# Improving Brazil Through Cybernetics

*September 25, 2026*

## Prologue: a room in Santiago

In July 1971 Fernando Flores, a 28-year-old engineer at CORFO, Chile's state development corporation, wrote a letter to the British cybernetician Stafford Beer. Salvador Allende's government had nationalized a large part of Chilean industry in a few months, many managers had left the country, and the state was suddenly running factories it had no way of seeing. Flores wanted to apply what he called scientific views on management and organization at the national scale, where cybernetic thinking becomes a necessity ([Metaphorum](https://metaphorum.org/staffords-work/cybersyn)). Beer dropped most of his consulting contracts and started flying to Santiago ([Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn)).

The system they designed had four parts ([Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn)). Cybernet was a network of telex machines in state firms; the number usually quoted is 500, and the real one was probably smaller. Cyberstride was statistical software (Bayesian filtering, on an IBM 360/50) that read daily production indices and raised an alarm when a series left its expected band. CHECO was an economic simulator. The Opsroom was the room everyone remembers, with seven swivel chairs that had buttons in the armrests, screens on the walls, and a design team led by Gui Bonsiepe, who swore he had never watched Star Trek. In Spanish the project was called Synco, a pun on *cinco*, because Beer's model of organization had five levels.

The method mattered more than the furniture. Engineers modeled each factory with "quantified flowcharts" built around its bottlenecks, and they asked the operators which numbers described their own machines. Only about twenty factories were fully modeled. A problem stayed at the lowest level that could handle it, and it climbed to the next level only after a set time passed without a fix.

Most of it never worked, and the honest histories say so. The statistician Cosma Shalizi, reading Eden Medina's history of the project, ranks the four parts by how finished they were and concludes that the telex network was the only useful piece, and useful in a way nobody planned ([Shalizi](https://bactra.org/notebooks/cybersyn.html)). In October 1972 a national truckers' strike, supported by the right-wing opposition and by the CIA ([Project MUSE review of Medina](https://muse.jhu.edu/article/501413/summary)), tried to starve the cities. Officials used the telex lines to follow about two thousand messages a day from the north of Chile to the south ([iRevolutions, quoting Medina](https://irevolutions.org/2009/02/21/project-cybersyn-chile-20-in-1973/)) and kept food and fuel moving with around 200 trucks ([Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn)). A minister later said the government would have fallen without it ([Metaphorum](https://metaphorum.org/staffords-work/cybersyn)). On 11 September 1973 it fell anyway. The military found the network intact, had its engineers explain how it worked, and destroyed the Opsroom.

The detail that matters for Brazil is in a footnote. Medina reports that after the coup Beer was approached by two governments that wanted systems of their own: the military dictatorship of Brazil and apartheid South Africa ([iRevolutions, quoting Medina](https://irevolutions.org/2009/02/21/project-cybersyn-chile-20-in-1973/); [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn)). Beer had already warned that if his invention were taken apart and rebuilt with other tools, it could become an instrument of oppression. Brazil's generals wanted the machine after 1973 and never built it. This essay is about the version Brazil should build now, and about why the country's history, read with Beer's tools, points toward it.

### Beer's tools

Norbert Wiener's *Cybernetics* (1948) defined the field as control and communication in the animal and the machine. Its first idea is feedback. Negative feedback pulls a system back toward a set point, the way a thermostat or a central bank does. Positive feedback amplifies a deviation until something breaks: a bank run, hyperinflation, an addiction. A large part of Brazilian history can be told as a list of positive loops that nobody damped.

The second idea is W. Ross Ashby's law of requisite variety: only variety can absorb variety. A regulator has to be able to take at least as many distinct states as the disturbances it faces, and a regulator simpler than its environment fails however good its intentions are. There are two ways out. You can raise the regulator's variety with more sensors, local autonomy or markets, or you can lower the environment's variety with standards, rules and chokepoints. Roger Conant and Ashby later added a corollary, that every good regulator of a system must contain a model of that system. A state that cannot see its country cannot steer it.

The third is Beer's Viable System Model. Beer argued that anything that survives on its own performs five functions. System 1 is the set of units that do the work. System 2 coordinates them and damps the oscillations between them. System 3 manages the whole in the present, with an audit channel, System 3\*, that checks reality directly. System 4 looks outward and forward. System 5 sets identity and policy and keeps 3 and 4 in balance. The model is recursive, so every viable system is made of viable systems and sits inside a larger one: a family inside a city, inside a state, inside Brazil, inside the world economy.

The fourth is the algedonic signal, from the Greek words for pain and pleasure. It is an alarm that skips the normal hierarchy and reaches System 5 when something threatens the survival of the whole. Beer even built prototype dials so that citizens could register how they felt about policy in real time (Project Cyberfolk, never finished). In a country, the pain channels are the free press, elections, courts and the street. Cutting them leaves the pain in place and delays the moment anyone in charge learns about it.

The fifth is a phrase Beer used for decades: the purpose of a system is what it does. If a system reliably produces an outcome, that outcome is its purpose, whatever its founders wrote down.

### Deutsch's engine

Beer explains how a system stays alive. It says less about how a system gets better, and for that I am borrowing a second engine from David Deutsch's *The Beginning of Infinity* (2011). Deutsch argues that progress comes from good explanations, ones that are hard to vary while still accounting for what they explain, and from institutions that let a society find and remove its own errors. Two short sentences from the book work as a program for a country: problems are inevitable, and problems are soluble. His optimism is a claim about knowledge, which is that all evils are caused by insufficient knowledge, and that knowledge can always be improved.

Deutsch contrasts static societies, which spend their energy preventing change (his example is Sparta), with dynamic ones that keep criticizing and replacing their ideas (Athens, briefly, and the Enlightenment). He also adopts Karl Popper's test for political systems: the question is less who should rule than whether a society can remove bad rulers and bad policies without violence. In cybernetic language, Popper's criterion is a requirement on the error-correction loop at the level of System 5.

Put the two engines together and the question for Brazil becomes concrete. A country the size of a continent needs a nervous system that keeps it viable, and it needs institutions that turn every mistake into knowledge. My guess is that Brazil's best moments (Embrapa, the Real, Pix) were cases of good error correction that happened almost by accident, and that its worst were periods when the pain channels were cut or the regulator was far simpler than the territory. The rest of the essay tests that guess against five centuries of history, a hundred years of prices and wages, and the records of countries that started where Brazil started and ended up somewhere else. It ends with a plan and with an argument for a new Brazilian aesthetic, one where technology connects the country's past to its future.

## Part I: Before the name

For more than a century before Cabral, European sea charts showed an island called Brasil (Bracile, Hy-Brasil, O'Brasil) somewhere west of Ireland. Sailors went looking for it and never found it, because it did not exist. Historians still argue about where the word came from, and most tie the country's name to *pau-brasil*, the brazilwood tree whose red dye (the color of *brasa*, an ember) was the colony's first export. So the land ended up named after a commodity, with a phantom island from Celtic legend hovering somewhere in the etymology.

Before any of that, the land had peoples: Tupi-Guarani speakers along the coast, Jê speakers on the interior plateaus, Arawak and Carib speakers in the north, and hundreds of others. The old picture of an empty Amazon is wrong. Archaeologists still argue about the numbers, and several estimates put the pre-conquest population of Amazonia alone between 6 and 10 million people; conquest, exploitation and disease then killed upward of 90% of them ([Eos](https://eos.org/features/the-nutrient-rich-legacy-in-the-amazons-dark-earths)).

### Soil with memory

The best evidence of what those societies knew is underground. Across the basin there are patches of black earth, *terra preta*, set in the acidic red soils of the forest. It is full of charcoal, pottery shards, fish bones and manure, and it is extraordinarily fertile. Estimates of its extent run from 6,000 to 18,000 km², and one model suggests more than 150,000 km², about 3.2% of the forest ([Eos](https://eos.org/features/the-nutrient-rich-legacy-in-the-amazons-dark-earths)). A 2021 paper argued that rivers deposited the fertility and people simply settled on it ([Nature Communications](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-20184-2)), but most archaeologists and soil scientists think people made it.

The Kuikuro of the upper Xingu still make it. They call it *eegepe*. They sweep up charcoal and ash, throw manioc peelings into middens around their houses, and a few years later plant on top of them so the plants can "grow happy" ([Eos](https://eos.org/features/the-nutrient-rich-legacy-in-the-amazons-dark-earths)). An engineer would describe this as a closed loop with a period of centuries, in which waste becomes input and each generation's garbage becomes the next generation's capital. The forest carries the same signature: patches dense with domesticated and useful species (Brazil nut, açaí, peach palm) cluster around old settlements ([Plant and Soil, 2020](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11104-020-04461-z)). Parts of the Amazon are gardens whose gardeners died five centuries ago.

### A governor on power

The anthropologist Pierre Clastres worked among Tupi-Guarani and neighboring peoples and made an odd claim in *Society Against the State* (1974). These societies had no state because they prevented one from forming. The chief was a peacemaker, an orator and the most generous person in the village, with prestige and without the right to command, and a leader who tried to turn prestige into coercion lost his following. Deleuze and Guattari took the argument into *A Thousand Plateaus*.

In Wiener's terms this is negative feedback on the accumulation of power, a governor on an engine. Deutsch would read the same mechanism with more suspicion, as the kind of defense a static society builds against change. I think both readings fit, and the tension between them runs through the rest of this essay: Brazil's recurring problem is power that accumulates with nothing to damp it, and the fix cannot be a society that damps change itself.

Eduardo Viveiros de Castro later described Amerindian perspectivism, in which every kind of being sees itself as a person and sees the others as animals or spirits, so that reality depends on where the observer stands. Heinz von Foerster built second-order cybernetics on a similar move, putting the observer inside the system being observed. (In Santiago, a few kilometers from Beer's Opsroom, the biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela were working out *autopoiesis* at the same time.)

### What the state could see

The 2022 census counted 1,693,535 indigenous people, 0.83% of the population, living in 4,832 municipalities, and the number of officially delimited indigenous lands rose from 501 in 2010 to 573 ([Poder360](https://www.poder360.com.br/brasil/brasil-tem-169-milhao-de-indigenas-diz-censo-2022/)). The count nearly doubled from 896,917 in 2010, and IBGE attributes most of the jump to method: better maps of indigenous localities, indigenous community guides on the census teams, and real-time monitoring of coverage. The population did not double in twelve years. The sensor improved. For five centuries the Brazilian state's model of its first peoples had large blank areas, and the Conant–Ashby theorem says that a regulator with a blank model regulates badly.

### Tupi or not tupi

The coast left one more idea that the rest of this essay will use. The Tupinambá ritually killed and ate war captives, and the German gunner Hans Staden, who survived their captivity, published an illustrated account of it in 1557. In 1928 the modernist poet Oswald de Andrade turned that horror into a cultural program in the *Manifesto Antropófago*. Brazil should neither copy Europe nor refuse it; it should eat Europe, digest it and turn it into its own body. His most quoted line was written in English: "Tupi, or not tupi that is the question."

Read cybernetically, antropofagia is a method for absorbing variety. A country facing a more complex environment can imitate it piece by piece, or close the door, or ingest the complexity and rebuild it inside its own structure. The third option is the one Brazil used whenever it did well, and I think it is the right model for how Brazil should deal with AI.

On 22 April 1500 a Portuguese fleet commanded by Pedro Álvares Cabral anchored off the coast of what is now southern Bahia.

## Part II: A machine with its purpose set in Lisbon

In 1942 the historian Caio Prado Júnior asked what the *sentido* of Brazilian colonization had been, meaning its direction or meaning seen from far away. His answer reads like systems theory written before the vocabulary existed. The colony, he wrote, had been organized to supply sugar and tobacco, later gold and diamonds, then cotton and coffee, to European commerce, "nada mais que isto" ([USP course notes quoting *Formação do Brasil Contemporâneo*](https://edisciplinas.usp.br/mod/resource/view.php?id=3141998); [UEPG](https://revistas.uepg.br/index.php/rhr/article/download/2100/1581/6031)). Society and economy were arranged around an objective that lay outside the country.

This is Beer's rule about purpose, stated by a Marxist historian. The colony's reference signal lived in Lisbon, its sensors counted shipments, and its loops pointed outward. Twelve years after Caio Prado, Heidegger described modern technology as a way of revealing the world as *Bestand*, a standing reserve of stock on call for use elsewhere. The colony treated land and people that way three centuries before anyone had the word. Alfredo Bosi's *Dialética da Colonização* (1992) finds the same structure inside the language: the Latin verb *colo* (I till, I occupy) is the root of colony, of cult and of culture, and Brazilian history keeps passing through all three meanings.

### Cycles instead of growth

The economy moved in cycles, each a boom around a single commodity followed by a collapse: brazilwood, then sugar in Pernambuco and Bahia (Stuart Schwartz's *Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society* is the classic account), gold and diamonds in Minas Gerais in the eighteenth century, coffee in the nineteenth, rubber in the Amazon at the turn of the twentieth. Each cycle built a region, drained it and moved on, and little of the surplus stayed behind as local structure. Immanuel Wallerstein would later call this position the periphery of a world-system: a region whose role is to supply raw materials and labor at prices set by the core.

Two cycles show where the value went. Minas gold flowed through Lisbon to London, because after the Methuen Treaty of 1703 Portugal paid for English manufactures with Brazilian bullion, and Celso Furtado argued that this gold helped finance England's early industrial rise. Kenneth Pomeranz's *The Great Divergence* adds that Europe escaped its ecological limits partly through "ghost acres" in the Americas, land it did not have to farm at home. Brazilian sugar fields and mines were some of those acres.

The rubber cycle ended with a theft. In 1876 the Englishman Henry Wickham shipped tens of thousands of Hevea seeds out of the Amazon to Kew Gardens, seedlings went to British Asia, and within four decades plantations in Malaya and Ceylon were outproducing the entire Amazon. Brazil owned the trees and never owned the knowledge of how to farm them, and the opera house in Manaus is what remains of the monopoly. Biotechnology will bring the same question back.

The gold cycle also produced the colony's clearest pain signal. Lisbon took a fifth of the gold as tax, the *quinto*, and when output fell it threatened a forced collection, the *derrama*. In 1789 a group of conspirators in Minas planned a revolt, the Inconfidência Mineira. They were betrayed, and in 1792 the one of lowest rank, Tiradentes, was hanged, quartered and displayed along the roads. The signal reached the top and the answer was to cut the channel and put the pieces on display.

### The mill that ground people

The machine ran on enslaved labor. Brazil received more enslaved Africans than any other country in the Americas, and Portuguese ships carried more people across the Atlantic than those of any other nation ([Statista, from SlaveVoyages data](https://statista.com/chart/22057/countries-most-active-trans-atlantic-slave-trade)); around 40% of all Africans taken in the Atlantic trade came from the Angola region ([Statista](https://statista.com/chart/amp/19068/trans-atlantic-slave-trade-by-country-region)). Luiz Felipe de Alencastro argued in *O Trato dos Viventes* that Brazil was formed outside Brazil, in a South Atlantic system in which Luanda and Salvador were two ports of the same economy.

