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.

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.

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. :)

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.

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.

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.

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.