmers in Santiago, Chile were building a network of their own. Project Cybersyn had a purpose, ethos, and design completely different from the American network. In the two brief years it lasted, Cybersyn’s creators saw the shape of something unique, something that was lost before we ever really learned what it could have meant to a networked world.
In episode two, we see how they rigged up a shockingly low-tech solution to high tech problems, and brought the world its first real-time economic hub.
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