best.post.evah on the OLPC
it feels so good to read this after seeing so much poorly thought through support of the project and equally poorly thought through criticism.
“As far as I know, there is no real study anywhere that demonstrates constructionism works at scale. There is no documented moderate-scale constructionist learning pilot that has been convincingly successful; when Nicholas points to “decades of work by Seymour Papert, Alan Kay, and Jean Piaget”, he’s talking about theory. He likes to mention Dakar, but doesn’t like to mention how that pilot ended — or that no real facts about the validity of the approach came out of it. And there sure as hell doesn’t exist a peer-reviewed study (or any other kind, to my knowledge) showing free software does any better than proprietary software when it comes to aiding learning, or that children prefer the openness, or that they care about software freedom one bit.”
It goes on. The author is for constructivist learning. The way that I’ve written about this project before might make it seem that I’m against it. I’m not. I just had a big problem with this not being openly discussed as a huge experiment with enourmous cultural consequences if they deployed at the scale they wanted to.
Anyways - fantastic article by a key person in the OLPC project.
With this comment (out of the 35 so far) being my favorite:
“Guido van Rossum said,
May 14, 2008 @ 12:32 pm
I’ve thought for a while that sending laptops to developing countries is simply the 21st century equivalent of sending bibles to the colonies.”
This whole deal reminds me of the unbridled enthusiasm I/we had around creating software to “improve third places” through ISF. Kind of a clusterf@#$. I guess something to be appreciative of is that we weren’t successful. That’s a little bit too hard on ourselves, because at least we were going to try and design in such a way that respected and extended the existing spaces and put time and thought into that (that’s what first drew me to University of the Streets). But still, as technologist interventions go, it was pretty damning mix of geek chauvinism and ignorance.
May 14th, 2008 at 7:40 pm
Can you talk a bit or point out an article about why it failed? From what I can see, as an outsider, ISF tries to create social environment at different locations, it would be a bit weird to expect people to get up and start introducing themselves, but it’s still an “interesting” dimension to expand in.
May 14th, 2008 at 8:00 pm
I don’t have a good response to that right now. It’s something that I would be able to talk to more easily in discussion than in writing. But that we tried to ignore some of our biases (where we were coming from), the motives for our interventions, and the differences between us and our users. What’s a bit scary was that our tactic was to be able to use the size of our network to push different applications even if they weren’t very well designed, as opposed to trying to start small and build followings of appreciative users. Lots and lots of weird ideas like that, for which I was very much responsible. There’s lots of good there as well, in that we were trying to provide an fairly highly visible alternative to solely corporate use of “augmented space”, but I think we just hadn’t properly thought through what it would have meant to actually engage our aimed-for audience in discussion and what it would have meant to respect their lives. So that in many important ways, we would have been propagating the same relationship with technology pushed by corporate interests, instead of opposing them.
I agree with you that some of the easy applications would have been simply “interesting”. What is scary is that we were aiming to have a larger impact that just adding some interesting applications.
And I still think about stuff like http://code.google.com/p/calagator/ and what it would be like to intervene and create a commonly used calendaring platform, what impact that would have on a community. And what the impact would be of easy access to all civic information. But (hopefully) I am much more aware now of my biases and also of the possibility for unintended consequences.
May 14th, 2008 at 11:32 pm
I can somewhat see viewpoint, and it’s very interesting. I’ve hopped onto a list run by Walter Bender, who used to be in charge of the software development for this project, and this post has the list buzzing.
The thing that has to be pointed out about this is that Negroponte took a lot of smart developers, told them that they were changing the world, and then proceeded to figure out a way that he could get kids in 3rd world countries to get Microloans so he can colonize them the same way capitalism has in the past. It’s colonialism and capitalism dressed up in a nice feel good mascot suit.
Also, your posts as of late have a weird primitivist streak (as in you’re not outright rejecting technology yet). I know that John Zerzan will be in your neck of the woods this weekend at the Montreal Anarchist Bookfair and seems to have pissed a lot of people off just by showing up. I know you’re not an Anarchist, let alone an Anarchoprimitivist, but I’d recommend listening to him speak, since he’ll point out some interesting arguments that you’d probably agree with.
May 15th, 2008 at 12:18 am
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the experimentation, if there’s a way for users to select what they’re being exposed to, with very conservative defaults, something like http://www.google.com/ig or… Facebook.
I’ve been involved in similar ventures. Actually I’ve been meaning to contact you to meet up sometime, at the prompting of a mutual acquaintance.. please write me a note if you’re free in the next while. (I assume you can access my email address) or let me know any public events you’ll be at. :)
May 15th, 2008 at 12:39 pm
Its weird, reading your post, Ivan’s post and working on my own paper here, that it didn’t occur to me earlier, that the word control is central to the entire argument.
Most of the people I have read who critique the OLPC project think that loosening up control is the only way to ensure that the Laptops have a life-span that reflects the needs of their host communities.
Krstic is the only person pointing out that the total lack of control n the deployment level probably means that no-one is going to get the laptops without a significant amount of frustration. So tighteningup control of the distribution system is the only way to get the project in line with it’s mission statement.
