I find this programme frankly amazing and don't really understand why it was made.

Science Fiction would seem a very apt title as this is what this film appears to be as it demonstrates a complete ignorance of the chosen subject.

To produce a documentary without doing any of the basic research is disingenuous to say the least. What was the point?

Everybody is entitled to their own opinion of course but surely that opinion should, at the very least, be slightly informed.

To get so many inaccuracies in such a short space of time appears to be almost impossible, yet the perpetrators pull it off with great aplomb.

The CIA have a terrible history in South America and in Chile specifically. But I would have thought that in these more open and enlightened times, the reality of how they behaved on that other September 11th is now freely available to all. It's hard to understand why this documentary was made as it contributes nothing to a very lively and ongoing debate.

Why did they not talk to any of the survivors who escaped Pinochet's murdering hoards? There are many people around who built and operated Beers control room who could have enlightened their attitude.

There are of course many reasons to be critical of Beer’s work. But he is still an internationally renowned management scientist after all. A man who has had many prestigious plaudits piled upon him. So let's not be too dismissive.

Let's have critical debate by all means. Let's try and understand if his work in Chile had reasonable managerial merit and success. But to deny the existence of the very tools that they designed, built and were using is just ridiculous. Of course the operations room existed and worked, there is so much literature and testimony available to show how this tool was used as a management instrument that to deny its viability discredits other possibly reasonable claims made in the film.

I wouldn't know, but it would appear to me that the design of the chairs is a simple pragmatic adaptation of a contemporary chair design. Why this deserve such ridicule eludes me.

To decry the display technology seems equally perverse. I suppose you have to stop and ask yourself if you were trying to make large screen displays in 1973 exactly how you would do it? There was no video technology available then other than small television screens. If I may express my personal opinion, I think that what Beer and his team achieved by way of display technology was truly breathtaking. Compare it to Star Trek by all means, but let's remember that Star Trek was just a television programme and what Beer achieved was reality.

Like him or loathe him, Beer was unquestionably a brilliant thinker who is responsible for putting science into management. His work today, years after his death, is adopted by mainstream thinkers all over the world. Whilst attempting to explain Beers thinking, the authors of this work demonstrate that they don't begin to understand the initial concepts of Cybernetics let alone Beer’s system models.

I greatly look forward to their next video clip examining the works of Karl Marx and his relationship with his brothers Groucho, Harpo and Chico.


Professor Nigel Lurker NsFP, AAic, URJC

Director of the Institute of Political Management

My daughter just showed me the film. It is not science fiction and I know because I built it when I worked at Electrosonic for Bob Simpson and Mike Ray. Professor Beer was a really clever man and so was Bob Simpson and Mike Ray. I was really lucky to know these men. Bob Simpson and Mike Ray led the world in making big fast displays. When it says in the film that they were Kodak Carousel projectors they don't know what they're talking about. They were not. They were totally modified random access projectors and my job was to set up the drive motors in these modified projectors. I had to set up the photo optic disc so that the drive motor would stop at exactly the right place and the slides would always index properly and it was a very skilled job. We had five random access projectors on every screen. Each slide magazine had 80 slides which meant Professor Beer could project any 1 of 400 slides in under a second. And there were loads of these screens. All of it was controlled by funny shaped buttons in the chairs. Using just these buttons you could do anything in the room. Anyone who says this is just Star Trek is a plonker who does not know what he is talking about and when they say this is a mockup it was not it was very real and really worked. The whole room was like a big computer only bigger and faster. You could try lots of different things really quickly. Professor Beer said it was to help you make decisions by looking at different ways of doing things. He was a really special man and he would talk to me just the same as he talked to managing directors and presidents.

When they say that it does not have an output and does not have a telephone in the room that is what Professor Beer totally wanted. It was the room where you could try all sorts of combinations. It doesn't have an output like a calculator doesn't have an output. You pres the buttons on a calculator and you can try lots of different things when you look at the numbers. That is what Professor Beers room was only a million times cleverer. It was like a whole load of computer screens and you could ask yourself the question and have a look at the answers.

I'm not a clever man and I do not know about politics. But I do know that the room was real and worked. Ask Bob Simpson about it he is still the world's audiovisual guru.
You want to learn what is going on matey before you start saying rubbish like that.

This is a disgracefully scurrilous misrepresentation of the facts.

Let me start by declaring an interest. 40 years ago Professor Stafford Beer was a very close friend. Mutual work commitments caused our path is to diverge over the intervening years but I still consider him to be one of the most brilliant men I ever met and I would still count him as a friend and was saddened to hear of his death in 2002.