Darcy Ribeiro called colonial Brazil a *moinho de gastar gente*, a mill for grinding people. As a control system it was a positive loop with an outside supply. When buying a person cost less than keeping one alive, the plantations used up their workers and bought more, so the system never had to reproduce its own operators, educate them or listen to them. Gilberto Freyre's *Casa-Grande & Senzala* (1933) described the intimacy of the plantation house and the slave quarters as the matrix of a mixed civilization, and Florestan Fernandes spent decades showing that the "racial democracy" read into Freyre let exclusion continue in new forms. The abolitionist Joaquim Nabuco saw it coming in 1883: "A escravidão permanecerá por muito tempo como a característica nacional do Brasil."

## Part III: A colony without printing presses

Deutsch's distinction between static and dynamic societies turns out to be a precise description of what the colony lacked. A dynamic society needs places where ideas are criticized and replaced. Portugal made sure Brazil had none.

Printing was forbidden in the colony. In 1747 the printer Antônio Isidoro da Fonseca set up a press in Rio de Janeiro, and a royal order shut it down and had the equipment sent back to Lisbon. Spain founded universities in Lima and Mexico City in 1551; Brazil's first lasting universities appeared only in the twentieth century (Paraná in 1912, Rio de Janeiro in 1920, São Paulo in 1934). The colonial elite studied at Coimbra and came back with a model of the world built in another climate, which José Murilo de Carvalho later identified as the glue that held the Empire together. When the first Brazilian newspaper of opinion appeared, the *Correio Braziliense* of 1808, it was printed in London by Hipólito José da Costa, because it could not have been printed at home.

In cybernetic terms, a colony without presses or universities has no channel for criticism and no organ for creating knowledge. It can execute, and it cannot learn. For three centuries the territory's System 4 was located in Lisbon and its error correction was the Inquisition.

### The Dutch interlude

For a few years there was an exception, and it is the most interesting counterfactual in Brazilian history. The Dutch West India Company held the sugar coast of the northeast from 1630 to 1654, and from 1637 to 1644 its governor in Recife was Johan Maurits of Nassau-Siegen. He laid out a planned town, Mauritsstad, brought the painters Frans Post and Albert Eckhout to record the land and its people, and brought the scientists Willem Piso and Georg Marcgrave, whose *Historia Naturalis Brasiliae* (1648) was the first systematic natural history of the territory. Marcgrave ran an astronomical observatory in Recife that is often called the first in the Americas. Recife tolerated Jews openly, and the synagogue Kahal Zur Israel, founded in the 1630s, was the first in the Americas.

I do not want to romanticize it. Dutch Brazil ran on sugar and slavery like Portuguese Brazil, the company that governed it answered to shareholders in Amsterdam, and Dutch Suriname later became one of the harshest slave colonies in the hemisphere. What those seven years show is narrower and more useful: the same land, with the same crops, briefly had a functioning System 4, with people whose job was to observe, measure and describe the environment. When the Portuguese retook Recife in 1654, the observatory and the natural history left with the Dutch.

### A history of the future

The most ambitious forward-looking text written in the Portuguese-speaking Americas in that century was a prophecy. The Jesuit Antônio Vieira, raised in Bahia, the greatest prose writer of the language in his time, preached against the enslavement of indigenous people in Maranhão and argued in Lisbon for letting New Christian (converted Jewish) merchants finance a company to protect the sugar fleets. He also wrote *História do Futuro* and a long letter predicting a Fifth Empire, a Portuguese-led universal kingdom that would follow Assyria, Persia, Greece and Rome. The Inquisition tried him for it in the 1660s.

Vieira's Fifth Empire grew out of Sebastianism, the belief that King Sebastian, who vanished in battle in Morocco in 1578, would return to redeem Portugal. The belief crossed the ocean and resurfaced in the backlands, in the millenarian movement of Pedra Bonita in the 1830s and in the imagery around Canudos in the 1890s. Fernando Pessoa gave it a modern form in *Mensagem* (1934). The number five keeps showing up in this story: Vieira's Fifth Empire, Beer's five systems, and Synco, named after *cinco*. It is a coincidence, and I enjoy it. The difference between them is the whole argument of this essay. Sebastianism imagines System 5 as one person who will come back and fix everything, and Beer's System 5 is a function that works only if the other four are alive.

### Sérgio Buarque's regulators

Sérgio Buarque de Holanda's *Raízes do Brasil* (1936) is the book this essay owes most to, because it is a study of control styles. It opens with a diagnosis: "somos ainda hoje uns desterrados em nossa terra," we are still exiles in our own land ([SciELO](http://www.scielo.br/j/ccrh/a/FBRYnzHxVHTzYxsMKK4r4tj/?lang=pt)). Brazil imported its institutions, ideas and forms of life from a distant place and kept them in an environment that did not fit them, so everything seemed to belong to another climate and another landscape ([Ensaios e Notas](https://ensaiosenotas.com/2019/04/06/sergio-buarque-de-holanda-raizes-do-brasil/)). In Ashby's vocabulary, the regulator carried a model of the wrong system. Decades later Roberto Schwarz gave the same diagnosis a sharper name in "As ideias fora do lugar" (1973): liberal ideas recited in a society that ran on slavery.

Buarque built the book on pairs, work and adventure, method and caprice, bureaucracy and *caudilhismo*, impersonal norm and affective impulse ([SciELO](http://www.scielo.br/j/ccrh/a/FBRYnzHxVHTzYxsMKK4r4tj/?lang=pt)). Three of them map onto cybernetics almost directly.

Spanish America was built by *ladrilhadores*, tile-layers, who stamped grid cities onto the land by royal ordinance. The Portuguese were *semeadores*, sowers, who scattered towns along the coast and let them follow the terrain. The grid is a low-variety regulator that imposes legibility. The sowing admits the environment's variety and builds nothing to coordinate it. Beer would have rejected both, because viability needs local autonomy together with a coordination layer.

The Portuguese colonist, in Buarque's portrait, was an adventurer, someone who wants to collect the fruit without planting the tree. The worker's ethic compounds over years, while the adventurer keeps buying lottery tickets. The line runs from the gold rush to the online casinos that Brazil banned this week.

The cordial man is the most misunderstood idea in Brazilian thought. *Cordial* comes from *cor*, heart, and describes a society where personal ties outrank impersonal rules and public office is treated as family property. The cybernetic reading goes further than the moral one. When formal rules have too little variety to handle real situations, personal networks supply the missing variety, and the *jeitinho*, the favor and the friend of a friend are Ashby's law at work in the shadows. They keep the system running, and they are also the channel through which patronage flows.

By the end of the eighteenth century the pattern was complete: a purpose set outside, value flowing one way, an energy source that was consumed instead of sustained, pain channels cut, no presses and no universities, and a gap between formal and real control filled by personal networks. In November 1807, with Napoleon's army marching on Lisbon, the Portuguese court boarded its ships.

## Part IV: The Empire and its keystone

The court sailed under British escort and landed in 1808, and the metropole moved into the colony, which had never happened anywhere before. Within months Rio had a royal press (the Impressão Régia), a bank, a botanical garden and military academies, and the royal library followed with tens of thousands of volumes. The organs of knowledge that three centuries of colonial policy had kept out arrived in the holds of a fleet running from Napoleon. Brazil's first System 4 was an accident of a European war.

In 1808 the prince regent opened the ports to friendly nations, which in practice meant Britain. In 1815 Brazil became a kingdom united with Portugal. When the king returned to Lisbon in 1821 his son Pedro stayed, and in 1822 he declared independence.

Spanish America broke into many republics after long wars. Brazil became independent under the heir to the Portuguese throne, kept its monarchy and its slaves, and stayed in one piece. José Murilo de Carvalho argued that the unity came from a small elite, trained largely at Coimbra, that shared one idea of the state. A few hundred people who thought alike could coordinate a continent as long as the continent had no way to answer back, which is a regulator with very little variety holding together a territory with a great deal of it.

The new country's most lucid statesman saw where the weak point was. In 1823 José Bonifácio de Andrada e Silva wrote a memorandum to the constituent assembly arguing that slavery made civilization and solid wealth impossible, and proposing to end the trade and free the enslaved gradually. The emperor dissolved the assembly that year, and Bonifácio went into exile.

### The keystone

The constitution Pedro I imposed in 1824 contained an idea no other charter in the Americas had: a fourth power. Borrowing from the French liberal Benjamin Constant, it created the *Poder Moderador*, delegated privately to the emperor so that he would incessantly watch over the independence, balance and harmony of the other powers ([Trilhante, quoting article 98](https://trilhante.com.br/trilha/direito-constitucional/curso/historia-constitucional-do-brasil/aula/constituicao-de-1824-1)). Article 98 called it the key to all political organization.

It is hard to find a closer historical match for Beer's System 5, a function above ordinary management whose job is to keep the other functions in balance and preserve the identity of the whole. The jurist Afonso Arinos later pointed out a mistranslation in it. Constant's *clef* meant the keystone at the top of an arch, the stone that supports and coordinates the others, and the Brazilian text rendered it as a key that opens any door ([PUC-Rio thesis quoting Arinos](https://www.maxwell.vrac.puc-rio.br/21213/21213_4.PDF)). One reading gives a System 5 that coordinates and the other gives one that intervenes wherever it likes. Brazil got the second.

In practice the emperor used the moderating power to dismiss cabinets and dissolve the chamber, and the new cabinet then ran elections that reliably delivered it a majority. Historians call this *parlamentarismo às avessas*, parliamentarism in reverse. In a working loop the sensor (the election) tells the regulator (the government) what to do. Here the regulator manufactured the reading it wanted, so the instrument measured the government instead of the country. With the vote restricted by income, the channel was narrow even before it was faked.

(The idea keeps coming back. In recent years some argued that the Armed Forces, under article 142 of the 1988 Constitution, or the Supreme Court play a moderating role above the other powers, and in 2024 the Supreme Court rejected the military reading. A republic that keeps looking for a keystone is unsure of its arch.)

### One man's curiosity

Pedro II took the throne at fourteen in 1840 and reigned for almost half a century. He corresponded with Pasteur and Victor Hugo, photographed, studied languages, and tried Bell's telephone at the Philadelphia Centennial in 1876. In the 1870s a submarine telegraph cable linked Brazil to Europe, a project associated with the industrialist Irineu Evangelista de Sousa, the Baron of Mauá, who also built railways, shipyards, gas lighting and banks and went bankrupt in 1875, partly because the imperial state never coordinated with him. My guess is that the Empire's System 4 was mostly the emperor's personal curiosity, and a function that lives in one person retires when he does.

### The slow end of the energy source

Abolition came from the outside in. Britain pressed for an end to the trade and eventually seized slave ships at sea, and Brazil banned the Atlantic trade in 1850. Laws freeing newborns (1871) and the elderly (1885) followed, each small enough to spare the plantation economy a single shock. The Lei Áurea abolished slavery on 13 May 1888, the last abolition in the Americas. It freed roughly three-quarters of a million people and gave them no land, no schooling and no compensation. The economy switched energy sources, to European immigrants whose passage São Paulo's coffee planters subsidized, and left the freed population outside the loop.

Eighteen months later, on 15 November 1889, a military coup ended the monarchy. Planters who had lost their slaves without compensation no longer had a reason to defend the throne, and an army grown confident after the Paraguayan War (1864–1870) took the decision. By Popper's criterion it was a failure of the error-correction loop at the top, since a change of regime came by force, and it set a pattern that repeated in 1930, 1937, 1945 and 1964.

## Part V: The Republic learns to steer

The First Republic (1889–1930) replaced the keystone with a bargain. Presidents from São Paulo and Minas Gerais took turns (the *café com leite* arrangement), governors delivered loyal delegations to Congress, and the federal government left the states alone. At the bottom sat the *coronéis*, rural bosses who controlled the votes of everyone living on or near their land. Victor Nunes Leal's *Coronelismo, enxada e voto* (1949) showed that this was a live exchange and no relic of feudalism: the fading private power of landowners traded votes for the growing public power of the state, paid in jobs, roads and police appointments. As a control system it was closed and tidy. The node the sensor was supposed to measure owned the sensor, information went up only as loyalty, and resources came down only as favors.

The Republic also met a part of its territory that its model did not contain. In the backlands of Bahia, the lay preacher Antônio Conselheiro gathered thousands of poor followers at Canudos in the 1890s. The government read the settlement as a monarchist threat and sent four military expeditions, the last with artillery, which destroyed it in 1897. Euclides da Cunha covered the war as a reporter and wrote *Os Sertões* (1902), the book in which the educated coast discovered the interior it had been ruling blind. His most famous sentence reverses the prejudice he had brought with him: "O sertanejo é, antes de tudo, um forte." A regulator that cannot model a population ends up responding to it with force.

### The first national control loop

The Republic's great economic experiment was coffee. From 1906 the coffee states, and later the federal government, bought surplus coffee to hold up world prices. Edmar Bacha calls it one of the longest-running attempts in economic history to exploit monopoly power, one that worked in the short run and backfired in the long run as high prices encouraged competitors abroad and overplanting at home, until only the distortions remained ([Bacha, 2025](https://iepecdg.com.br/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/20251002CafeCindes.docx-1.pdf)). A negative loop on price had created a positive loop on supply. Every time the regulator propped up the price it paid farmers to plant more, which pushed the price down and required more buying. After the 1929 crash the government bought the surplus and burned it, about 80 million bags in total according to Bacha.

Then something happened that nobody planned, and Celso Furtado was the one who saw it. In *Formação Econômica do Brasil* (1959) he argued that financing the purchase and destruction of coffee with credit and a weaker currency was "Keynesian policy before Keynes" ([USP course notes](https://edisciplinas.usp.br/mod/resource/view.php?id=3251677)). Income kept flowing through the coffee sector into the domestic market, the cheap currency protected local producers from imports, and industry producing for Brazilians became the main driver of investment. Furtado called it the *deslocamento do centro dinâmico*, the displacement of the economy's dynamic center from exports to the home market ([USP](https://edisciplinas.usp.br/mod/resource/view.php?id=1917397)). For the first time since 1500 the main loop of the economy began to close inside the country, as the side effect of a control action aimed at one price.

The same year, 1959, Antonio Candido published *Formação da Literatura Brasileira*, which argues that a national literature exists only when writers, readers and a tradition form a continuous circuit, and traces the moment in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when Brazil's circuit closed. Caio Prado had written *Formação do Brasil Contemporâneo* in 1942. The obsession of Brazilian thought with *formação*, formation, is an obsession with the moment a system starts regulating itself.

### Vargas builds the machinery

Getúlio Vargas took power in the Revolution of 1930 and ruled for fifteen years, eight of them as dictator under the Estado Novo (1937–1945), then came back by election in 1951. His governments built most of the machinery the Brazilian state still runs on. The DASP (1938) introduced competitive exams and career rules for civil servants, the first serious attempt at a professional System 3. Law 185 of January 1936 created the minimum wage, which took effect on 1 July 1940 with 14 different regional values; the labor code (CLT) followed in 1943 ([DIEESE, *Salário Mínimo no Brasil: 90 anos*](https://www.dieese.org.br/livro/2026/Livro90anosSM_DIEESE_2026_web.pdf)). He bargained between Washington and Berlin at the start of the Second World War and came away with American financing for the Volta Redonda steel mill in exchange for alignment, air bases and eventually about 25,000 soldiers sent to fight in Italy. After the war came the national development bank, BNDE (1952), and, after the popular campaign "o petróleo é nosso," Petrobras (1953).

