Amazon Created The Socialist Dream

Allied and Axis militaries during World War II developed centralized coordination systems using war rooms where senior officers made strategic decisions based on live battle information displayed by women plotters using magnetic rakes on massive map tables.

Soviet scientists proposed replacing Stalin with computer systems after his sudden death in 1953, attempting projects like Redbook (1959) and OGAS (1962) to automatically manage the entire Soviet economy through distributed computer networks, but political leaders including the defense minister repeatedly killed these initiatives.

Stafford Beer, a young British officer who observed WWII war rooms, developed cybernetic management theory in the 1950s-1970s, realizing that centralized coordination systems resembled biological nervous systems where information flows to a decision-making brain rather than requiring human commanders.

American corporations like General Motors demonstrated by the 1920s how profit signals enabled autonomous decision-making across hundreds of thousands of workers in dozens of plants, with Stafford Beer later recognizing that markets themselves functioned as cybernetic systems despite his initial focus on planned coordination.

Salvador Allende, Chile’s first democratically elected socialist president, hired Stafford Beer in 1971 to build Project Cybersyn after traditional bureaucracy drowned in complexity, with tech minister Flores believing cybernetics could coordinate nationalized industries—copper mines, banks, and factories—without markets.

The Defense Department initially funded ARPANET to help university researchers share computing resources, then expanded it for military communications that could survive nuclear war, creating distributed infrastructure that evolved into the public internet where anyone could connect and build services.

Amazon, Google, Apple, and Facebook transformed from companies using the internet to sell products into companies owning the market infrastructure itself, with Jeff Bezos recognizing in 1994 that web usage growing at 2,300 percent annually meant electronic commerce technology would become ubiquitous.

Netflix, Facebook, and YouTube replaced human editors and merchandisers with algorithmic recommendation systems, with Netflix using collaborative filtering to match users with similar viewing patterns, Facebook introducing timeline algorithms in 2009, and YouTube switching to neural network-powered recommendations in 2012 when 400 hours of video were uploaded every minute.

Platform companies like YouTube and Facebook deployed neural networks starting in 2012, discovering that machine learning systems could recognize patterns in user behavior data better than human editors at predicting what content would maximize engagement and watch time.

Both Soviet cybernetic planners and American platform corporations independently reached toward AI-managed systems where algorithms rather than humans coordinate economic activity, with smartphones becoming the citizen input dials that Stafford Beer envisioned for Chile’s Cybersyn, now processing billions of clicks, views, and purchases globally.

Over 350 AI experts including Nobel Prize winners and AI company CEOs signed a 2023 statement calling AI extinction risk a global priority alongside pandemics and nuclear war, warning about centralized control infrastructure that superintelligent AI could exploit, with Stafford Beer decades earlier recognizing that computers might invent strategies beyond human comprehension.