The recorded talks of a workshop called “CYBERPLAN: Does the Economy fit into a Matrix or Tensor? Interrogating Cybernetic Planning Proposals”, which was held at the 2023 edition of the annual festival of the Gesellschaft für Informatik, have been uploaded to the INDEP YouTube channel. You can find a playlist with all the uploaded talks here.
The website of the workshop is not online any longer, but its program can be seen on this screenshot.
The workshop description:
“Triggered by technological developments, deepening inequality and a looming ecological crisis, one could observe a discursive resurgence on the theorisation of post-capitalist futures in recent years. Especially the successful use of algorithms in gigantic corporations such as Amazon might indicate the feasibility of a conscious control over entire economies. In the workshop, we aim to bring together scientists working on such a large-scale algorithmic mediation with a wider audience of critical computer scientists. We will discuss the utility of algorithms for economic coordination, namely optimisation algorithms for the best allocation of scarce resources and forecasting algorithms for the prediction of future demand. Next to technical issues such as computational complexity, we would like to debate the political dimension of such a cybernetic vision concerned with the threat of too much centralisation, linking it historically to past experiments such as Project Cybersyn.”
The workshop’s talks (the unlinked talks have not been recorded):
- Stefan Ullrich: “Economic Simulations and Empanadas. The socio-technical system Cybersyn in Allende’s Chile”
- Jan Groos: “Simulating Alternatives – Some Questions”
- Max Grünberg: “Algorithms and Economic Planning: Fields of Application”
- Tomas Härdin: “Optimal Planning and its Limits”
- Martin Schmidt: “Sharing Public Resources Effectively between Trusted Agents: A σ-approximate algorithm”
- Matilde Marcolli: “The Problem of Scale in Anarchism and the Case for Cybernetic Communism”
- Spyros Samothrakis: “Pivoting Away from Cybernetic Planning as Fact-free Science”
- Johannes Buchner: Post-Capitalism, Planetary Boundaries & Progressive Computer Science”
- Elena Hofferberth: “Planning Beyond Growth. The Case for Economic Democracy within Ecological Limits”
- Christoph Sorg: “The ‘Democratic’ in ‘Democratic Planning’”
- Bengi Akbulut: “Democratic Economic Planning, Social Metabolism and the Environment”