The historian José Murilo de Carvalho noticed that Brazil acquired citizenship in the wrong order. In T. H. Marshall's account of England, civil rights came first, then political rights, then social rights. In Brazil social rights (the minimum wage, labor law, pensions) arrived first, under a dictatorship, political rights came and went, and civil rights stayed the weakest. José Murilo called the result *estadania*, citizenship granted by the state instead of claimed from it. In cybernetic terms the citizen received outputs from the state long before gaining reliable inputs into it. The voters who elected the 1933 constituent assembly were about 4% of the population ([DIEESE](https://www.dieese.org.br/livro/2026/Livro90anosSM_DIEESE_2026_web.pdf)).

The corporatist design deserves a comment. By attaching unions to the Ministry of Labor and routing disputes into labor courts, Vargas built a coordination layer, a System 2 that damped the oscillations between workers and employers. The same design gave the state control of the channel through which workers could signal pain, and the Estado Novo backed it up with a censorship department and a political police.

### Workers build their own sensor

The minimum wage was frozen for eight years after 1943, and by the early 1950s it had lost much of its value. In 1953 textile and metal workers in São Paulo launched what became the "strike of the 300,000," with the empty pan as its symbol. The strikers accused the official cost-of-living indices of being falsified, and a proposal made in a factory assembly by a worker named Paul Singer, later a well-known economist, led in 1955 to the creation of DIEESE, an inter-union department of statistics ([DIEESE](https://www.dieese.org.br/livro/2026/Livro90anosSM_DIEESE_2026_web.pdf)). Workers who did not trust the state's thermometer built their own. The same movement proposed a unit of value that would strip expected inflation out of food prices, a rough ancestor of the device that ended hyperinflation forty years later.

In 1954 Vargas doubled the minimum wage to Cr$2,400. *O Globo* had warned in January of a "verdadeira debacle na economia nacional" and of mass unemployment, industry federations went to the Supreme Court to stop the increase, and it took effect in July ([DIEESE](https://www.dieese.org.br/livro/2026/Livro90anosSM_DIEESE_2026_web.pdf)). In August, surrounded by a political crisis, Vargas shot himself in the presidential palace and left a letter whose last line every Brazilian schoolchild learns: "Saio da vida para entrar na História."

### The periphery as a structure

Furtado belonged to the group around Raúl Prebisch at the UN's Economic Commission for Latin America (CEPAL) in Santiago. CEPAL argued that the world economy had a center and a periphery, and that the periphery exported primary goods whose prices tended to fall relative to the manufactures it imported, so that its position in the system kept it poor whatever its effort. That is systems thinking before the vocabulary arrived: the behavior of a part depends on its place in the network of loops, and optimizing the part locally does not change the place. Furtado took the idea into government and created SUDENE, the development agency for the Northeast, in 1959. After the 1964 coup he lost his political rights and went into exile.

### The brain of the nation

Juscelino Kubitschek (1956–1961) governed with an explicit target system, the Plano de Metas: thirty numerical goals for energy, transport, food, basic industry and education, plus a "synthesis goal," a new capital in the empty center of the country. On his first visit to the site he described it as the future "cérebro das altas decisões nacionais," the brain of the nation's highest decisions. Brasília, designed by Lúcio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer, was inaugurated in April 1960, less than four years after construction began, under the slogan of fifty years of progress in five.

James C. Scott made Brasília a central case in *Seeing Like a State* (1998): high modernism at its purest, a city designed from above for an abstract citizen, with no street corners and no mixed use. The anthropologist James Holston showed that the workers who built it were never meant to live in it, so they built their own settlements outside the plan, and those satellite cities became where most of the population lived. Beer and Scott are usually cited on opposite sides, and here they agree completely. The plan had far less variety than the life it was meant to regulate, life overflowed it, and the overflow organized itself. Cybernetics, read correctly, is the opposite of the master plan: you design the feedback and let the outcome emerge.

Kubitschek's growth was real, and so were the inflation and foreign debt that financed it. Jânio Quadros, elected in 1960, resigned in August 1961 after seven months in office, and his vice president, João Goulart, took over under a parliamentary arrangement designed to limit his power.

## Part VI: 1964, or the regulator that cut its own nerves

On the night of Friday, 13 March 1964, João Goulart spoke to a crowd of 150,000 to 300,000 people in front of the Central do Brasil railway station in Rio, live on radio and television, for about 65 minutes ([IMS, Testemunha Ocular](https://testemunhaocular.ims.com.br/2024/03/30/o-comicio-da-central/)). Before going on stage he had signed two decrees at the Laranjeiras Palace, one authorizing the expropriation of land along federal railways, highways, irrigation zones and reservoirs, and one taking over the private oil refineries ([EBC](https://memoria.ebc.com.br/cidadania/2014/03/ha-50-anos-jango-defendia-reformas-em-comicio-na-central-do-brasil)). He addressed himself to the millions who "dão ao Brasil mais do que recebem" ([Jornal GGN, full text](https://jornalggn.com.br/politica/a-integra-do-discurso-de-jango-na-central-do-brasil/)), defended votes for illiterates and for rank-and-file soldiers, and argued that the land question required changing the constitution itself: "Sem reforma constitucional, trabalhadores, não há reforma agrária" ([PDT transcript](https://pdt.org.br/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Discurso-de-Jo%C3%A3o-Goulart-na-Central-do-Brasil.pdf)).

That night, in parts of Rio, conservative families put lit candles in their windows as a silent protest ([IMS](https://testemunhaocular.ims.com.br/2024/03/30/o-comicio-da-central/)). Six days later, on 19 March, hundreds of thousands marched through São Paulo in the March of the Family with God for Freedom against Goulart and his reforms. Two enormous pain signals crossed the country in the same week and pointed in opposite directions. A political system that passes Popper's test needs a way to settle that kind of conflict without force, and Brazil in 1964 did not have one. On 31 March the army moved, and within two days Goulart was gone, with almost no resistance.

The coup was Brazilian and it was also supported from Washington. Ambassador Lincoln Gordon told a US Senate committee that the movement had been "100 percent" Brazilian and that the embassy had played no part. Documents declassified from 1974 onward showed that the US government had plotted with the Brazilian military and prepared naval and military backing in case of civil war ([NCSU, with the State Department cables](https://faculty.chass.ncsu.edu/slatta/hi453/PS/brazil64.htm)). Operation Brother Sam was the Pentagon's plan to supply guns, gasoline and, if needed, combat troops, and a White House memo of 30 March said the US did not want the Brazilian military to move until everything was in place ([National Security Archive](https://unredacted.com/2014/04/01/from-regime-change-to-declassified-diplomacy/)). The task force, built around the carrier *Forrestal*, turned back because the coup succeeded quickly and without popular reaction ([Zenodo study](https://zenodo.org/records/15231465)). The Brazilian generals did most of the work, and the United States made sure they would not fail.

There is an irony here that the comparative chapter will return to. In the years after the Second World War the United States backed sweeping land reforms in Japan, Taiwan and South Korea as a defense against communism, and those reforms turned out to be one of the foundations of East Asian growth. In Brazil, a decree redistributing land along federal highways was treated as proof of a communist threat.

### A technocracy with a long horizon

The regime that followed lasted 21 years and, in one narrow sense, was the most "cybernetic" government Brazil has had: it believed in planning, trusted engineers and economists, and built institutions with horizons measured in decades. Embraer was founded in 1969, Telebrás in 1972, Embrapa in 1973, the ethanol program Proálcool in 1975, the year of a nuclear agreement with West Germany. The Itaipu treaty with Paraguay was signed in 1973. The regime also introduced *correção monetária*, the automatic indexation of contracts to past inflation, a thermostat that will reappear in the next chapter as the engine of hyperinflation.

The economy grew at about 11% a year between 1968 and 1973, the "miracle," and the growth was not shared. The real value of the minimum wage fell by about 40% between 1963 and 1974, according to the figures collected in DIEESE's history of the minimum wage ([DIEESE](https://www.dieese.org.br/livro/2026/Livro90anosSM_DIEESE_2026_web.pdf)), and the hours a minimum-wage worker in São Paulo needed to buy the basic food basket rose from 98 in 1963 to 163 in 1974 ([DIEESE table](https://www.dieese.org.br/analisecestabasica/2022/202212cestabasica.pdf)). Part VIII puts those numbers on a chart.

Some of the regime's technical loops worked so well that they outlived it and are still among the best things the Brazilian state has built. They had honest error signals from outside the government: export markets for Embraer, farmers' yields for Embrapa.

### The pain channel, cut

The rest of the system went the other way. In December 1968 Institutional Act No. 5 closed Congress, suspended habeas corpus for political crimes and gave the president the power to strip mandates and rights. Censors read newspapers, song lyrics and plays before publication. Torture became policy. The National Truth Commission confirmed 434 people killed or disappeared by the state, 210 of them still missing, and concluded that repression was a state policy decided at the level of the presidency and the military ministries ([Congresso em Foco](https://www.congressoemfoco.com.br/noticias/comissao-aponta-434-mortos-e-desaparecidos-na-ditadura/)).

Art kept sending signals anyway. In 1965 Glauber Rocha presented a manifesto of Cinema Novo in Genoa, "Uma estética da fome," arguing that hunger was the defining fact of Latin American life and that "a mais nobre manifestação cultural da fome é a violência." Cinema Novo, and later Tropicália, were algedonic channels that found a way around the censors.

In Beer's vocabulary the regime cut the pain channels (press, elections, courts, the street). The country kept feeling the pain, and the people in charge stopped hearing it, so errors piled up without correction. Foreign debt taken at floating rates looked cheap during the miracle and became a trap when American interest rates spiked after 1979. Indexation looked like a thermostat and worked as an amplifier. Megaprojects in the Amazon were planned in Brasília with no channel through which the people living there could say they would fail. By the early 1980s the bill arrived all at once, as a debt crisis, an inflationary spiral and a lost decade.

### A sensor pointed at the country

The regime's chief strategist, General Golbery do Couto e Silva, was also its main geopolitical theorist. His *Geopolítica do Brasil* treated the country as a continental power that had to occupy its own territory, and "integrar para não entregar" (integrate so as not to hand over) became the slogan of the Amazon highway program. In 1964 Golbery created the National Intelligence Service, the SNI, and years later he reportedly said he had created a monster.

Beer's System 4 is supposed to face outward, toward the environment, the future, and the threats and opportunities an organization cannot see from inside. The SNI was a System 4 turned around, an intelligence function whose environment was the country's own citizens. It was during these years that, according to Medina, the Brazilian government showed interest in a Cybersyn of its own. Put the two facts side by side and the request is clear: the telex network without Cyberfolk, the sensors without the voice.

### Reopening the channel

The exit was slow. Geisel promised an opening that would be "slow, gradual and secure." An amnesty law in 1979 covered exiles and torturers alike. In 1984 millions of people filled the streets for *Diretas Já*, the campaign for direct presidential elections; the amendment failed in Congress, and the pain signal still reached the top. In 1985 an electoral college chose a civilian president, Tancredo Neves, who fell ill on the eve of his inauguration and died in April, so his vice president, José Sarney, governed in his place.

The lesson of 1964–1985 is narrower than "authoritarian technocracy works." Long-horizon technical institutions can be built under very different regimes, and several of Brazil's best were built under this one. A country's ability to correct itself, though, depends on the pain channels, and the regime that cut them was flying on instruments that measured only what it wanted to see.

## Part VII: Democracy learns to sense

On 4 September 1987, during the debates of the Constituent Assembly, the indigenous leader Ailton Krenak stood at the podium in a white suit and, while he spoke against proposals that would weaken indigenous rights, painted his face black with genipapo dye. The image went around the country. The constitution promulgated on 5 October 1988 recognized indigenous peoples' original rights to the lands they traditionally occupy. That day Ulysses Guimarães, president of the assembly, said of the regime that had just ended: "Temos ódio à ditadura. Ódio e nojo." He called the text the *Constituição Cidadã*, the citizens' constitution.

Read as a control system, the 1988 Constitution is the moment Brazil rebuilt its pain channels by law. It restored direct elections, a free press and independent courts. It made health a right of everyone and a duty of the state, which created the SUS, one of the largest public health systems in the world. It gave the Public Prosecutor's Office unusual independence, which amounts to a System 3\*, an audit channel that can check reality without asking the government for permission. It also inherited an economy whose central loop was running away.

### Hyperinflation, a loop with memory

By the early 1990s inflation ran in the thousands of percent a year, close to 2,500% in 1993. The mechanism was the indexation the military had introduced. Wages, rents and contracts were adjusted automatically for past inflation, each adjustment fed the next, and yesterday's inflation became the floor for today's. Economists called it inertial inflation. An engineer would call it a positive feedback loop with memory, a system whose output is fed back as its own reference.

The first attempts to stop it failed in instructive ways. The Cruzado Plan of 1986 froze prices by decree, and ordinary citizens volunteered as "fiscais do Sarney," reporting shops that raised prices. It was a crowdsourced sensor network attached to a regulator with almost no variety: one frozen number imposed on an economy of millions of relative prices. Shortages and black-market premiums appeared within months. In 1990 the Collor Plan froze most bank deposits, which destroyed trust in the financial system itself.

The Real Plan of 1994 worked because its designers understood the loop. The idea went back to a 1984 proposal by Persio Arida and André Lara Resende, and in a rough form to the São Paulo strikers of 1953. For four months in 1994 prices were quoted in a virtual unit, the URV, whose value in the old currency was updated every day. Everyone could reprice freely, now against the same daily reference, so the staggered memory that kept inertia alive dissolved as contracts moved onto a common clock. On 1 July 1994 the URV became the real.

I think the Real is the most elegant piece of applied cybernetics in Brazilian history. The Cruzado tried to impose an outcome. The URV redesigned the feedback, synchronizing millions of oscillators onto one reference and then swapping the reference. It had a cost that its critics still point to: prices were converted at their peaks and wages at their averages, and the minimum wage at the start of the Real was worth about US$64 ([DIEESE](https://www.dieese.org.br/livro/2026/Livro90anosSM_DIEESE_2026_web.pdf)). In 1999, after a currency crisis, Brazil added a floating exchange rate and an inflation-targeting central bank, a textbook negative loop with a published set point. The central bank gained formal autonomy in 2021.

### A state that can see its poor

The second great cybernetic invention of the democratic period is a database. The *Cadastro Único*, the unified registry of low-income families, became the sensor behind Bolsa Família (2003), which paid monthly transfers conditioned on school attendance and health checkups. For the first time the Brazilian state had a live, individual-level model of its poorest citizens and a way to send them money with no *coronel* in the middle.

The results are measurable. Brazil left the UN hunger map in 2014, returned to it after the crisis years, and left again in 2025 ([O Povo](https://www.opovo.com.br/noticias/brasil/2025/07/28/brasil-sai-do-mapa-da-fome-anuncia-onu.html)); the 2026 report confirmed it is still out, with severe food insecurity down to 0.6% in 2023–2025 ([Movimento Econômico](https://movimentoeconomico.com.br/alimentacao/2026/07/21/fao-confirma-brasil-fora-do-mapa-da-fome-com-menor-custo-de-dieta-saudavel/)). In 2024, 98.8% of new formal jobs went to people registered in the CadÚnico, and in January 2025 about a million families left the program because their income had risen ([O Povo](https://www.opovo.com.br/noticias/brasil/2025/07/28/brasil-sai-do-mapa-da-fome-anuncia-onu.html)). The same sensor paid for itself in 2020, when emergency aid reached tens of millions of informal workers within weeks because the state already knew who they were, while SUS, the Butantan Institute and Fiocruz produced and distributed vaccines at national scale.