So in this scheme the central tension apparently is about how much control the various parties have over technology or over distributing technology. So in a sense it looks like colonialism, but it could also just be someone with a high level organizational deficit (negroponte) being put in charge of a very complex deployment problem. Try to imagine the project working, if negroponte had a made deals with oxfam or the red cross and the governments of the host countries to subsidize/help with deployment, would we still be crying foul and calling it a colonialist exercise? If the countries who signed on, as of now, all had functioning well-supported laptops it would be the dawn of global cooperative, technology infrastructure. In a way it’s natural that the first run fucked up - it would have been expecting a lot for it to work.
I think describing the OLPC as colonialism is a stretch. It was a well-intentioned accidentally colonialesque initiative, which we can all learn a lot from.
Also Mike i think you voluntarily giving up on technology is a separate issue to anything ISF has done, or what the OLPC tries to do, and in your head you should stringently maintain that separation. You have had a life full of technological possibility thus far, and if you have the right to decide it isn’t as interesting as you thought it would be, that is a different set of decisions than someone who hasn’t had those opportunities.
May 15th, 2008 at 9:34 pm
Hey Joe. I don’t think I’ll have time (busy week) but thanks for the thought. I’ll keep that in mind as I run across other readings + conversations.
It’s really interesting hanging out with the Koumbit folk here in Montreal because so many of them are anarchist and have very conflicted feelings + thoughts around technology. The local digital divide group Communautique as well.
David - After your first comment I checked out your site, saw that you were thinking about / planning to move here and I thought that it would be interesting to meet. So yeah - i’ll ping you. :-)
Mir - “well-intentioned accidentally colonialesque initiative” = colonialism. No colonialist ever thought that they were in the wrong. They were always doing what they explained to themselves as “help”. And I want to ask you about the last feedback. I kinda like it and I want to make sure I understand the distinction you’re making / why it’s important.
May 16th, 2008 at 3:11 am
it’s funny, i don;t know much about the OLPC project, but there seems to be huge parallels with the big white elephant renewable energy/”development” projects from the 90s that i saw when I worked in that world. there were literally thousands and thousands of of failed renewable energy projects rusting all around the developing world.
typical set up was: rich country funds building/dissemination of a renewable energy, or some manufacturing plant, in some remote part of country xyz, lots of fanfare, glamorous life for the UNDP workers and the diplomats and the NGOs, driving landrovers and having nice photo ops with dignitaries and funny cultural experiences with the locals, and everything is going to be better now because there is a brand new wind farm/solar power project/biomass plant. the environment wins. the poor people win. the manufacturers win. the idealistic adventurers from harvard and queen’s win. then 2 yrs later, the thing breaks, and gets abandoned and a few years after that there are palm trees growing in your biomass boiler.
there are many reasons for this, but the main one is that there is never any money (or much interest) to do the boring stuff like really figure out how the thing will fit usefully into the local culture/economy/social fabric … and in fact the “experts” usually don’t know the first thing about that.
in the case of the OLPC it seems (and I know little about it) even more radical. because the whole POINT of the thing is to completely change the culture by transforming kids, thru constructivist learning or whatever, into a “new” kind of 3rd world citizen.
which is all good and well (possibly) but i remember someone asking me when we pitching some kind of solar wind project in indonesia: if it’s so great, why aren’t you doing it at home (which we mostly weren’t at the time), instead of here at the end of the world?
maybe OLPC will be a great success - but it does seem to me that launching it on the scale envisioned, without any idea how it actually ought to get launched, at the very least risks simply littering the world with a bunch of really neat, green, rusting machines that no one uses.
May 16th, 2008 at 1:15 pm
correction: probably hundreds, not thousands of rusting renewable projects.
May 16th, 2008 at 2:49 pm
it’s interesting that you say this Hugh, I hadn’t actually thought of the OLPC project paralleling renewable energy projects. Which is annoying because now my paper is more or less done an dit’s too lat eto incorpporate your fine idea :) . Many of the papers I read in my communications and development class pointed out the biases inherent in the well-intentioned but again, wrongfooted eco-development projects of the 90’s. I had just not thought to compare this to them. ( Perhaps a topic for another paper, or if the paper gets rejected a whole new section to add…. grrr).
It kind of reminds me of the quote that ends the movie Charlie Wilson’s War.
“These things happened. They were glorious and they changed the world… and than we fucked up the end game.”
I think most large-scale projects can be considered to “fuck-up the end game”. what’s weird is that even though we’ve (human beings in general) have spent hundreds of years fucking up end games we haven’t seemed to learn a thing. It’s like everyone suffers from ” I Want it FIXED NOW” and can’t understand that things are slow and take time and everyone has to have a chance to vent and change things and disagree and make the thing closer to what they want, and most of the time when change happens it looks like nothing is happening at all.
I dunno, that’s my feeling about OPLC. Like most well-intentioned projects, change didn’t happen fast enough for impatient ROI obsessed western funders and philanthropists. People lost focus and didn’t have patience to wait for consensus so they rushed stupid ideas to fruition and now there is a massive culturally insensitive project just waiting to hit the grey markets of the developing world as cheap laptops for sale to the highest bidder.