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Liam Wilkinson

The Cybersyn operations room

A scroll-driven walkthrough of the Project Cybersyn operations room in Santiago, 1972: the seven chairs, the wall screens, the telex network behind them and the Cyberfolk meter, ending with the coup of 11 September 1973.

InteractiveReview pending

proyecto synco · santiago · 1972

sala de operaciones

  1. Santiago, 1972

    Stafford Beer and Allende's government built a room to steer a newly nationalised economy. Gui Bonsiepe's team designed it.

  2. Seven chairs

    Fibreglass swivel chairs with buttons in the armrests to switch the screens. No keyboards: Beer didn't want to "insinuate a girl between themselves and the machinery".

  3. The screens

    The walls showed the economy as flows, levels and alarms, in a visual language of their own.
    The original Cybersyn operations room in 1973: white swivel chairs in a ring facing wall screens.
    The operations room, Santiago, 1973. Photo: Rodrigo Walker, courtesy Gui Bonsiepe. Reproduced for criticism and review.

  4. Behind the screens

    They showed prepared slides. The room looked more omniscient than its data ever was.

  5. Cybernet

    The part that worked was humbler: a telex network linking factories to Santiago.

  6. Cyberfolk

    A plan to let citizens signal their satisfaction as it happened. Beer's son built prototype meters from radio parts and pink and green cardboard. They never saw service.

  7. 11 September 1973

    The air force bombed the presidential palace. Allende died inside, and the project ended with him.
    Smoke rising from La Moneda, Chile's presidential palace, during the bombing on 11 September 1973.
    The bombing of La Moneda, 11 September 1973. Biblioteca del Congreso Nacional de Chile, CC BY 3.0 CL, via Wikimedia Commons.

To present it, press the full-screen button in its corner, then step through with the arrow keys or a clicker. Esc leaves.

Reuse and citation

Free to reuse under CC BY 4.0, with credit. Archival photographs are credited where they appear and keep their own terms.

Liam Wilkinson, “The Cybersyn operations room”, interactive, lwilko.com, 2026. https://www.lwilko.com/library/interactives/cybersyn-operations-room

A canvas model of the hexagonal operations room built for Project Cybersyn, designed by a team led by Gui Bonsiepe. The scenes cover the seven swivel chairs with armrest buttons, the wall screens and the slides behind them, the telex network linking factories to Santiago, and the Cyberfolk satisfaction meter. The two archival photographs shown in the explainer are third-party material and keep their own terms.

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Catalogue source: knowledge/interactives/cybersyn-operations-room.md

Generated by claude-code/claude-sonnet-5-5 on 2026-10-24

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