### Booms, crises and two impeachments

The 2000s brought a commodity boom, falling inequality and the discovery of the pre-salt oil fields under the Atlantic, which Petrobras had the technology to reach. Then the cycle turned. In June 2013 millions of people took to the streets, starting with a bus fare increase and ending with everything at once, a surge of pain without a single message. The Lava Jato investigation (2014–2021) placed the audit channel at the center of national politics and remains one of the most contested episodes of the period. The 2015–2016 recession was one of the deepest in the country's history.

Two presidents were removed by impeachment, Fernando Collor in 1992 and Dilma Rousseff in 2016. Whatever one thinks of either case (and the second is still disputed), both removals followed constitutional procedures, and after 1985 every transfer of power happened through votes and courts, which by Popper's test is the most important change in the country's political machinery since 1889. The polarized decade that followed is too close for me to judge here. The systemic point is that the channels held: elections were contested and their results stood, and courts, press and the street kept transmitting. The economy grew 3.2% in 2023, 3.4% in 2024 and 2.3% in 2025, and unemployment ended 2025 at 5.6% ([Movimento Econômico](https://movimentoeconomico.com.br/alimentacao/2026/07/21/fao-confirma-brasil-fora-do-mapa-da-fome-com-menor-custo-de-dieta-saudavel/)). A tax reform approved in 2023 began its long transition in 2026.

### Pix and the geopolitics of a payment rail

In November 2020 the Central Bank launched Pix, an instant payment system that it both regulates and operates. More than 170 million individuals have used it, about 80% of the population, and it handled more than 7 billion transactions in January 2026 alone ([O Tempo](https://www.otempo.com.br/politica/2026/6/2/pix-e-apontado-como-pratica-comercial-prejudicial-aos-eua-segundo-governo-trump)). On 4 September 2026 it processed 318.1 million transactions in one day ([Seu Crédito Digital](https://seucreditodigital.com.br/pix-bate-recorde-318-milhoes-transacoes/)). Pix is the closest thing Brazil has built to Cybernet, a real-time national nervous system for money, and it has changed what the state can do. The provisional measure banning online betting, published on 25 September 2026, relies on the payment rails for enforcement, blocking money at the one point every bet must pass through instead of chasing thousands of mirror websites.

It has also made Pix geopolitical. In July 2025 the US Trade Representative opened a Section 301 investigation into Brazilian trade practices, and in June 2026 it concluded that Brazil's policies on payment services harm American companies ([O Tempo](https://www.otempo.com.br/politica/2026/6/2/pix-e-apontado-como-pratica-comercial-prejudicial-aos-eua-segundo-governo-trump)). The complaint, raised since 2022, is that the Central Bank is both operator and regulator ([N3news](https://www.n3news.com.br/2026/04/pix-gera-dialogo-produtivo-entre-brasil-e-eua)). When a peripheral country builds its own nervous system the center notices, and the same question will come back, on a much larger scale, with AI.

## Part VIII: A hundred years in the life of a Brazilian

A Brazilian born in 1900 could expect to live about 29 years, and one born in 2019 about 76, so over those twelve decades the country gained roughly one year of life expectancy every two and a half years ([Our World in Data, long-run series](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/owid/owid-datasets/master/datasets/Life%20expectancy%20-%20Riley%20%282005%29%2C%20Clio%20Infra%20%282015%29%2C%20and%20UN%20%282019%29/Life%20expectancy%20-%20Riley%20%282005%29%2C%20Clio%20Infra%20%282015%29%2C%20and%20UN%20%282019%29.csv)). History written as a sequence of regimes hides this. The charts below put the same person, an ordinary Brazilian, at the center, and measure the century in units anyone can feel: years of life, the ability to read, hours of work for food, hours on the road between the two largest cities.

![Life expectancy at birth in Brazil, Argentina and South Korea, 1900-2019, and the literate and urban shares of Brazil](https://future-seems-so-good.com/blog/assets/improving-brazil-through-cybernetics/charts/life-literacy-urban.png)

*Our World in Data mirrors of Riley (2005), Clio Infra and UN life expectancy, long-run literacy and urbanization · 1900–2019*

Argentina started the century far ahead and South Korea far behind. Brazil closed most of the gap with Argentina by the 2010s, and Korea passed both around 1990, which is the story of the next chapter. In 1920 about two in three Brazilians could not read; in the 2022 census the illiteracy rate was about 7%. Most of that change happened after 1950, in the same decades when the country moved from the countryside to the cities.

### Food, measured in hours

In 1938, to implement the minimum wage, Decree-Law 399 defined a *ração essencial mínima*, the minimum monthly food ration a worker needed. In the São Paulo region the list includes six kilos of beef, along with rice, beans, milk, bread, coffee, potatoes, tomatoes, bananas, sugar, oil and butter ([DIEESE methodology](https://www.portaldefinancas.com/arq_cestas/metodologia.htm)). DIEESE, the statistical office the 1953 strikers created, has priced that basket in São Paulo every month since January 1959. Dividing its cost by the hourly minimum wage gives one of the longest consistent measures of what the country's lowest legal wage can buy.

![Monthly hours of minimum-wage work needed to buy the basic food basket, 1959-2022](https://future-seems-so-good.com/blog/assets/improving-brazil-through-cybernetics/charts/food-basket-hours.png)

*DIEESE, Pesquisa Nacional da Cesta Básica, table 2 · São Paulo · 1959–2022*

The line reads like a record of Brazilian politics. In 1959, near the end of the Kubitschek years, a minimum-wage worker needed about 65 hours of work to buy the basket, the lowest value in the whole series. Under the dictatorship the number more than doubled while the economy grew at double digits, which is what "the miracle was not shared" looks like in practice. Hyperinflation pushed it to its peak in 1994, the year of the Real, at 225 hours, more than a full month of legal working time. The policy of real minimum-wage increases after 2003 brought it down to about 103 hours in 2012, and it climbed again to 139 in 2022 ([DIEESE table](https://www.dieese.org.br/analisecestabasica/2022/202212cestabasica.pdf)). In July 2026 the figure in São Paulo was about 124 hours ([Revista Fórum, with DIEESE data](https://revistaforum.com.br/economia/com-lula-brasileiro-trabalha-13h51-menos-para-comprar-cesta-basica-do-que-com-bolsonaro-dieese)).

The contrarian reading is uncomfortable and, I think, correct as far as it goes: measured this way, the minimum wage of 1959 bought food more easily than the minimum wage of 2026. The caveats matter. The recipe of the basket has been fixed since 1938 while diets changed, in 1959 far fewer workers were covered by the minimum wage at all, and the minimum wage is a policy variable, set by bargaining, that says little about average income. At the average labor income of R$3,726 reported by IBGE in mid-2026, the São Paulo basket, which cost R$965 in June, takes about a quarter of a month's pay ([Gazeta SP](https://www.gazetasp.com.br/economia/cesta-basica-sao-paulo-salario-minimo-horas-trabalho/)). In dollars, the minimum wage was worth about US$64 at the launch of the Real, reached about US$306 in 2010 and stood at about US$279 in December 2025, when it bought 1.8 baskets in São Paulo and 2.8 in Aracaju ([DIEESE](https://www.dieese.org.br/livro/2026/Livro90anosSM_DIEESE_2026_web.pdf)).

### Distance, measured in hours

The two largest cities are about 400 kilometers apart. Here is how long it took to cover that distance.

| Year | How | Travel time |
|---|---|---|
| 2026 | Car on the Via Dutra, or a flight | About 5 to 6 hours by car, about 1 hour in the air; no passenger train |
| 1977 | Train | About 10 hours |
| 1959 | Ponte aérea, the shared air shuttle | About 1 hour in the air |
| 1951 | Car on the new Via Dutra | About 6 hours |
| 1948 | Car on the old road | About 12 hours |
| 1930s | Train; road | About 15 hours by train, more than a day by road |
| 1877 | First through train, changing gauge at Cachoeira | About 15 hours |

Sources: [ANPF](https://anpf.com.br/cia-sao-paulo-rio) (1877), [Sesc São Paulo](https://portal.sescsp.org.br/online/artigo/7993_VIA+DUTRA+AEREA) (1930s, 1959), [Motonline](https://www.motonline.com.br/noticia/rodovia-presidente-dutra-ha-60-anos-ligando-sao-paulo-rio-de-janeiro/) (1948, 1951), [IJSN](http://biblioteca.ijsn.es.gov.br/Record/338637) (1977), [Diário do Transporte](https://diariodotransporte.com.br/2016/01/17/historia-da-rodovia-presidente-dutra-ligacao-rio-sao-paulo/) (the end of passenger rail by 1990).

The railway took a hundred years to go from 15 hours to 10, and then passenger service disappeared. The road cut the trip in half in a single year, 1951. The air shuttle, created in 1959 by three competing airlines that agreed to share one timetable, cut it to an hour and has stayed there for almost seventy years. A high-speed train between the two cities was promised for 2016 and never built.

### Voice, measured in dollars

In 1996 Brazil had about 10 fixed telephones per 100 inhabitants ([PUC-SP](https://revistas.pucsp.br/index.php/pensamentorealidade/article/download/8493/6298/20715)). A fixed line cost around US$5,000 when the state phone system was privatized in 1998, people declared their lines as assets on their income tax returns, and some rented lines out as an investment ([Mercado & Consumo](https://mercadoeconsumo.com.br/?p=127325)). An early cellular line in 1991 cost the equivalent of about US$22,000 ([PUC-Rio thesis, citing Anatel](https://www.maxwell.vrac.puc-rio.br/6163/6163_2.PDF)). The country went from about 4.5 million mobile lines in 1998 to 235.8 million subscriptions in 2018 ([Gazeta do Povo](https://www.gazetadopovo.com.br/opiniao/artigos/privatizacao-da-telefonia-quem-perdeu-foi-a-viuva-enj7rjb4j56oimstjq1hcowaa/)), and today more than 170 million people move money with Pix from the same phones.

### What the century shows

Put the four measures side by side and a pattern appears that Deutsch would recognize. Where the change depended on knowledge (vaccines, sanitation, literacy, aircraft, digital switching, a payment protocol), the gains were enormous and they stuck. Where it depended on a political bargain, the minimum wage being the clearest case, the line went up and down with the regime, rising when the pain channels were closed and falling when they were open. The basket chart is close to a direct readout of Brazil's algedonic channel for its poorest workers.

## Part IX: Brazil and its twins

The best way to test an explanation of Brazil is to hold the variables fixed and change the country. The chart below follows income per person for Brazil and five countries that make useful comparisons: Argentina, which was far richer in 1900; South Korea, which was poorer until the 1980s; Mexico, a similar Latin American economy; Portugal, the old metropole; and the United States as the frontier.

![GDP per person in Brazil, South Korea, Argentina, Mexico, Portugal and the United States, 1900-2018, log scale](https://future-seems-so-good.com/blog/assets/improving-brazil-through-cybernetics/charts/gdp-per-person.png)

*Maddison Project Database 2020 via the Our World in Data mirror · six countries · 1900–2018*

Three facts stand out. In 1900 Brazilian income per person was about a ninth of the American level, and in 1980 it reached its best relative position, a little over a quarter, before the lost decade pushed it back. In 1960 South Korea's income per person was less than half of Brazil's, and by 2018 it was more than two and a half times Brazil's. And the old metropole, which was about 40% richer than Brazil in 1960, was almost twice as rich in 2018 ([Maddison Project Database 2020, OWID mirror](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/owid/owid-datasets/master/datasets/Maddison%20Project%20Database%202020%20%28Bolt%20and%20van%20Zanden%20%282020%29%29/Maddison%20Project%20Database%202020%20%28Bolt%20and%20van%20Zanden%20%282020%29%29.csv)).

Schooling tells the same story from the other side.

| Country | Years of schooling, adults, 1960 | 1990 | 2015 |
|---|---|---|---|
| United States | 8.9 | 12.3 | 13.3 |
| South Korea | 3.1 | 9.1 | 12.1 |
| Chile | 5.0 | 8.0 | 10.3 |
| Argentina | 5.3 | 7.9 | 9.8 |
| Portugal | 1.9 | 5.2 | 9.1 |
| Mexico | 2.3 | 5.6 | 8.6 |
| Brazil | 2.5 | 4.0 | 7.6 |

Source: Lee-Lee (2016), Barro-Lee (2018) and UNDP (2018), average total years of schooling of the adult population, via the [Our World in Data mirror](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/owid/owid-datasets/master/datasets/Years%20of%20Schooling%20-%20based%20on%20Lee-Lee%20%282016%29%2C%20Barro-Lee%20%282018%29%20and%20UNDP%20%282018%29/Years%20of%20Schooling%20-%20based%20on%20Lee-Lee%20%282016%29%2C%20Barro-Lee%20%282018%29%20and%20UNDP%20%282018%29.csv).

In 1960 the average Brazilian adult had slightly less schooling than the average Korean and slightly more than the average Portuguese. Thirty years later Korea had more than doubled Brazil's level, and in 2015 Brazil had reached roughly where Korea stood in 1980. The colonizer, less schooled than the colony in 1960, passed it during the 1970s.

### Korea: the same decade, a different feedback

Brazil and South Korea grew at similar double-digit rates in the late 1960s and early 1970s, both under military rule, both with heavy state direction of credit. The difference was the design of the loop. Alice Amsden's *Asia's Next Giant* (1989) describes Korean industrial policy as reciprocal: firms received cheap credit and protection in exchange for performance standards, above all export targets, and firms that missed the targets lost the support. Brazilian import substitution protected industries for a domestic market and rarely made the protection conditional on performance abroad. Korea's subsidies came with an external error signal, the world market, and most of Brazil's did not.

The other half of the difference happened before industrialization. Korea carried out a sweeping land reform around 1950, with American support, which flattened rural inequality and put a generation of farmers' children in school. Brazil attempted a land decree in 1964, and the attempt helped trigger a coup that the same superpower backed. The schooling table above is partly the bill for that week in March.

### 1983 to 1987: chips on both sides of the world

The clearest natural experiment happened in the same four years. In 1983 Samsung entered memory chips. Taiwan's state research institute ITRI, founded in 1973, spun off TSMC in 1987 with government capital. In between, in 1984, Brazil passed its Informatics Law, reserving the market for small computers to national firms. All three were state-led technology bets made in the same decade by middle-income countries. The Asian ones forced their firms to compete in the world market from the start, and the Brazilian one protected its firms from exactly that signal. TSMC now manufactures a large share of the world's most advanced chips, and the Brazilian market reserve was dismantled in the early 1990s.

### Portugal and the external anchor

Portugal left its dictatorship in 1974 and joined the European Economic Community in 1986. It did not become rich through a clever industrial policy. It imported a set of external constraints and resources (a common market, structural funds, European rules and courts) that acted as a System 3\* it could not switch off, and it spent heavily on schooling, which rose from 1.9 years in 1960 to 9.1 in 2015. The contrarian lesson is that a country can borrow error correction from outside when it cannot generate enough at home. Brazil has never had an external anchor of that kind, and Mercosur never became one.