When Stafford was designing the operations room to be installed in Chile, I helped him identify the suppliers for the displays and I verified the costs of the equipment. So I am qualified to talk about both the technology and about the finances. All the large interactive screens were supplied by Electrosonic who I believe are still very much in existence. Bob Simpson, Electrosonic's managing director, worked with Stafford to identify the system requirements for the large random access screens. These large screens pushed the very boundaries of available technology to their limits. The quantity of information and the speed at which it could be displayed defied anything that had previously been built anywhere in the world. Although I never went to Chile, I did attend the formal equipment handover and can tell you categorically that these screens were very real and were extremely powerful displays. They most certainly were not science fiction.

I can also assure you that the shape of the screens was dictated by physics and the type of lenses available for the projectors. We had to pull the screens forwards into the room to get the focal distance required. They were certainly not an attempt at futuristic design - what would have been the point? To suggest that they were designed with a ‘futuristic science fiction’ agenda is just laughable. It may be difficult for young Americans to understand, but I doubt that Stafford had ever heard of Star Trek let alone spent his time watching it. All we were trying to achieve was a technically proficient operations room; built to the highest possible specification at the lowest possible cost. To suggest that the operations room had ‘wooden panelling to create an atmosphere of privilege’ is simply stupid and seems just another cheap attempt to degrade Stafford's successes. It most certainly doesn't look like any ‘gentleman's club’ that I've ever been to but possibly I should get out more. The wooden panelling was simply the cheapest way of constructing the fabric of the room. This was the pre-requisite because Chile had little in the way of foreign currency reserves and Stafford was anxious not to waste a penny of the funds committed to him. Wooden panelling was cheaper than plasterboard!

Several times in the video, the commentator implies that Stafford was well paid for his work in Chile. I can absolutely assure you from first-hand knowledge that the money he received for the project barely covered his living expenses. I was after all, helping him apportion the funds that he had been given and I know how careful he was to exercise his responsibility to the Chilean government in spending their money wisely. Stafford felt free to call on my particular expertise as a friend and blatantly stated that he couldn't pay me for my work. I gave my time and knowledge to Stafford gladly because we were all trying to help in any way we could. Virtually all the foreign currency given to Stafford went to Electrosonic and to Technomation who produced some of the other displays. To portray Stafford as somebody who was only working for the money is a disgrace and a grievous slur on a fine man's name.

This total distortion of reality continues with the implication that Stafford went and ‘hid in a small cottage’. Stafford was a leader. His loyalty to Chile, Allende and the members of its team was absolute and unquestionable. Try and understand that what these fine people were doing was groundbreaking in the extreme. Stafford was working 20 hours a day to deliver the working system for Allende and his government. He needed peace and quiet to write. That's why he ended up in the cottage. To state that Stafford ran away from Chile on the 19th of September is such a blatant lie that I can only conclude that it is a deliberate attempt to somehow make the facts fit a scurrilous if not slanderous, preconceived idea. Stafford happened to be in London on the 19th of September and suffered greatly from survivor guilt that plagued him for the rest of his life. If I may paraphrase Stafford, ‘it is easier to die for something you really believe in than to live when all your friends have perished’. It is hard to believe that anybody could reach the conclusions so crudely and cruelly portrayed in this charade, if they had talked to any of the participating designers or engineers or even bothered to read any of Stafford's writing about how the system worked.

It may be childishly amusing to mispronounce ‘Cybersyn’ which is not, as is claimed in this amateur production, an amalgam of ‘Cybernetics’ and ‘synthesis’ but rather ‘Cybernetics and synergy’ as described in Stafford's writings. The word ‘cyberfolk’ sounds so alien to anything Stafford would say that I would challenge its very existence. It appears that this is another cheap jibe at Stafford.

Having been privileged to work with Stafford and later, in a different life, to meet with Fidel Castro, I find the physical comparison between these two men bizarre in the extreme. True, they were both tall, had beards and smoke cigars. But then so did Abraham Lincoln and Stafford didn't really look very much like him either. I can only conclude that this is another crudely manipulative attempt to implant some ideological connection between the two men for reasons that are unstated in the video.

As an engineer, I have absolutely no difficulty in understanding Stafford's use of electronic symbols to represent attenuators (resistors) and amplifiers. It seems eminently sensible to me. Mocking Stafford's use of such terms just emphasises the depth of ignorance of the writers.

Further descriptions portraying the control room as an ‘illusion’ a ‘Potemkin village’ an ‘Emerald City’ or even ‘a promise that was not fulfilled’ can only have been included to further enhance the videos hidden agenda with its deceptive message as not one of these statements will stand up to even the most cursory examination to the casual observer.

