Red Plenty
01 Jul 2026 - 01 Jul 2026
- unclassifiable book by Francis Spufford, about attempts of early cybernetics to manage the Soviet economy.
- See Project Cybersyn for a latter day, more real version of the same thing.
- surely someone has connect these in more depth
- Ask Claude
- The book you're thinking of is **"Red Plenty" (2010)** by Francis Spufford - a hybrid work mixing fiction, history, and essay that follows the Kantorovich-era dream of using mathematical optimization and early computing to make Soviet central planning work.
The Red Plenty / Cybersyn Connection
- You're right that this connection deserves more systematic treatment. Here's what exists:
- The obvious parallel:
- Red Plenty covers roughly 1950s-60s Soviet OGAS/Cybertonia dreams (Glushkov's network especially)
- Cybersyn was Stafford Beer's 1971-73 Chilean implementation of viable system modeling under Allende
- Where they've been connected:
- Eden Medina's "Cybernetic Revolutionaries" (2011) on Cybersyn occasionally gestures at the Soviet precedent
- Slava Gerovitch's "From Newspeak to Cyberspeak" covers Soviet cybernetics seriously
- There's a Crooked Timber symposium on Red Plenty (2012) that touches on this
- The gap you're identifying: Nobody has really written the unified history of socialist cybernetics as a recurring political dream - why it keeps appearing, why it keeps failing, what that reveals.
- Worth noting: Spufford himself is aware of Cybersyn. The failure modes differ interestingly - Soviet version died from bureaucratic resistance, Chilean version from a coup.