### Argentina: wealth without error correction

In 1900 Argentina's income per person was about five times Brazil's, among the highest in the world. From 1930 the country went through a long sequence of military coups, hyperinflations and defaults, and by 2018 its income per person was only about a third higher than Brazil's. In Popper's terms Argentina spent half a century unable to remove bad governments or bad policies without breaking something, and wealth did not protect it. Islands of excellence survived anyway. INVAP, a state-owned technology company founded in Bariloche in 1976, designs and exports nuclear research reactors, including Australia's OPAL, which came online in the mid-2000s. Macroeconomic chaos and a world-class engineering team can live in the same country, which is also Brazil's situation with Embrapa and Embraer.

### Mexico: integration without a learning loop

Mexico signed NAFTA in 1994 and integrated its manufacturing with the United States more deeply than any other Latin American economy integrated with anyone. Exports multiplied, and income per person grew slowly, from about 9,900 dollars in 1980 to about 16,500 in 2018 in the Maddison series, a gain of about two-thirds, close to Brazil's. Integration gave Mexico an external market, a signal Brazil's industry lacked, but assembly plants that import components and export finished goods learn little from the loop they sit in. An error signal only helps a firm that owns the thing being corrected.

### Chile, and the strangest footnote

Cybersyn's own country offers the strangest footnote in this essay. After 1973 the military government and its Chicago-trained economists opened the economy, and from the mid-1980s Chile grew faster than any other Latin American country for two decades. In 1976 the government created Fundación Chile together with ITT, the American telephone company that had worked against Allende, with money from the settlement over ITT's nationalized Chilean assets. Fundación Chile went on to seed industries that did not exist, most famously salmon farming, which turned Chile into one of the world's largest salmon producers. The institution that did for Chilean aquaculture what Embrapa did for Brazilian soybeans was paid for by the company that had tried to bring down the government that built Cybersyn.

### Three networks

The historian of technology Benjamin Peters compared three national computer networks in *How Not to Network a Nation* (2016). In the early 1960s the Soviet cyberneticist Viktor Glushkov proposed OGAS, a nationwide network to manage the planned economy; it died in the 1970s in turf wars between ministries. The American ARPANET, launched in 1969 with Pentagon money, grew into the internet because its builders cooperated across institutions. Peters's summary is that the capitalist network was built by cooperating state-funded scientists and the socialist one was killed by competing bureaucrats. Cybersyn, the third case, was killed by a coup.

Brazil's most successful network, Pix, is a hybrid none of the three anticipated: a rail built and run by the central bank, open to hundreds of competing institutions that build their own products on top. India's UPI (2016) and Estonia's X-Road data exchange (2001) belong to the same family of digital public infrastructure, and they suggest that this design, public rails with private variety on top, may be where middle-income democracies have a real advantage.

### Oil, and two ways to spend it

Norway created its sovereign oil fund in 1990 and turned an exhaustible resource into a permanent financial asset governed by strict rules. Venezuela spent its oil through the state budget and ended in collapse. Brazil created a pre-salt social fund in 2010, modeled in part on the Norwegian idea, and whether the pre-salt becomes Norway's story or Venezuela's depends on rules and on error correction far more than on geology.

### What the twins have in common

Across these cases, the countries that converged combined three things: an external error signal their firms could not ignore (export markets for Korea and Taiwan, European rules for Portugal), heavy and early investment in schooling, and a way to change governments and policies without breaking the machine. The countries that stalled were missing at least one. Brazil had islands of all three and never had the whole set at the same time.

## Part X: The loops that worked

Every country keeps a list of institutions it is proud of. Brazil's list is unusually good, and the question worth asking is why these worked while so many others failed. The winners share a cybernetic signature.

| Loop | Founded | Error signal it could not fake | Foreign knowledge it absorbed | What it produced |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Embrapa | 1973 | Farmers' yields and costs | Researchers trained abroad; tropical soil science | Soybean output from 15 Mt (1979) to about 173 Mt expected; nitrogen fixed by bacteria instead of imported fertilizer |
| Embraer (with ITA) | ITA 1950, Embraer 1969 | Airlines buying in a global market | ITA modeled on MIT | One of the world's leading makers of regional and commercial jets |
| Petrobras deepwater | CENPES research center, 1960s | Geology and cost per barrel | Offshore engineering, then its own | Oil from the pre-salt, under two kilometers of water and a thick layer of salt |
| National Immunization Program | 1973 | Disease incidence | Global vaccine science; Butantan and Fiocruz manufacturing | Mass vaccination at continental scale |
| Real and inflation targeting | 1994, 1999 | Prices and expectations | Monetary theory, adapted to indexation | The end of hyperinflation |
| Pix | 2020 | Adoption by people and firms | Instant-payment designs from abroad | More than 170 million individual users |
| OBMEP and IMPA | 2005, 1952 | Scores on the same national test | The culture of international olympiads | More than 18.5 million students a year |

Sources: [Embrapa](https://www.embrapa.br/en/johanna-dobereiner/quem-foi), [World Food Prize](https://www.worldfoodprize.org/index.cfm/87428-1/49317/scientist_whose_biological_seed_treatments_helped_make_brazil_a_global_breadbasket_named_2025_world_food_prize_laureate), [O Tempo](https://www.otempo.com.br/politica/2026/6/2/pix-e-apontado-como-pratica-comercial-prejudicial-aos-eua-segundo-governo-trump), [Super Rádio Tupi](https://www.tupi.fm/?p=2308143).

### Embrapa, or learning to farm the tropics

When Embrapa was founded, tropical agriculture was considered close to a contradiction. The cerrado, the vast savanna of central Brazil, had acidic, poor soils that temperate-zone science had written off. Embrapa sent its young researchers abroad for graduate degrees, brought them back and pointed them at a problem nobody else was working on.

The most beautiful result came from Johanna Döbereiner, a Czech-born scientist who arrived in Brazil in 1950. In the 1960s, when going against chemical fertilizer was close to blasphemy, she studied bacteria that let soybeans take nitrogen from the air. Brazil's soybean breeding program went in the opposite direction from the American one, which relied on fertilizer, and the technique saves the country more than US$2 billion a year ([Embrapa](https://www.embrapa.br/en/johanna-dobereiner/quem-foi)). Her student Mariangela Hungria won the 2025 World Food Prize, and over Hungria's career national soybean output rose from 15 million tons in 1979 to an expected 173 million ([World Food Prize](https://www.worldfoodprize.org/index.cfm/87428-1/49317/scientist_whose_biological_seed_treatments_helped_make_brazil_a_global_breadbasket_named_2025_world_food_prize_laureate)).

The story has a cost. Embrapa was born inside the dictatorship's development plans, whose goals included the conquest of the cerrado and the Amazon ([ReVista, Harvard](https://revista.drclas.harvard.edu/lessons-from-the-brazilian-cerrado-technological-achievement-and-environmental-challenges/)), and much of the cerrado has since been cleared. A loop can be brilliant on the variable it measures and blind to the ones it ignores. Yield was measured and the biome was not.

### Embraer, a school before a company

Embraer began as a school. In 1950 the air force founded the Aeronautics Institute of Technology (ITA) in São José dos Campos, modeled on MIT and led in its first years by an MIT professor. Nineteen years later its graduates founded Embraer to build the Bandeirante, a twin turboprop for Brazil's thin regional routes. The company was privatized in 1994. Its real regulator was the airline customer in a global market, ready to buy a competitor's plane the moment Embraer's was worse. Protection helped it start, and exposure made it good.

The counterexample is the one described in the previous chapter, the informatics market reserve of 1984. The sociologist Peter Evans compared Brazil, India and Korea in *Embedded Autonomy* (1995) and found that what mattered was whether state agencies were insulated from patronage and at the same time densely connected to the firms they steered, and whether those firms faced real competition. The market reserve protected its firms from the only signal that would have corrected them, and a closed loop with no outside error signal decays.

### A regulator in every tank

Since 2003 most new cars sold in Brazil have been flex-fuel, able to run on any mix of gasoline and ethanol. Drivers choose at the pump, usually by the rule of thumb that ethanol pays when it costs less than about 70% of the price of gasoline. The country's fuel mix is regulated by tens of millions of drivers responding to one price ratio in real time. The state never chose the mix. It helped put an actuator in every car and let a price signal do the rest.

### A test for eighteen million children

IMPA, the national institute of pure and applied mathematics, was founded in Rio in 1952. In 2005 it began running OBMEP, a mathematics olympiad for public schools that now reaches more than 18.5 million students a year ([Super Rádio Tupi](https://www.tupi.fm/?p=2308143)), and in 2014 Artur Avila, trained at IMPA, became the first Latin American to win the Fields Medal. OBMEP is cheap and simple: one national test, prizes and scholarships for the best, teachers and families doing the rest. As a sensor it finds talent in towns the education system had never measured, and as a signal it tells a child in the interior of Piauí that she is good at something the whole country values.

### The signature

Set the winners side by side and five design principles appear. Each had an error signal from outside the institution that it could not fake, whether yields, airline orders, disease incidence, test scores or adoption. Each absorbed foreign knowledge on purpose (ITA copied MIT, Embrapa trained its people in foreign universities, the Real borrowed monetary theory), which is antropofagia used as industrial policy. Each combined technical staff insulated from patronage with constant contact with farmers, airlines, patients or schools, Evans's formula and Beer's autonomous System 1 with a working System 2. Several are public rails with private variety on top: the central bank built Pix and hundreds of institutions compete on it; OBMEP is one test and thousands of schools do the teaching. And all of them had long horizons protected from the electoral cycle while staying exposed to feedback, where the worst institutions tend to be protected from both.

The remaining chapters apply these principles to the parts of Brazil that still do not work.

## Part XI: Brazil as a viable system

If Beer is taken seriously, the first job is a diagnosis: map his five systems onto the country and see which are overgrown, which are missing and where the channels are noisy. What follows is a sketch. A real model would have to be built from the bottom up, the way Beer's engineers modeled factories with the operators' own knowledge.

| System | Function | Where it lives in Brazil | Diagnosis |
|---|---|---|---|
| S1, operations | The units that do the work | Firms, farms, families, 5,570 municipalities, schools, clinics | Enormous variety; 37.4% of workers informal and partly invisible to the rest of the system |
| S2, coordination | Damping oscillations between units | Central Bank, Pix, CadÚnico, gov.br, national standards | Excellent for money, weak between states |
| S3, control | Running the whole in the present | Ministries, budget, regulatory agencies | Rigid and fragmented; most spending locked in by law, discretionary money scattered through parliamentary amendments |
| S3\*, audit | Checking reality directly | Audit court (TCU), comptroller (CGU), prosecutors, Federal Police, courts, press | Strong, sometimes strong enough to freeze System 1 |
| S4, intelligence | The outside and the future | IBGE, IPEA, EPE, INPE, Embrapa, universities | Scattered and underfunded, with little authority over decisions |
| S5, identity | Policy, and the balance between S3 and S4 | Constitution, presidency, Congress, Supreme Court | Oscillating, still looking for a keystone |

Source for informality: IBGE, second quarter of 2026, via [Portal de Prefeitura](https://portaldeprefeitura.com.br/brasil/desemprego-trimestre-menor-ja-registrado-periodo-aponta-ibge/628383/).

### System 1: the variety is the asset

Brazil's operating units are extraordinarily diverse: soy farms in Mato Grosso, fintechs in São Paulo, riverside communities in Amazonas, the informal economy of every city. Unemployment in the second quarter of 2026 was 5.4%, the lowest since the series began in 2012, and 37.4% of workers were informal ([Portal de Prefeitura](https://portaldeprefeitura.com.br/brasil/desemprego-trimestre-menor-ja-registrado-periodo-aponta-ibge/628383/)).

Informality is usually discussed as a moral or fiscal problem. Cybernetically it is a visibility problem: about two workers in five are units the regulator cannot see. The *microempreendedor individual* (MEI), a simplified legal form created in 2008, has been one of the country's best sensor upgrades, with more than 17 million active MEIs in 2026 ([Fecomércio MG](https://fecomerciomg.org.br/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Estudo-sobre-o-MEI-2026.pdf)). Pix does the same for money, turning every informal payment that moves onto a rail into a signal.

There is a darker problem inside System 1 that Beer's model makes easy to state. Norbert Elias described the formation of modern states as a long process in which a central authority acquires the monopoly of legitimate violence. In large parts of Brazilian cities that process never finished, and militias or drug factions tax, police and adjudicate whole neighborhoods. In VSM terms these are rival System 5s operating inside System 1, each with its own identity, rules and sensors. No amount of optimization in Brasília reaches a unit whose real regulator is somebody else.

### System 2: good at money, weak at federalism

System 2 is the least glamorous function and the one whose absence shows first: it keeps the parts from fighting each other. Brazil's is world-class in money. The Central Bank damps inflation, Pix synchronizes payments and the CadÚnico synchronizes social policy. Between the states it has been weak for decades. The *guerra fiscal*, in which states compete with tax breaks to pull factories away from each other, is a textbook oscillation that nobody damped. The 2023 tax reform, which moves consumption taxes to the place where goods are consumed, is in effect a System 2 repair, and its transition runs into the 2030s.

### Systems 3 and 3\*: the overgrown middle

Raymundo Faoro's *Os Donos do Poder* (1958) described a *estamento burocrático*, a bureaucratic estate that since Portuguese times had treated the state as its own property and governed society from above. In Beer's terms that is System 3 capturing System 5, control mistaking itself for identity.

The symptoms today are rigidity and fear. Most of the federal budget is committed by the constitution or by law before any decision is made, and a growing share of the discretionary remainder is distributed through parliamentary amendments, hundreds of small regulators each steering its own slice. The audit channel, which the 1988 Constitution rightly made strong, has become strong enough that public managers talk about the *apagão das canetas*, the blackout of pens: officials who stop signing things because every signature is a future liability. An audit function that freezes operations has forgotten that it exists to serve them.

Sérgio Buarque's cordial man lives here too. When formal control is rigid and slow, the informal network of favors supplies the missing variety, and every *jeitinho* is a small patch on a regulator that was never designed for the territory it governs.

### System 4: the missing organ

If I had to name one diagnosis it would be this one. Brazil has excellent pieces of System 4. IBGE is one of the best statistical agencies in the developing world, INPE monitors deforestation from satellites, EPE plans energy, and IPEA and the universities produce serious research. There is no place, though, where the outside world and the future are modeled with authority over decisions. Nobody in the Brazilian state is responsible for asking what AI will do to the labor market in 2032, or what the grid needs if data centers arrive at scale, and then making the rest of the government listen.

The country's best-known description of itself has the same problem. In 1941 Stefan Zweig, a refugee from Nazi Europe who would die in Petrópolis the following year, published *Brasil, país do futuro*. The phrase stuck, first as praise and later as a joke. A country whose identity sits permanently in the future tense has merged System 5 into System 4: identity should say what the country is, and intelligence should say where it is going. When the two collapse into each other the future turns into a mood and stops being a model.

### System 5 and the pain channel

At the top, the three powers keep testing where the keystone sits. The Supreme Court's expanding role, Congress's control of budget amendments and the presidency's use of provisional measures are all attempts to supply a coordinating function the 1988 design left ambiguous. My guess is that the oscillation reflects a missing System 5 function more than a failure of any one institution: the country lacks an agreed procedure for balancing present control against future intelligence.

