One Laptop Per Child is one of those wonderful ventures that seems to change the ground rules. Everyone wants cheaper computers, of course, but the promised price drop for the OLPC system was spectacular - an order of magnitude - and the reason for the reduced sticker was much better than bargain-hunting. OLPC promised a new type of technology that could survive the rigors of a developing country so that kids everywhere could get online and learn. World-changing. Wow.
By delivery date, the price had crept up a bit but that’s to be expected. The good news was that the OLPC vision encouraged other companies to step up and deliver cheaper, tougher little systems: Intel, Asus and others all said they wanted a piece of the Little Computer That Could market. Head Visionary of OLPC Negroponte yelped that the competitors were carpetbaggers crashing his party, his idea. Well, yeah! That’s what competitors do and they don’t even bother to say ‘thank you’.
Negroponte ran the Media Lab at MIT and OLPC has the same bravura quality that many Media Labs projects had - except OLPC is real! Media Lab was (and probably still is) all show, in my opinion. No one can begrudge brilliant grad students the right to try wonderful and wacky things; that’s what they’re supposed to do. But Newgroponte enlisted heavy hypers such as Stewart Brand to promote anything and everything at the Lab and soon it became the place that was about to deliver the future. Kinda like Artifical Intelligence was for a generation before (also a largely MIT event.) Like AI, Media Lab delivered very little.
What is more interesting about Negroponte, however, is the fact that he moved on to the OLPC project - from hype to (potentially) hero. But the surrounding hype for the first deliveries of the OLPC systems suggests the hero still needs his hoopla. An article on ABC’s website comes with the picture above: a grateful little Peruvian looking up at us as though we are on a mission from God and there to grant her the right to live in our plugged-in world. The article copy gushes about how lucky these kids are.
We can only hope Negroponte and the OLPC venture is real and delivers workable systems to the kids that want and need them. Unfortunately we can’t tell - the media are giving us the ‘God-blesses-America-and-America-blesses-you’ version.
It would be wonderful to see some real journalism about OLPC:
What does it cost? How do kids in Peru get one? Does it work? In what language? And what happens when it breaks?
Perhaps most interestingly of all:
What are the kids doing with the systems?
