If you don't know the soviets were theorizing about an infrastructure plan to build a network across the USSR to basically plan their economy for them. Ambitious as fuck, probably would have failed, and eventually got sunk by boomers anyway.
I was wondering if it would work now though. Like say after the revolution we put our best stem lords and ladies on the task of like combining all the user data Google and the NSA was collecting into useful data for addressing peoples real needs.
Some ass hole was talking about "the knowledge problem" and I was wondering if it would be technologically feasible to easily solve this precieved failure of the USSR with technology we have today. I don't know much about databases or statistics though.
Chile also tried to do this but the technology was extremely limited in the early 70s (especially for a country like Chile), and before it really got going the fascists literally smashed up the computers during the coup.
In answer to the OP, I don’t see why the hell AI and the vast computing power we have at our disposal now wouldn’t be able to massively assist in a planned economy in the 21st century. One of the biggest problems for the USSR was that they were literally using pen and paper to plan the economy for a country of a hundred million people.
They didn't have anywhere near the amount of data we have now though
That’s true. But these huge multinationals manage their supply chains somehow, surely a socialist project could apply cybernetics in a similar way with a few tweaks.
This is definitely something that is possible. There's a reason data is worth so much. It's useful for predicting demand. The crazy thing is that meta data is actually better utilized in a broad sense, but these natsec ghouls insist on trying to reverse engineeer individual people's brains with it.
You could solve so many fucking problems by just taking all that data and using it to like find out where more hospitals are needed, determine the best place for a new train station, find out which buildings can be demolished without disrupting a community, etc. We don't though. We just use it to kill POC more efficiently.
I didn't finish it, but The People's Republic of Walmart (it's available on libgen) is a pretty good look at how capitalist monopolies have basically proven that centralized planning is possible and good.
This book is excellent, and the first one I've read that really gets into the discussion of markets vs economic planning. I highly recommend it, and I'd love to do something like a book club discussion on this.
Exactly, Amazon is creating our centrally planned economy for us. We need only seize Amazon, and now we have a centrally planned economy.
I believe it was 100% technologically possible back then but bureaucracy killed any attempt at it that wasn't on a micro-level.
"Within this new party politics Viktor Glushkov was contacted by officials and started to work on new ideas (see also Glushkov’s personal reminiscences). His plan for a computer network all over the Soviet Union for monitoring labor, production and retailing would integrate a number of existing informational infrastructures and included more than 100 regional network nodes interconnected by wide-band channels as well as over twenty thousand local computer centers. The structure would additionally provide a distributed data bank accessible from everywhere. This idea for data compiling, storing and processing, later specified together with Nikolai Fedorenko, was crucial to the whole concept and would have meant a major shift in soviet bureaucracy. Instead of collecting raw economic data and feeding different administrative channels, Glushkov and Federenko thought of single storage in central data banks, which would then be made accessible for all different kinds of usage. But Glushkov’s plans reached even further: to reorganize the whole bureaucracy and, for example, to abolish material money.
The opposition against such proposals quickly increased. The plans were criticized from three positions. First, bureaucrats and factory managers did not feel attracted to more observation and standardized control over their daily work and general efficiency. Second, more liberal economists saw a new rise of centralization and extensive planning from above. Finally, the building of a universal computerized data network was confronted with resistance from top political level in order to preserve the administrative status quo."
"I want to emphasize one particular insight that is central for the progress of cyber-communist approaches. Technological and scientific insufficiencies were not the prime problem for building a general cybernetic system for the Soviet economy. Instead, political mechanisms of power, information exclusivity and competence skirmishes prevented a technologically bolstered, cybernetic re-coordination of the economy. The political, academic and military divisions showed a tendency for applying only parts of the large-scale innovations for their particular purpose. Computer technology, information networks and especially cybernetic modeling are by definition general ideas applicable to various problems. Military authorities, economics, politicians and scientists did all anticipate benefits for their particular needs in the Cold War. One problem in the Soviet Union was, for example, the lack of standardization and coordination for computer networks. In the US and the Western World, general communication protocols, like TCP/IP, or addressing systems, like DNS, were widely implemented over a battled period spanning into the 1980s. Without such standards for digital communication and because of incompatible hardware and software the bunch of different soviet networks were never to be connected. Each one was sheltered and veiled by intransparency and the fear of losing already gained privileges."
https://networkcultures.org/longform/2016/12/19/communication-control-communism-on-socialist-cybernetics-accelerationist-dreams-and-tiqquns-nightmares/
Sorry for the wall of text I just really like this topic and hate that our future could've been so much better had things turned out differently ;-;
If you don’t know the soviets were theorizing about an infrastructure plan to build a network across the USSR to basically plan their economy for them.
They actually implemented the sort of domestic intranet those plans called for on the scale that they materially could. I don't have any idea of how well that worked in practice because the same time period that saw that rollout also saw both serious material problems (aging labor force, depletion of some resource deposits, a crash in global oil prices, etc) and the active, willful sabotage of the Soviet planning and logistics system by dipshit libs like Gorbachev and his bloc.
The world agrees on a standard of living that everyone is assigned, globally.
The world agrees that nobody needs more than that standard, which varies from country to country. Temperate countries need less energy than cold countries, for example.
The world agrees that everyone should work an equal amount per week.
The world agrees that an algorithm, understood and curated by humans, controls all of the above.
FALGSC.
