These people had cars and computers and satellites buzzing and beeping across the heavens. More: they had a Plan, and not a Gosplan-style Five Year Plan, a centrally-controlled economy like that of the Soviet Union. They’d given him a “Welcome to the Commonwealth” briefing booklet and there was some wild stuff in it: computer networks, real-time planning, a continuation and expansion of a thing called Project Cybersyn that had been suppressed in Chile in the 1970s by a US-ordered fascist coup—a plan to catch up that paralleled the way South Korea, Japan, and China had modernized in the
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