The Santiago Boys

The tech world that may have been

English

Disponibile su

A wild tale of how Allende's engineers and a British management consultant dared challenge corporations and spy agencies - and almost won.

The Santiago Boys: il Podcast

Cybersyn was a project created by the Chilean President Salvador Allende. His idea was to build a large digital network serving the socialist government. It was a sort of internet before the internet, that would have made centralization possible, allowing to process an enormous amount of data from all over Chile. However, the project was abruptly interrupted due to the 1973 coup, that brought General Pinochet to power. What would have happened if Allende had completed his project? This podcast delves into the research of the engineers (the Santiago Boys) who helped the Chilean president and, in particular, into the figure of a prominent British technology guru, Stafford Beer. 

Credits

The Santiago Boys is a co-production of Chora Media and Post Utopia.
Writing, research, development and Presentation Evgeny Morozov.

Music Main Theme Luca Micheli.
Audio Editing and Post-production Emanuele Moscatelli.
Music Supervisor Luca Micheli.

Post-production Assistant Luca Possi.
Post-production Producer Matteo Scelsa.

The people who have been helping me to organize, record and process hundreds of interviews unfortunately too many to name here, but I’d like to extend special thanks to Chiara De Leone, Eckhart Kinsella, Nikolai Maksymchuk and Matteo Miavaldi, all of whom helped me in more than one way.

Evgeny Morozov

Evgeny Morozov, journalist and geopolitical expert, collaborates with The New Republic, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, London Review of Books and other publications. Before moving to the United States, Morozov traveled to Berlin and Prague, where he served as new media manager at Transitions Online, a non-governmental organization active in 29 former Soviet bloc countries. He has also been a visiting scholar at Stanford University and a researcher at the New American Foundation, the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy at Georgetown University and the George Soros Open Society Institute.