One of the greatest tragedies of the 20th century was the knee-jerk Soviet hostility to cybernetics, despite the fact so much of Western capitalism and its technical and logistics networks are kept afloat by cybernetics, sometimes solely. Hell, the field I work in wouldn't exist if it wasn't for cybernetic management, a field that's a linchpin keeping this whole global game afloat
this post was submitted on 15 Apr 2026
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The sad thing is that by the late 70s and early 80s nobody over there really honestly understood or believed in economic planning anymore, capitalism achieved the hegemonic position in the economics academia worldwide and it affected the USSR. Cockshott talks of going to the USSR and Hungary upon publishing "towards a new socialism" to get it translated to Russian and printed and socialist economics professors looking at him like he was crazy for proposing economic planning.
They encountered the information overload problem, then didn't build for or recognize the solution to it. Alot of 70's and 80's Soviet economic theory was based on an amalgamation of Lenin's NEP and nordic social democratic market policy.
Which worked in the social democracies because they were already incorporated into the global economy, whereas you could get extremely wealthy trading for contraband in the USSR. It's debated how effective the NEP it was, it certainly modernized lots of areas, but it's large problem was that it lacked a financial dimension, and it definitely wasn't as effective as Stalin's version of command economy (which came at a fairly intense cost in terms of human organizational capacity, and to a large extent worked due to the urgency of the need, as well as a requirement of holding those in political office extremely accountable for their actions, which made it one of the first things that Khrushchev dismantled).
As such, it never really worked for the Soviet Union. Too much liberalism in my socialism, thanks. Nazis really lost the battle but won the war to some extent.
Modern capitalism in almost any developed country truly is at the stage that the practical implementation of national planned economy would be to just knit all the corporate internal central plans together into one great national plan. We are well past the mythical "1 million atomic small time producers only interacting through the market signals".
knit all the corporate internal central plans together into one great national plan.
this would be a y2k remediation amount of work and it should absolutely be done, at gunpoint if necessary.
You’d want to go about this very carefully. Codebases taking on remnants of all previous organizational structures will have knock on effects. I’d love to see a bunch of domain experts get invites to a conference and develop a standard for a single system to rule them all. But maybe that’s a civilization-scale case of rewrite syndrome.
probably right, but also very https://xkcd.com/927/
Probably easier to make everyone use the 14th standard when it’s backed by state power
Agreed, and this is precisely the kind of idea that would've addressed many of the problems inherent in the central planning system that USSR was using which stem with delays and distortions in information travelling up and down the chain of command.
first it started with the Soviet development of the Sandevistan speedware, which cemented Soviet cyber technologists as equally capable with the megacorps of the west. later, full body conversions became their specialties....