The algedonic channel is open and noisy. Elections, courts and press all transmit, which is the great achievement of the democratic period. Social media, though, amplifies outrage faster than any institution can process it, which is itself a positive feedback loop. A healthy pain channel is loud when survival is threatened and quiet the rest of the time. Brazil's is loud all the time, and that makes the alarms that matter harder to hear.

The summary: a rich, partly invisible System 1 with armed rivals inside it, a System 2 that works where it was engineered and fails where it was not, an overgrown System 3, an atrophied System 4, and a System 5 still looking for its keystone.

## Part XII: Loops worth cutting

Beer's engineers started every factory model by looking for bottlenecks. The national equivalent is to look for runaway loops, places where positive feedback drains the operating units faster than they can recover. The obvious ones (corruption, violence, schooling) already have names and constituencies. The interesting ones look normal, and many of them look like protection.

### The prototype: the betting ban

The provisional measure published on 25 September 2026 is a clean case. Online betting was a positive loop at the level of the family: variable rewards, losses, the urge to win the money back, debt, more betting. A study by USP's Made center estimated that betting took between R$120 billion and R$141 billion out of economic activity in 2025, 0.9% to 1.1% of GDP ([O Tempo](https://www.otempo.com.br/economia/2026/9/25/estudos-indicam-perdas-de-ate-r-141-bilhoes-para-economia-brasileira-por-causa-de-bets)). Other estimates are much lower, and the direction is not in dispute.

Three features make it a prototype. The first is Ashby's law applied to a person: a tired worker on a bus has far less variety than a product tuned by A/B tests and retention models, so self-regulation was never a fair fight, and regulation moved up one level of recursion. The second is the control point. The measure bans intermediation and payments and leaves the blocking of Pix and bank transfers to a Central Bank rule ([BNLData](https://bnldata.com.br/mp-das-bets-confisca-licencas-pagas-anistia-infracoes-e-tira-dos-estados-a-quota-fixa/)), so instead of chasing an unlimited number of mirror websites it reduces variety at the one chokepoint every bet has to pass through. The third is a cost nobody priced: the regulated market was also a sensor that reported bets by taxpayer number to a federal system, and whatever demand survives the ban will now move where no one can measure it. Cutting a loop is half the job, and the other half is a sensor that tells you whether it stayed cut.

Sérgio Buarque's adventurer, who wants to harvest the fruit without planting the tree, is the ideal customer of a casino, and the country he described adopted online betting at astonishing speed.

### Seven more loops

| Loop | How it runs away | Where to cut it |
|---|---|---|
| The Simples cliff | A tax jump at the revenue ceiling of the simplified regime makes firms stop growing or split into several small companies, so they never gain scale and stay dependent on the regime | Replace the cliff with a ramp |
| Induced turnover | Workers can draw their FGTS severance fund, the 40% penalty and unemployment insurance only when dismissed, so dismissal becomes a goal; firms stop training people who will leave, and productivity and wages stagnate | Allow access to the fund for defined purposes without ending the job |
| *Parcelado sem juros* | Interest hidden in the price makes cash buyers subsidize installment buyers; households commit income months ahead with no buffer, and a shock sends them into revolving credit at extreme rates | Show the cost of installments on the payment screen |
| Litigation as a product | Presumed moral damages plus aggressive client-capture make lawsuits a business; companies price them in, new competitors stay away, service worsens and suits rise | Require evidence of damage and regulate the trade in other people's claims |
| Distrust and the *cartório* | Low trust demands notaries, guarantors and duplicate documents; the cost pushes people to informal workarounds, which enable fraud, which confirms the distrust | Verifiable digital identity, electronic signatures, fast reversal of fraud |
| Paying the best to avoid risk | A very high risk-free rate makes lending to the state beat investing in production, and stable, well-paid public careers pull top graduates into years of exam preparation, which keeps the private sector thin | Narrow the gap in returns to risk; the rate side depends on the fiscal loop |
| Time on the bus | Cheap housing is far from jobs, hours of commuting eat the time to study, sleep and raise children, income stays capped and housing stays far | Density near transit, bus lanes, remote work where possible |

The litigation loop has the most striking numbers. According to the airlines' association Abear, 98.5% of all lawsuits against airlines in the world are filed in Brazil, one for every 0.52 flights against one for every 2,585 in the United States, and about 90% of them seek moral damages ([Poder360](https://www.poder360.com.br/poder-justica/brasil-concentra-985-das-acoes-contra-aereas-diz-abear/)). In a sample of about 400,000 cases, roughly 10% were filed by the same 20 lawyers or firms ([O Povo](https://www.opovo.com.br/noticias/economia/2025/06/28/judicializacao-a-brasileira-pressiona-aereas-e-alimenta-mercado-de-processos.html)). The figures come from an interested party, and even a fraction of them would make Brazil an outlier.

The rate loop is the most expensive. The Selic stood at 14.25% in mid-2026 ([Portal de Prefeitura](https://portaldeprefeitura.com.br/brasil/desemprego-trimestre-menor-ja-registrado-periodo-aponta-ibge/628383/)), and the banker André Esteves compared the CDI to a Kenyan marathon runner that never tires ([Seu Dinheiro](https://www.seudinheiro.com/2026/economia/gosto-de-ativos-em-reais-no-final-das-contas-vai-remunerar-melhor-do-que-o-dolar-diz-andre-esteves-ao-falar-de-investimentos-em-evento-do-btg-mlim/)). That runner sets the pace every productive investment in the country has to beat.

### The loop that is still open

The mechanism that made betting destructive, a variable reward tuned against the user's self-control, is alive in short video and in games with loot boxes. There the currency is time and attention, and the users are often children. Brazil has already moved on part of it, taking phones out of classrooms, and it is the natural next place to apply the same logic.

### Why protections turn into traps

Rui Barbosa gave Brazilian law its most quoted principle of justice in 1920, in a speech to law graduates: "A regra da igualdade não consiste senão em quinhoar desigualmente aos desiguais." Equality means treating unequal cases unequally. Almost every loop in the table began as that kind of protection. The simplified regime protects small firms, the FGTS protects workers, moral damages protect consumers, job stability protects civil servants from political persecution, and the notary protects against fraud.

The trouble starts when the unequal treatment creates an incentive to stay in the protected category. A firm that grows loses its regime, a worker who keeps a job loses access to the fund, a litigant who proves nothing still collects. Charles Tilly argued in *Durable Inequality* (1998) that categorical inequalities persist because organizations find them useful, and these loops are small machines for making categories permanent. The cut that works keeps the protection and removes the incentive to stay: a ramp in place of a cliff, access without dismissal, a price made visible. Each of these can be piloted in one state or sector, measured and reversed if the signal says it failed, which is the kind of problem Deutsch meant when he said problems are soluble.

Three of the loops (installments, trust, litigation) have a sharp chokepoint that runs through data and payment rails. Engineers can cut those three without waiting for a new law, and the next chapters are about what engineers can do.

## Part XIII: The next cycle, or how not to export compute like sugar

Every earlier wave of technology reached Brazil as a commodity cycle, from brazilwood to rubber. The risk with AI is running the same program with new inputs: clean electricity and land go out, and tokens, models and rules come in. Caio Prado's sentence would need only one new noun.

The first policy move of this cycle shows the risk and the opportunity at once. The data-center regime, Redata, became law this month (Law 15.504/2026). It suspends federal taxes on equipment for new or expanded data centers, with an estimated waiver of R$5.2 billion in 2026 ([Senado Notícias](https://www12.senado.leg.br/noticias/materias/2026/09/01/incentivo-para-instalacao-de-data-centers-no-brasil-e-aprovado-pelo-senado)). In exchange, beneficiaries must buy all their electricity from renewable or low-emission sources, invest 2% in research and development and offer at least 10% of their capacity to the domestic market ([Cescon Barrieu](https://cesconbarrieu.com.br/senado-aprova-o-redata-regime-especial-de-tributacao-para-servicos-de-data-center/)). The government has talked about attracting R$2 trillion in ten years ([eixos](https://eixos.com.br/energia-eletrica/o-que-e-o-redata-o-regime-fiscal-para-data-centers/)), and one flagship project is a wind-powered data center in Ceará whose client is ByteDance ([Brazil Journal, via CB Insights](https://www.cbinsights.com/company/casa-dos-ventos)).

The domestic-capacity and R&D clauses are exactly the kind of feedback the informatics market reserve lacked, so the law deserves credit. A strategy that stops at data centers, though, turns Brazil into a landlord for other people's intelligence. The useful question is where, layer by layer, the error signals live, because that is where value accrues.

### The stack, layer by layer

| Layer | What Brazil has | The trap | The move |
|---|---|---|---|
| Energy | One of the cleanest large grids in the world, with wind and solar in the Northeast | Selling cheap electrons to foreign compute | Price clean firm power as a strategic product and co-locate it with domestic compute and industry |
| Minerals | About 15% of global rare-earth reserves, second only to China; around 90% of world niobium output; large graphite reserves | Exporting ore and importing magnets | Separation, refining and magnets at home, the lesson of rubber |
| Chips | A small base (CEITEC, design groups, open-architecture projects) | Pretending to build leading-edge fabs | Design niches, packaging and testing, open architectures |
| Compute | A R$23 billion AI plan to 2028 and new supercomputers | Idle public compute, or compute rented to foreigners | Tie public compute to national environments and users |
| Models | Portuguese, and the data of one of the world's largest instant-payment systems | Racing to pretrain frontier models | Adaptation, evaluation and fine-tuning on Brazilian tasks |
| Data and environments | Pix, SUS, CadÚnico, INPE, Embrapa trials, a digitized judiciary | Giving raw data away, or locking it up so nobody learns from it | Auditable, privacy-preserving environments where models meet real error signals |
| Talent | 18.5 million students in one math olympiad, IMPA, strong engineering schools | Training people for export | Make the hardest problems in the world solvable here |
| Robotics and agriculture | The largest tropical agriculture in the world, mining at scale | Buying finished machines | Field robotics and autonomy tested the way Embrapa tests seeds |
| Biotech | Some of the richest biodiversity on Earth, SUS, Butantan, Fiocruz | Biopiracy, the rubber story again | AI-driven bioprospecting with benefit-sharing, vaccines and trials at SUS scale |

Sources: rare earths from [NetZero Circle, on the 2026 ANM revision](https://www.netzerocircle.org/news/brazil-retains-second-place-in-global-rare-earth-reserves-despite-revised-estimates); niobium from USGS via [EMIS](https://isimarkets.com/insights/brazil-looking-for-ways-to-benefit-from-niobium-reserves/); the AI plan from [DPL News](https://dplnews.com/um-ano-de-plano-brasileiro-de-inteligencia-artificial-o-que-esta-sendo-feito/) and [Movimento Econômico](https://movimentoeconomico.com.br/tecnologia/2026/08/20/supercomputador-de-r-1-bi-no-rn-segue-plano-de-soberania-digital-e-ia-no-brasil/); OBMEP from [Super Rádio Tupi](https://www.tupi.fm/?p=2308143).

The National Mining Agency revised Brazil's rare-earth reserves from 21 to 11.4 million tonnes of oxides in 2026, and because global estimates also fell, Brazil still holds about 15% and stays second to China ([NetZero Circle](https://www.netzerocircle.org/news/brazil-retains-second-place-in-global-rare-earth-reserves-despite-revised-estimates)). Rare earths become the magnets inside every electric motor, drone and robot joint, and China's power over them comes more from its separation plants and magnet factories than from its mines. A Brazil that only digs will repeat the rubber cycle with a longer half-life.

The Brazilian AI Plan (PBIA) foresees about R$23 billion between 2024 and 2028 ([DPL News](https://dplnews.com/um-ano-de-plano-brasileiro-de-inteligencia-artificial-o-que-esta-sendo-feito/)). In August 2026 the government announced a new supercomputer of about 7,200 petaflops for around R$1 billion, and a R$1.276 billion supercomputing center in Rio, built with Huawei and iFlytek, that is meant to train a national Portuguese language model ([Movimento Econômico](https://movimentoeconomico.com.br/tecnologia/2026/08/20/supercomputador-de-r-1-bi-no-rn-segue-plano-de-soberania-digital-e-ia-no-brasil/)). My guess is that pretraining a Portuguese frontier model is the least valuable thing that money can buy, since open-weight models from abroad improve every quarter. The scarce asset is a model that has been corrected by Brazilian reality.

### Environments with real feedback

This is the layer where Brazil is best placed. Models are only as good as their error signals. Coding improved fastest because software comes with a compiler that says, instantly and honestly, whether you were right, and most of the economy has no compiler. Brazil has built, almost by accident, several national-scale institutions that behave like compilers for their domains: a Pix transfer settles or fails, a vaccination campaign moves the incidence curve or leaves it flat, an Embrapa field trial yields or does not, a court rules. They are environments with real consequences, which is what AI systems need to become useful in the physical and institutional world. The move is to build secure, auditable environments over them (privacy-preserving sandboxes over SUS outcomes, Pix fraud patterns, crop trials) where models learn from consequences, and to make the improvements flow back into the institutions that produced the data. Selling the data would repeat the colonial pattern with a new commodity.

Deutsch has a name for what these rails already did. He calls it the jump to universality: the moment a system of rules becomes able to express anything in its domain, the way the alphabet, positional numbers and the computer did. Pix made that jump for payments in Brazil, since anyone can pay anyone else instantly for almost nothing. The question for AI is whether Brazilian institutions become the environments where AI makes similar jumps in health, agriculture and justice, or only its customers.

### Biology and the last mile

Amodei's *Machines of Loving Grace* imagines AI compressing the biology of the twenty-first century into five to ten years and argues that the bottlenecks will be experiments, data and human constraints ([Amodei](https://darioamodei.com/essay/machines-of-loving-grace)). Brazil has one of the world's strongest answers to the last mile: a universal health system with an immunization program that can reach a continent. It also has the biodiversity the rubber cycle taught it to protect. An AI-accelerated biology in which therapies are designed, tested, manufactured and distributed here, with benefit-sharing for the knowledge of traditional peoples, would be antropofagia at its best.

### Is Brazil receptive?

Amodei's essay does not mention Brazil, and its framework fits Brazil unusually well. He argues that the returns to intelligence are limited by complementary factors (the speed of the physical world, data and "constraints from humans"), worries about an "opt-out" problem in which people refuse beneficial technology, and sets as a dream scenario growth of 20% a year in the developing world, with the explicit hope that powerful AI helps it catch up ([Amodei](https://darioamodei.com/essay/machines-of-loving-grace)).

On opt-out, the data are encouraging. A 47-country study by the University of Melbourne and KPMG found that people in emerging economies, Brazil among them, report higher adoption, more trust and more optimism about AI: three in five trust AI systems against two in five in advanced economies, and 82% report benefits against 65% ([KPMG](https://kpmg.com/xx/en/media/press-releases/2025/04/trust-of-ai-remains-a-critical-challenge.html)). In a Google/Ipsos survey, 71% of Brazilians supported governments using AI to help citizens reach public services ([Google/Ipsos Brazil factsheet](https://www.mobiletime.com.br/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/Brazil-Our-Life-with-AI-2025_2026.pdf)). OpenAI reports that Brazil ranks among the top three countries in weekly ChatGPT use, with about 140 million messages a day ([OpenAI](https://openai.com/global-affairs/brazil-ai-moment-is-here/)), a company figure worth noting anyway.