So what was the agenda behind this video? If it is a genuine piece of coursework then I hope their examiners treated it with the contempt that it so deserves and throw it back at them with the suggestion that they start again from scratch and that this time perhaps they could have just a casual look at the facts before producing such ‘a fetid pile of dingoes kidneys’ (to quote Douglas Adams, a fellow admirer of Stafford's work).

Frank Delaney

What an ill informed commentary
I went to work in Chile in the summer of 1964 and worked for the Departamento del Cobre at Sewell one of the world's biggest copper mines which is now called El Teniente. There were about 15,000 people working at this mine when I started work there and the conditions were primitive in the extreme. Accidents were common with a management structure that cared little for its employees and was all about maximising copper output. Early in 1966 President Eduardo Frei Montalva changed the name to the Copper Corporation of Chile or Codelco. In 1967 the government took control of the mine with a 51% stake and set about moving everybody from Sewell to Rancagua and the ‘Copper Highway’ road was built between Rancagua and the mine. If anything, conditions in the mine deteriorated at this time and battles with the government for more money to improve the working conditions came to nothing. In 1971, President Salvador Allende came to power with what appeared to all of us to be a landslide victory. True in numerical terms he was elected with a majority of 3 or 4% of the vote. But everybody was amazed that he had succeeded in beating Alessandri who everybody assumed would win because he was backed by American money. After Allende’s defeat in the last election, where American money, openly supplied by the CIA, was used overtly to ‘bribe’ the poor and the slum dwellers, it was assumed by everybody that the Americans would just do it again. But they become complacent and didn't bother. The lies that were told then, produced a backlash that the Americans had not foreseen. Henry Kissinger thought that ‘Allende might lead an anti-US movement in Latin America more affectively than Castro, just because it was the democratic path to power’. This resulted in Kissinger's famous statement ‘I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people’. When President Allende was elected to lead Chile, the change in the mining conditions was almost immediate. Safety of the miners became a serious issue and workers committees were formed to oversee the operation of the mine. Within a very short time, the workers wages had doubled. Now they were at least a living wage!
It is claimed in the video that when Allende came to power, the management of the mins left the country. This is categorically not true. It was when Pinochet came to power and people were being killed left right and centre by his armed thugs that people left the mine. I know, I was one of them.
All the mid-term elections showed a massive increase in Allende’s popularity which is why the Americans openly poured money and resources directly into the right wing factions of the Chilean military. Arms, ammunition, aeroplanes and ‘military advisers’ poured into the country. A gesture of goodwill from America. We all knew this was going on. The failed coups that so clearly showed the American involvement totally underestimated the genuine love that the people of Chile showed Allende. The huge spontaneous rallies supporting Allende must have shaken the CIA leading to the final massive involvement and the placement of their murderous puppet Pinochet into a position of power that he held with the ruthless repression for years to come. The good news however was that America was still able to rape the copper mines and carry on exploiting the people. So it wasn't all bad.
I don't remember anything about Stafford Beer or his work in Chile. Possibly I did know that one of the workers committees was concerned with copper production and that this was taking place around me. I just remember the incredible feeling of liberation and self-determination that arrived with Allende.
Later, I went to work in the Middle East, Including Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan. American foreign policy may well have lost its subtlety. It no longer bribes and promises, it now uses guns and tanks to kill the masses and give them their freedom. It will probably end in disgrace and humiliation for America, it usually does. But the people they kill in their naïveté, still stay dead.
When it comes to the motivation behind the video; we should all realise that the American public is not at all representative of American foreign policy. Hang on to that simple truth. So let's all be generous, these children who have produced this video in their wide-eyed innocence are most likely politically illiterate and understand nothing of international politics or world events. Having been caught up in, and lived through, the Machiavellian skulduggery of the CIA and American foreign policies I have reason to distrust. But even the CIA wouldn't be so dumb as to use a literary platform to further their dark desires. Would they?

Let's assume that America is learning from its past mistakes. Let's do something crazy and bold, so unbelievably warm and embracing to show America that we believe they can change for change they must. Don't laugh but try this - why don't we give their President the Nobel Peace Prize for services rendered!

p.c.b. Scunthorpe, England.

If you want to know more about what happened try reading;
‘Chile's voice of democracy Salvador Allende’, Reader - published by Ocean published in 2000
ISBN 1-876175-24-9
I think it's probably one of the best researched books I have read about Chile and Allende and, unlike this video, backs up every statement with verifiable sources.

This is fabulous. I think there's enough interesting stuff here to warrant a long-form documentary film.

The original material is fantastic, but Axelrod & Borenstein's text sounds like a parody of academese. It is priceless to read the comments from people who were actually involved.

Hahaha!!