Every site is trying to pull a Bonzai Buddy now.
“We need all your info for advertising, not you can’t opt out unless you make an account and give us your email. Oops, looks like I hid the opt-out under a subheader. Amazon is now profiling you.”
WE USED TO CALL THAT SHIT A VIRUS.
ITS EVERY. FUCKING. WEBSITE. NOW
“Hi I’m going to block this entire site until you give me your info, this is very cool and normal.”
Capitalism ruined the internet. The whole thing is malware now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OGAS
Here you go.
Well that is a tantalizingly sparse wikipedia article. If I had more time, I’d pirate the book it seems to be summarizing, because it seems like it could be an interesting read. Have you read the book? Or did you make do with the extremely sparse wikipedia article?
I don’t remember most of things I’ve read about this, because it’s sort of a common knowledge for everybody in ex-USSR interested in history of cybernetics in the latter.
Which makes the fact that a Murrikan tankie hasn’t heard of it even funnier.
EDIT: Ah, yes, look at the references in the Russian version.
Show me where this article says it was about the threat to the power of bureaucrats & not the feasibility of cyberneticizing the economy in the first place lmao. If it’s so easy why hasn’t anyone than China even begun to do it with modern technology? Walmart and Amazon sharing information along their chaotic just-in-time supply chain does NOT count. Rich investors prefer to use information technology to get an advantage over others, rather than cyberneticize economies anywhere.
In the Russian version of the article you will find it, including even ministries most opposed to it and references to other attempts. The English version seemed its translation to me on the first glance, a glitch in my firmware so to say.
For USSR it would in theory (not considering politics inside a bureaucratic system) be easier due to the command system of the economy.
And some local transitions of this kind even happened in USSR, but to preserve balance of power between ministries, service branches etc there would be elements in the chain that wouldn’t be converted specifically so to not give away control to a different organization.
That would look as stupid as automated data submission to some analytic center, but some stage of the calculations it would perform (for planning purposes or something else) would be done by human computers. Purely for organizational\political purposes - “no, that other ministry can’t do it without us”.
Or they wouldn’t be global - some plants etc would submit data to some computational center of one ministry, some to another, but those centers wouldn’t share data or expertise.
That was also the case with much less ambitious modernization projects in the USSR.
The english language one also references a book about how there was a failure to network the country for various reasons. There are all kinds of valid historical materialist criticisms of the soviet union but I’m not buying this pop history take about how bureaucrats were threatened by a cybernetic system that barely existed conceptually
The English version doesn’t reference many things other than that book. The Russian version has a rather long list.
The whole history of USSR’s demise consists of various bureaucratic groups perceiving any change as a threat.
Vague historical truisms are not really useful to anybody.
This was over 50 years ago. We’re talking about computers about as powerful as graphing calculators. Handing over planning to something like that is a ridiculous prospect. It wouldn’t have saved the USSR.
The USSR had an overly hefty tribute going to administration and industry, industry was too focused towards military, this planning structure was inflexible for various reasons including external pressure. USSR applied too much external pressure in turn, it supported an unsustainable development policy where third world countries were supposed to be develop in the context of an imperialist financial system with USSR serving as a counterbalance. It’s because the USSR was so successful with parts of its planning that it was able to play this role IMO. Painting pretty broad strokes here.
Maybe better computing devices would have helped them figure out their planning was not materialist, but semiconductors don’t appear out of thin air. These days require extreme metallurgy, precision engineered parts like X ray mirrors & the tables which move chips to carve circuits. They recycle hydrogen gas to keep impurities out.
Let’s please not make such statements without some spreadsheets. They didn’t have to run DALL-E on those computers.
That aside, those times had plenty of specialized (non-universal) counting machines, analog computers for engineering and planning purposes, and those were practically used, and in USSR too.
N-no. It just had sufficient resources on start and, as you said, administrative inflexibility not to notice and not to react to the fact that it actually couldn’t.
You are overestimating the technology required to make such a system an improvement over what USSR really had.
Let me give you a classic historical example of relatively good agricultural planning that still squandered its potential: irrigation with slightly salty Nile water destroying soil over time. Just a really broad analogy.
Can’t be too good at industrializing the country and also incapable of basic planning to the point a graphing calculator changes everything. They were the reason we had a space race bruh
They weren’t that good at industrializing the country. Large part of it had been done by foreign engineers, large part of heavy machinery still in operation in 70s had been bought in 30s for gold, and some “taken” from Germany after 1945 as reparations.
And, eh, what a certain machine will or will not change requires technical arguments. I’m not making statements requiring such, you do.
Also if I did say the opposite of what you say, that’d be sort of supported by existence, again, of computerized networked control systems in USSR not intended for economic planning and exchange.
Okay so I have to back up my statements with spreadsheets, but you get to use vague historical truisms. I love talking to people online about history.
I’m just saying that USSR had systems capable of processing data necessary for centralized control of air defenses and nuclear missiles, in operation.
And Soviet planning was sufficiently rough for computerization of that kind to be absolutely beneficial for it.
Anyway, it’s not even about processing, which would require machinery, because that could be done in large part by humans still, it’s the idea of such an open exchange of data between institutions and ministries etc, which shot it down.
A purely administrative reason.
Mao Zedong thought would have saved the USSR’s agricultural base