There is also a contrarian argument for optimism that comes from the periphery itself. Countries with less legacy infrastructure can skip a generation of it. Brazil never built a dense network of checks and credit cards for the poor, and that absence helped Pix jump straight to instant payments for everyone; tens of millions of people went from no landline straight to a smartphone. A state with thin bureaucratic capacity in many places may find it easier to adopt AI-mediated services than one with fifty years of entrenched systems. The receptiveness is also a warning, because a population that adopts everything quickly is also where extractive products get tested first, as the betting boom showed, and that is one more reason to build the regulator before the products arrive.

### The antropofagic stack

The strategy that follows from all this is Oswald's and never Wickham's. Eat the foreign models and skip the attempt to out-pretrain the frontier labs. Digest them in Brazilian environments, where the error signals belong to the country. Keep the value where the feedback lives: refining instead of ore, fine-tuning and evaluation instead of raw compute rental, institutions that improve instead of datasets that are sold. And measure the whole effort the way Embrapa measured itself, by a signal from outside that cannot be faked. Underneath the economics there is a political question, and it comes next.

## Part XIV: A seat at the table, or the bantustan problem

In 1988 a young philosopher at Warwick named Nick Land published an essay, "Kant, Capital, and the Prohibition of Incest," that contains a sentence about South Africa worth reading slowly in Brazil. Land described the bantustans, the nominally independent homelands the apartheid regime created for Black South Africans, as "a recapitulation of the world in miniature," and the logic of the world order as "simultaneous political distance and economic proximity": a periphery kept close enough to supply labor and resources and far enough to have no say ([Urbanomic](https://www.urbanomic.com/chapter/fanged-noumena-kant-capital-and-the-prohibition-of-incest/)). Land later disowned much of his early work and moved in directions I do not follow. The sentence is still one of the sharpest descriptions of what Brazil should fear in the age of AI: to be economically indispensable, as a source of clean energy, minerals, data and users, and politically absent from the places where the rules are written.

Land's later writing adds a contrarian twist that deserves a paragraph. In essays collected in *Fanged Noumena* he treated capitalism itself as an intelligence assembling itself, a cybernetic process with its own momentum that human politics can at most slow down. If that picture were right, a country's only choice would be where to stand in the path of the process. I think it is wrong for Deutsch's reason: processes do not have goals, people do, and institutions that correct their errors can steer anything that runs on knowledge. The picture is still useful as a warning about what happens to a periphery that does not steer.

### Tiers

The fear is concrete. In January 2025 the United States published the "Framework for Artificial Intelligence Diffusion," which sorted the world into three tiers for access to advanced chips: close allies with free access, a large middle group with quotas, and a restricted group ([Federal Register](https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/01/15/2025-00636/framework-for-artificial-intelligence-diffusion)). Brazil was in the middle tier. The rule was rescinded in May 2025 ([Thompson Hine](https://thompsonhinestaging.contentpilot.net/insights/commerce-rescinds-biden-administrations-ai-diffusion-rule/)), and the idea behind it, that access to compute is a lever of foreign policy, has not gone away. Pix under a Section 301 investigation is the same logic applied to payment rails.

Amodei's essay proposes what he calls an entente strategy, in which a coalition of democracies secures an advantage in powerful AI and then offers its benefits to countries that join ([Amodei](https://darioamodei.com/essay/machines-of-loving-grace)). From Brasília the question is whether Brazil would be a member of that coalition or a recipient of its benefits, and the answer will shape who captures the value of the next cycle.

### Requisite variety in diplomacy

Brazil's diplomatic tradition is, in cybernetic terms, a way to keep variety. The Baron of Rio Branco settled almost all of the country's borders around 1900 by arbitration and treaty instead of war. San Tiago Dantas's Independent Foreign Policy of the early 1960s refused automatic alignment with either Cold War bloc. Vargas bargained between Washington and Berlin and came home with a steel mill. More recently Brazil held the G20 presidency in 2024, hosted COP30 in Belém in 2025, and at the Rio BRICS summit in 2025 led a leaders' statement calling for global AI governance with a larger voice for developing countries ([BABL AI](https://babl.ai/brics-leaders-call-for-global-ai-governance-rooted-in-sovereignty-equity-and-south-south-cooperation/)).

A country that belongs to several clubs, trades with all the great powers and is indispensable to none can play Ashby's game: its policy has enough states to answer whatever the environment throws at it. The risk is the opposite of the bantustan: being so open to everyone that nobody takes the country seriously as a partner in writing rules.

### A swing state

Brazil is already a swing state in the AI competition, whether or not it chooses to be. One of the largest data-center projects under Redata serves ByteDance ([CB Insights](https://www.cbinsights.com/company/casa-dos-ventos)), the new supercomputing center in Rio is being built with Huawei and iFlytek ([Movimento Econômico](https://movimentoeconomico.com.br/tecnologia/2026/08/20/supercomputador-de-r-1-bi-no-rn-segue-plano-de-soberania-digital-e-ia-no-brasil/)), and American cloud providers are the main tenants of Brazilian data centers. Every one of those choices will be read in Washington and Beijing as a signal.

### What a seat at the table requires

Four things, I think, turn a swing state into a rule-maker. The first is an evaluation capability of its own, a public institute that tests frontier models on Brazilian tasks and in Portuguese, so that the country can say with evidence what a model does here. The second is environments as a bargaining chip: access to Brazilian environments (health, payments, agriculture, justice) under Brazilian rules is something no other country can offer, and it is worth more at the negotiating table than electricity. The third is refining, since a country that separates rare earths and makes magnets is a supplier the others need, while one that exports ore is a supplier they can replace. The fourth is standards: Brazil exported Pix's design to conversations everywhere, and it can do the same for auditable environments, privacy-preserving public data and evaluation protocols, turning its institutions into the template others adopt. All four are cheap compared with a frontier training run, and all four put Brazil where the error signals are, which is where the power sits in this technology.

## Part XV: A plan

A plan written by one person for a country of 213 million is a provocation. This one is meant as a set of conjectures in Deutsch's sense, each specific enough to be tested and each designed so that it can be reversed if the evidence goes against it. Brazil has an advantage for that kind of policy that few countries have: 5,570 municipalities and 27 states that can serve as parallel trials, as the CadÚnico and OBMEP already showed.

| Function | What to build | First version |
|---|---|---|
| S4, intelligence | A public opsroom that models the country and its environment, with authority to put findings on the agenda | Nowcasting of prices, employment, credit and hunger from public data, with anomaly alerts |
| Algedonic channel | Cyberfolk on gov.br: structured channels from citizens to decision-makers, with published response times | Complaints and service ratings with an obligation to answer and a public record |
| S2, coordination | More public rails with private variety on top | Open finance on Pix, verifiable digital identity, electronic signatures |
| S3, control | Budgets tied to measured outcomes, with a sunset clause for every new program | Pilots in volunteer states and municipalities, compared with controls |
| S3\*, audit | Audit that protects good-faith decisions | A safe harbor for managers who document decisions and follow approved protocols |
| S1, operations | Cut the runaway loops | A ramp for the Simples cliff; FGTS access without dismissal; visible installment costs |
| AI environments | Sandboxes over SUS, Pix, crop trials and court records, with privacy by design | One health environment and one agriculture environment, open to national and foreign teams under Brazilian rules |
| Evaluation | A national institute that tests models on Brazilian tasks, in Portuguese | Public benchmarks for health, law, agriculture and public services |
| Physical layer | Refining and magnets for rare earths; clean firm power tied to domestic compute | One separation plant; Redata's domestic-capacity clause enforced |
| Talent | Make the hardest problems solvable here | OBMEP-style olympiads for AI and engineering; research visas and returns for the diaspora |

### An opsroom that looks outward

The core proposal is the one Brazil asked Beer for in the 1970s, built the opposite way. The dictatorship wanted a System 4 pointed at its own citizens. The version worth building points outward and forward, and its screens are public. It would run Cyberstride's old idea with modern tools: statistical filters over public data (prices at the supermarket and in the DIEESE basket, employment, credit, hunger, deforestation, hospital admissions) that raise an alert when a series leaves its expected band, and a published rule, taken from Beer's time-bound escalation, about who must respond and how fast. The opsroom would have no power to command anyone. Its power would be to make a signal impossible to ignore, which is the power IBGE has when it publishes a number, extended to the future tense.

The citizen side, Cyberfolk, already has its infrastructure in gov.br, one of the largest digital-government platforms in the world. What is missing is the loop: a complaint or rating that produces a visible, dated answer and a public count of how often each agency closes the loop. A pain channel that never answers teaches people to scream louder, which is roughly what Brazilian social media does today.

### Popper's rule as a design rule

Every new program should be written as a conjecture: what it expects to change, how that will be measured, by when, and what happens if the measurement disappoints. Sunset clauses, pilots in volunteer municipalities compared with similar ones that did not volunteer, and published evaluations turn Popper's criterion from a principle about removing rulers into a routine for removing policies. The Cruzado Plan is the model of what to avoid: a single frozen number imposed on the whole country at once, with no pilot and no exit. The URV is the model to copy: a change in the feedback, announced in advance, adopted voluntarily, then made universal.

### Three ways this goes wrong

Brazil has already run each of the classic failures once. The first is the price freeze, a regulator with less variety than what it regulates, which the Cruzado demonstrated in 1986. The second is the market reserve, protection without an outside error signal, which the informatics law demonstrated in the 1980s. The third is the SNI, a sensor turned against the citizens it was supposed to serve. Any proposal in the table above that starts to resemble one of the three should be stopped by the same process it was meant to create, and that is the test of whether the process works.

### Who builds it

None of this requires a savior, which is the point of the whole essay. The functions in the table are built by civil servants at IBGE and the Central Bank, by engineers at fintechs and startups, by researchers at Embrapa, Fiocruz and IMPA, by teachers who run olympiads, and by founders who choose to build the rails and environments here instead of renting them. A viable system is made of viable systems, and every one of them can start this week.

## Part XVI: A parabolic antenna in the mud

In Recife in the early 1990s a group of musicians around Chico Science and Fred 04 wrote a short manifesto called "Caranguejos com Cérebro," crabs with brains. The mangrove, they wrote, is one of the most productive ecosystems on Earth, and Recife, a city built on mangroves and full of poor people, needed an injection of energy to stop drowning in its own mud. Their image for the movement, which they called mangue beat, was "uma antena parabólica enfiada na lama," a satellite dish stuck in the mud. The music mixed maracatu drums from the city's Afro-Brazilian tradition with hip hop, funk and distorted guitars. I think it is the best image anyone has produced of the aesthetic this essay is looking for: technology planted in local soil, receiving from the whole world and rooted in a place.

It has a genealogy. Oswald's antropofagia of 1928 said Brazil should eat the foreign and turn it into its own body. Villa-Lobos wrote the *Bachianas Brasileiras* (1930–1945), Bach's counterpoint wrapped around the forms of Brazilian popular music. João Gilberto recorded "Chega de Saudade" in 1958 and bossa nova compressed samba into a voice and a guitar, a lesson in how much information fits into a small signal. Hélio Oiticica built an installation called *Tropicália* in 1967, and Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Tom Zé and Os Mutantes took the name for a movement that put electric guitars into Brazilian song while the censors listened. Glauber Rocha's aesthetic of hunger belongs to the same line. Mangue beat closed the century with the dish in the mud.

Architecture tells the same story in concrete. Oscar Niemeyer said the curve he loved came from Brazil's mountains, rivers and bodies, and built a capital out of it. Roberto Burle Marx designed gardens with native plants that Brazilian elites had considered weeds, and turned the Copacabana promenade into a wave of stones. Lina Bo Bardi, an Italian who became Brazilian, converted an old drum factory in São Paulo into the SESC Pompeia (1977–1986), keeping the brick sheds and adding concrete towers joined by aerial walkways, so that the building holds the industrial past and a future of public leisure in one structure.

There is also an engineer in this line. Alberto Santos-Dumont flew the 14-bis in Paris in 1906 and then designed the Demoiselle, a light monoplane whose plans he chose to publish without a patent so that anyone could build it. An open design released freely, a century before open source had a name, is a Brazilian gesture worth claiming.

### Technique as a way of revealing

The philosophical key is in Heidegger's essay on technology, which this essay used earlier to describe the colony. For Heidegger, modern technology reveals the world as standing reserve, stock on call, and that is exactly what the colonial machine did to land and people. He also recalled that the Greek *techne* once meant art as well as craft, a bringing-forth, *poiesis*, and he quoted Hölderlin's line that where the danger is, the saving power also grows. The new aesthetic starts from that distinction. Technology that treats Brazil as a reserve to be extracted is the colony running on new hardware. Technology that brings something forth from the place, the way terra preta brings fertility out of waste, is what the country has done at its best.

The geographer Milton Santos gave the idea a Brazilian vocabulary. In *A Natureza do Espaço* (1996) he described the contemporary territory as a *meio técnico-científico-informacional*, a medium made of technique, science and information laid over the land, and in *Por uma outra globalização* (2000) he distinguished three globalizations: the one sold as a fable, the one experienced as perversity, and the one still possible, built from below by the people and places the first two left out. Gilbert Simondon, from France, adds the last piece: a culture that does not understand its technical objects is alienated from them, and the cure is technical culture, people who know how their machines work. OBMEP, the Real, Pix and Embrapa are all, among other things, lessons in technical culture delivered at national scale.

### What the aesthetic looks like

If I had to describe it in images, they would be these. A QR code for Pix taped to a tapioca stand at a street market. A flex-fuel engine choosing its own mix at the pump. A teenager from the interior of Piauí with an olympiad medal around her neck. An Embraer jet on a runway in Chicago. Zé Gotinha, the vaccination mascot created in 1986, on a poster in a health post on the Amazon. The Kuikuro sweeping ash into the middens that become black earth. Each of them joins something very old to something very new, and each is a feedback loop that works.

Fernando Pessoa, whose *Mensagem* carried Vieira's Fifth Empire into the twentieth century, wrote the line that could stand at the door of this aesthetic: "Deus quer, o homem sonha, a obra nasce." Read with Deutsch, the order of that sentence changes meaning. People dream, and the dreams become explanations; explanations are criticized, and the ones that survive become works, the obra, which change the world and create new problems to dream about. That loop has no end, which is what Deutsch meant by the beginning of infinity.

## Epilogue: exiles no more

Sérgio Buarque opened *Raízes do Brasil* ninety years ago by calling Brazilians exiles in their own land. After reading five centuries of the country's history as a control problem, I end with the opposite impression. The history is a long record of Brazilians learning, by strange routes, to regulate their country from the inside. Coffee burned in 1931 moved the center of the economy home. Workers in 1953 distrusted the official thermometer and built their own. A Czech-born scientist taught soybeans to take nitrogen from the air. A virtual unit of account in 1994 put millions of prices on one clock and ended hyperinflation. A central bank in 2020 gave 170 million people a payment rail that works in a favela as well as on Faria Lima. In each case somebody saw a loop and changed its feedback, and none of them needed a king to come back from Morocco.

The things I love most about Brazil turn out to be forms of variety. The capacity to eat the foreign and make it native, in music, food, religion and slang. The *mutirão*, a word that comes from Tupi, for the collective work of neighbors building a house or clearing a field together, the same dense network of personal ties that Buarque worried about, pointed at a shared task. The warmth that foreigners notice in their first week, and that Beer would have recognized as a society's capacity to absorb disturbances without breaking. The humor, which is a pain channel that keeps working when the others are closed. Cybernetics explains a good part of this and does not exhaust it.

