this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2025
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Idk it seems like getting the whole planned economy thing right would have been enough motive. If they'd managed big data and applied it to scientific socialism they'd have been unstoppable.
Of course you don't know what you don't know.
Yeah but they didn't really know that at the time. It's a failure of leadership however to realise just how big and important and transformative this was all going to be. Digitalisation should be looked at historically like industrialisation. They were definitely slow to it.
It's not as bad as some people make out though. They were like... 7 years behind I would say. Everyone always talks of it as "20 years behind" and that strikes me as an exaggeration.
There was also a sort of battle internally in the Soviet union between the proponents of socialism and the market reformers though which probably didn't help while simultaneously watching the west get ahead in this area it would have made people seeing it believe that capitalism is innovative without realising the material forces driving it were very different.
i wonder if Allende hadn't been couped that Cybersyn would've made the soviets get into it more
If the Soviets had gotten to digitalisation before the West, and OGAS had created the Internet, not DARPANET...
We, the communists, would probably have won the Cold War. Or at least, we'd have done a hell of a lot better.
God, I want a time machine so I can go knock some sense into Soviet heads of R&D who didn't see the value of computers.
Me dumping boxes of 90's era routers and 56k modems through a time portal pointing to 1950's era USSR trying desperately to make something good happen.
Fuck, that'd be good. I wish we could do that.