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In the opening episode of The Santiago Boys, a new podcast “where technology is politics, and politics is technology”, the host, writer and academic Evgeny Morozov, delivers a warning: “It might get dizzy at times,” he says. “But I promise you, in the end, it will all make sense.”
He’s not wrong about the dizziness. This nine-part series tells the story of Salvador Allende, socialist president of Chile in the early 1970s, and his efforts to wrest control of technology from multinational corporations to create a fairer local economy. Allende hired the services of an eccentric consultant from Surrey, in south-east England, named Stafford Beer, and the “Santiago boys” of the title, a gaggle of young Chilean engineers. Together they masterminded Project Cybersyn, which would harness technology to monitor Chile’s industrial output and empower its citizens.
But the above description doesn’t do justice to the dense and wide-ranging story told here. The first episode alone takes in student unrest at Santiago’s Catholic University; the CIA’s attempts to block Allende’s election; a spy mission to Chile by Fidel Castro’s daughter; a tense meeting between Allende and UN officials in New York’s Waldorf Astoria hotel; and a bomb blast at the offices of a tech company in Manhattan’s Madison Avenue. The series is what you might call front-loaded, so much so that I ended up listening to the first episode several times to get my head around it.
Morozov reveals that The Santiago Boys has been two years in the making, comprises 200 interviews and that he wrote 11 drafts of the script. There are moments when it could do with some streamlining — as the timeline jumps back and forth, the struggle to bring order to this sprawling story is clear. But, as promised, things slowly begin to fall into place in the second and third episodes; by the time I reached the end, I felt ready to sit an exam on 20th-century Latin American geopolitics.
Timed to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the Pinochet coup which deposed Allende, The Santiago Boys is clearly a labour of love for Morozov. You can hear the care that has gone into the research, which is elegantly laid out in an accompanying website containing detailed episode notes, a glossary of terms and books for further reading. The writing is smart, stylish and contains some terrific blink-and-you’ll-miss-them details, such as Allende leaving his meeting at the Waldorf Astoria “feeling the pain of his new shoes”.
The Santiago Boys may prove hard going for those who like their narrative series delivered in small, digestible portions. But it’s refreshing to find one that doesn’t shrink from complex ideas and that credits its audience with intelligence, curiosity and, above all, staying power. Like the best podcasts, it leaves you feeling a little bit cleverer for having heard it.