Deutsch's optimism fits Brazil better than Zweig's. A country of the future waits for its destiny. A country at the beginning of infinity treats every problem as soluble and every solution as the source of better problems. The hours in the food-basket chart, the gap in the schooling table, the missing System 4, the loops that drain families and firms: none of them is a law of nature, and each is a problem of knowledge and of institutional design, which means each can be solved by people who know how the machine works and care enough to change it. Ailton Krenak wrote a small book called *Ideias para adiar o fim do mundo*, ideas to postpone the end of the world. The knowledge of the people who made the black earth belongs inside the infinity Deutsch describes, and a country that learns from both has more variety than either.

Vieira wrote a history of the future as prophecy and was tried for it. The task now is to write it with instruments: sensors that see the whole country, channels that carry its pain to people who can act, institutions that turn mistakes into knowledge, and an aesthetic that joins the maracatu drum to the satellite dish. The materials are already here, most of them built by Brazilians who never read Beer.

In the upper Xingu, the Kuikuro still sweep charcoal and ash into the middens around their houses, and a few years later they plant on top of them.

## References

Sources opened for this essay, by part:

- Prologue: [Metaphorum](https://metaphorum.org/staffords-work/cybersyn), [Wikipedia, Project Cybersyn](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn), [Cosma Shalizi's notebook](https://bactra.org/notebooks/cybersyn.html), [Project MUSE review of Medina](https://muse.jhu.edu/article/501413/summary), [iRevolutions](https://irevolutions.org/2009/02/21/project-cybersyn-chile-20-in-1973/).
- Part I: [Eos on Amazonian dark earths](https://eos.org/features/the-nutrient-rich-legacy-in-the-amazons-dark-earths), [Nature Communications](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-20184-2), [Plant and Soil](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11104-020-04461-z), [Poder360 on the 2022 census](https://www.poder360.com.br/brasil/brasil-tem-169-milhao-de-indigenas-diz-censo-2022/).
- Parts II and III: [USP course notes on Caio Prado](https://edisciplinas.usp.br/mod/resource/view.php?id=3141998), [UEPG](https://revistas.uepg.br/index.php/rhr/article/download/2100/1581/6031), [Statista on the Atlantic slave trade](https://statista.com/chart/22057/countries-most-active-trans-atlantic-slave-trade) and [by region](https://statista.com/chart/amp/19068/trans-atlantic-slave-trade-by-country-region), [SciELO on *Raízes do Brasil*](http://www.scielo.br/j/ccrh/a/FBRYnzHxVHTzYxsMKK4r4tj/?lang=pt), [Ensaios e Notas](https://ensaiosenotas.com/2019/04/06/sergio-buarque-de-holanda-raizes-do-brasil/).
- Part IV: [Trilhante on the 1824 Constitution](https://trilhante.com.br/trilha/direito-constitucional/curso/historia-constitucional-do-brasil/aula/constituicao-de-1824-1), [PUC-Rio thesis quoting Afonso Arinos](https://www.maxwell.vrac.puc-rio.br/21213/21213_4.PDF).
- Part V: [Edmar Bacha on coffee](https://iepecdg.com.br/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/20251002CafeCindes.docx-1.pdf), [USP notes on Furtado](https://edisciplinas.usp.br/mod/resource/view.php?id=3251677) and [on the displacement of the dynamic center](https://edisciplinas.usp.br/mod/resource/view.php?id=1917397), [DIEESE, *Salário Mínimo no Brasil: 90 anos*](https://www.dieese.org.br/livro/2026/Livro90anosSM_DIEESE_2026_web.pdf).
- Part VI: [IMS, Testemunha Ocular](https://testemunhaocular.ims.com.br/2024/03/30/o-comicio-da-central/), [EBC](https://memoria.ebc.com.br/cidadania/2014/03/ha-50-anos-jango-defendia-reformas-em-comicio-na-central-do-brasil), [Jornal GGN, full speech](https://jornalggn.com.br/politica/a-integra-do-discurso-de-jango-na-central-do-brasil/), [PDT transcript](https://pdt.org.br/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Discurso-de-Jo%C3%A3o-Goulart-na-Central-do-Brasil.pdf), [NCSU with State Department cables](https://faculty.chass.ncsu.edu/slatta/hi453/PS/brazil64.htm), [National Security Archive](https://unredacted.com/2014/04/01/from-regime-change-to-declassified-diplomacy/), [Zenodo study on Brother Sam](https://zenodo.org/records/15231465), [Congresso em Foco on the Truth Commission](https://www.congressoemfoco.com.br/noticias/comissao-aponta-434-mortos-e-desaparecidos-na-ditadura/).
- Part VII: [O Povo on the hunger map](https://www.opovo.com.br/noticias/brasil/2025/07/28/brasil-sai-do-mapa-da-fome-anuncia-onu.html), [Movimento Econômico on the FAO report](https://movimentoeconomico.com.br/alimentacao/2026/07/21/fao-confirma-brasil-fora-do-mapa-da-fome-com-menor-custo-de-dieta-saudavel/), [O Tempo on Pix and Section 301](https://www.otempo.com.br/politica/2026/6/2/pix-e-apontado-como-pratica-comercial-prejudicial-aos-eua-segundo-governo-trump), [Seu Crédito Digital](https://seucreditodigital.com.br/pix-bate-recorde-318-milhoes-transacoes/), [N3news](https://www.n3news.com.br/2026/04/pix-gera-dialogo-produtivo-entre-brasil-e-eua).
- Part VIII: [DIEESE, table 2 of the December 2022 basket report](https://www.dieese.org.br/analisecestabasica/2022/202212cestabasica.pdf), [DIEESE methodology](https://www.portaldefinancas.com/arq_cestas/metodologia.htm), [Revista Fórum](https://revistaforum.com.br/economia/com-lula-brasileiro-trabalha-13h51-menos-para-comprar-cesta-basica-do-que-com-bolsonaro-dieese), [Gazeta SP](https://www.gazetasp.com.br/economia/cesta-basica-sao-paulo-salario-minimo-horas-trabalho/), [Our World in Data life-expectancy mirror](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/owid/owid-datasets/master/datasets/Life%20expectancy%20-%20Riley%20%282005%29%2C%20Clio%20Infra%20%282015%29%2C%20and%20UN%20%282019%29/Life%20expectancy%20-%20Riley%20%282005%29%2C%20Clio%20Infra%20%282015%29%2C%20and%20UN%20%282019%29.csv), [ANPF](https://anpf.com.br/cia-sao-paulo-rio), [Sesc São Paulo](https://portal.sescsp.org.br/online/artigo/7993_VIA+DUTRA+AEREA), [Motonline](https://www.motonline.com.br/noticia/rodovia-presidente-dutra-ha-60-anos-ligando-sao-paulo-rio-de-janeiro/), [IJSN](http://biblioteca.ijsn.es.gov.br/Record/338637), [Diário do Transporte](https://diariodotransporte.com.br/2016/01/17/historia-da-rodovia-presidente-dutra-ligacao-rio-sao-paulo/), [PUC-SP on telephones](https://revistas.pucsp.br/index.php/pensamentorealidade/article/download/8493/6298/20715), [Mercado & Consumo](https://mercadoeconsumo.com.br/?p=127325), [PUC-Rio thesis on early cellular service](https://www.maxwell.vrac.puc-rio.br/6163/6163_2.PDF), [Gazeta do Povo](https://www.gazetadopovo.com.br/opiniao/artigos/privatizacao-da-telefonia-quem-perdeu-foi-a-viuva-enj7rjb4j56oimstjq1hcowaa/).
- Part IX: [Maddison Project Database 2020, OWID mirror](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/owid/owid-datasets/master/datasets/Maddison%20Project%20Database%202020%20%28Bolt%20and%20van%20Zanden%20%282020%29%29/Maddison%20Project%20Database%202020%20%28Bolt%20and%20van%20Zanden%20%282020%29%29.csv), [years of schooling, OWID mirror](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/owid/owid-datasets/master/datasets/Years%20of%20Schooling%20-%20based%20on%20Lee-Lee%20%282016%29%2C%20Barro-Lee%20%282018%29%20and%20UNDP%20%282018%29/Years%20of%20Schooling%20-%20based%20on%20Lee-Lee%20%282016%29%2C%20Barro-Lee%20%282018%29%20and%20UNDP%20%282018%29.csv).
- Part X: [Embrapa on Johanna Döbereiner](https://www.embrapa.br/en/johanna-dobereiner/quem-foi), [World Food Prize](https://www.worldfoodprize.org/index.cfm/87428-1/49317/scientist_whose_biological_seed_treatments_helped_make_brazil_a_global_breadbasket_named_2025_world_food_prize_laureate), [ReVista, Harvard](https://revista.drclas.harvard.edu/lessons-from-the-brazilian-cerrado-technological-achievement-and-environmental-challenges/), [Super Rádio Tupi on OBMEP](https://www.tupi.fm/?p=2308143).
- Parts XI and XII: [Portal de Prefeitura on IBGE data](https://portaldeprefeitura.com.br/brasil/desemprego-trimestre-menor-ja-registrado-periodo-aponta-ibge/628383/), [Fecomércio MG on the MEI](https://fecomerciomg.org.br/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Estudo-sobre-o-MEI-2026.pdf), [O Tempo on the cost of betting](https://www.otempo.com.br/economia/2026/9/25/estudos-indicam-perdas-de-ate-r-141-bilhoes-para-economia-brasileira-por-causa-de-bets), [BNLData on the betting measure](https://bnldata.com.br/mp-das-bets-confisca-licencas-pagas-anistia-infracoes-e-tira-dos-estados-a-quota-fixa/), [Poder360 on Abear's figures](https://www.poder360.com.br/poder-justica/brasil-concentra-985-das-acoes-contra-aereas-diz-abear/), [O Povo on airline litigation](https://www.opovo.com.br/noticias/economia/2025/06/28/judicializacao-a-brasileira-pressiona-aereas-e-alimenta-mercado-de-processos.html), [Seu Dinheiro quoting André Esteves](https://www.seudinheiro.com/2026/economia/gosto-de-ativos-em-reais-no-final-das-contas-vai-remunerar-melhor-do-que-o-dolar-diz-andre-esteves-ao-falar-de-investimentos-em-evento-do-btg-mlim/).
- Parts XIII and XIV: [Senado Notícias on Redata](https://www12.senado.leg.br/noticias/materias/2026/09/01/incentivo-para-instalacao-de-data-centers-no-brasil-e-aprovado-pelo-senado), [Cescon Barrieu](https://cesconbarrieu.com.br/senado-aprova-o-redata-regime-especial-de-tributacao-para-servicos-de-data-center/), [eixos](https://eixos.com.br/energia-eletrica/o-que-e-o-redata-o-regime-fiscal-para-data-centers/), [CB Insights on Casa dos Ventos](https://www.cbinsights.com/company/casa-dos-ventos), [NetZero Circle on rare earths](https://www.netzerocircle.org/news/brazil-retains-second-place-in-global-rare-earth-reserves-despite-revised-estimates), [EMIS on niobium](https://isimarkets.com/insights/brazil-looking-for-ways-to-benefit-from-niobium-reserves/), [DPL News on the AI plan](https://dplnews.com/um-ano-de-plano-brasileiro-de-inteligencia-artificial-o-que-esta-sendo-feito/), [Movimento Econômico on the supercomputers](https://movimentoeconomico.com.br/tecnologia/2026/08/20/supercomputador-de-r-1-bi-no-rn-segue-plano-de-soberania-digital-e-ia-no-brasil/), [Dario Amodei, *Machines of Loving Grace*](https://darioamodei.com/essay/machines-of-loving-grace), [KPMG and the University of Melbourne](https://kpmg.com/xx/en/media/press-releases/2025/04/trust-of-ai-remains-a-critical-challenge.html), [Google/Ipsos Brazil factsheet](https://www.mobiletime.com.br/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/Brazil-Our-Life-with-AI-2025_2026.pdf), [OpenAI](https://openai.com/global-affairs/brazil-ai-moment-is-here/), [Urbanomic, Nick Land 1988](https://www.urbanomic.com/chapter/fanged-noumena-kant-capital-and-the-prohibition-of-incest/), [Federal Register, AI Diffusion framework](https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/01/15/2025-00636/framework-for-artificial-intelligence-diffusion), [Thompson Hine on its rescission](https://thompsonhinestaging.contentpilot.net/insights/commerce-rescinds-biden-administrations-ai-diffusion-rule/), [BABL AI on the 2025 BRICS statement](https://babl.ai/brics-leaders-call-for-global-ai-governance-rooted-in-sovereignty-equity-and-south-south-cooperation/).

Books and essays drawn on without a link: Norbert Wiener, *Cybernetics*; W. Ross Ashby, *An Introduction to Cybernetics*; Stafford Beer, *Brain of the Firm*; Eden Medina, *Cybernetic Revolutionaries*; David Deutsch, *The Beginning of Infinity*; Karl Popper, *The Open Society and Its Enemies*; Pierre Clastres, *Society Against the State*; Eduardo Viveiros de Castro on perspectivism; Oswald de Andrade, *Manifesto Antropófago*; Caio Prado Júnior, *Formação do Brasil Contemporâneo*; Martin Heidegger, "The Question Concerning Technology"; Alfredo Bosi, *Dialética da Colonização*; Stuart Schwartz, *Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society*; Immanuel Wallerstein, *The Modern World-System*; Kenneth Pomeranz, *The Great Divergence*; Luiz Felipe de Alencastro, *O Trato dos Viventes*; Darcy Ribeiro, *O Povo Brasileiro*; Gilberto Freyre, *Casa-Grande & Senzala*; Joaquim Nabuco, *O Abolicionismo*; Antônio Vieira, *História do Futuro*; Fernando Pessoa, *Mensagem*; Sérgio Buarque de Holanda, *Raízes do Brasil*; Roberto Schwarz, "As ideias fora do lugar"; José Murilo de Carvalho, *A Construção da Ordem* and *Cidadania no Brasil*; T. H. Marshall, *Citizenship and Social Class*; Victor Nunes Leal, *Coronelismo, enxada e voto*; Euclides da Cunha, *Os Sertões*; Celso Furtado, *Formação Econômica do Brasil*; Antonio Candido, *Formação da Literatura Brasileira*; Rui Barbosa, *Oração aos Moços*; James C. Scott, *Seeing Like a State*; James Holston, *The Modernist City*; Glauber Rocha, "Uma estética da fome"; Alice Amsden, *Asia's Next Giant*; Peter Evans, *Embedded Autonomy*; Benjamin Peters, *How Not to Network a Nation*; Raymundo Faoro, *Os Donos do Poder*; Norbert Elias, *The Civilizing Process*; Stefan Zweig, *Brasil, país do futuro*; Charles Tilly, *Durable Inequality*; Nick Land, *Fanged Noumena*; Milton Santos, *A Natureza do Espaço* and *Por uma outra globalização*; Gilbert Simondon, *On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects*; Chico Science and Fred 04, "Caranguejos com Cérebro"; Ailton Krenak, *Ideias para adiar o fim do mundo*.