Techno-oligarchs treat computation as a tool for consolidating power, extracting value, and scaling control — but there is a suppressed history where technology was imagined as something radically different, and this happened in Latin America.
In this piece for UMBAU, the online journal of HfG Karlsruhe, I trace how the region’s engagement with cybernetics was never a simple transplant of Western ideas into tropical soil, but an original intellectual project that integrated technology with local socio-political conditions in ways that remain remarkably relevant today — from Manuel Sadosky’s Marxist vision of computation as liberation in Argentina, to Waldemar Cordeiro’s pioneering computer art as a tool for social transformation in Brazil, to the Bariloche Foundation’s Latin American World Model, which challenged MIT’s «Limits to Growth» from the perspective of those already living in crisis.
Beyond these, the piece recovers lesser-known experiments like CENTRO in Peru — where exiled intellectuals attempted a «Model of Cybernetic Socialism» — and URUCIB in Uruguay, a locally built Executive Information System for the presidency that anticipated real-time dashboards and early warning detection decades before Silicon Valley made them standard. Where today’s tech billionaires design systems that make citizens into members of global digital platforms while eroding the capacity to ask structural questions about society, these Latin American projects sought the opposite: collective exploration, democratic participation, and local autonomy through cybernetic thinking. Perhaps what we have most lost is not the technology itself but the systemic perspective — the ability to recognise that what a system does, rather than what it claims to do, reveals its true purpose.
Read the full piece (open access)
Mariátegui, José-Carlos. 2026. «Hidden Histories of Technology and Cybernetics in Latin America.» UMBAU (Issue Five: Hide and Seek). https://umbau.hfg-karlsruhe.de/posts/hidden-histories-of-technology-and-cybernetics-in-latin-america.
