Spreading the Laptop Virus?

In 2002, MIT Professor Nicholas Negroponte experienced first-hand how connected laptops transformed the lives of children and their families in a remote Cambodian village. A seed was planted: If every child in the world had access to a computer, what potential could be unlocked? What problems could be solved? These questions eventually led to the foundation of One Laptop per Child, and the creation of the XO laptop.

XO Laptop mission page

An Amazing Machine

I can't figure out what I think of this thing. As a machine, the XO could be amazing. They claim they've designed the thing to survive extreme environmental conditions, namely, a kid running around a Third World village. It's more rugged than what's on my desk, yet the cost is—200 dollars. How? Well, it's only 433 Mhz, but I revel in their assertion that they've been able to get the most out of their hardware by using an operating system without any bloat (guess who). Even cooler, if an outlet's not around, kids will be able to power the thing with solar power, a pull cord, or a crank. I could have used that feature myself, back when I went outside.

You can see why I didn't hear about it on the social justice circuit, but on a list where a guy wanted a good cheap tool for taking notes. It's a cool machine. And it's connected to the Internet. And they're handing them to a bunch of kids in the middle of nowhere.

An Amazing Virus?

How could there be anything to criticize? I've spent the last year of my own life basically in front of a computer screen, I'm amazed at the power that people are redistributing with their own hands by means of the Internet, and I can't very well rail against our economic enslavement of peoples around the world and then get snooty when we finally share our treasures with their children.

But that's the question: is a laptop a treasure? Or rather, is it a treasure with no ill effects? Perhaps there is no such thing, but at the very least, do we even have a concept of what those effects might be?

If they weren't clustered around those amazing, tiny screens, what would they be doing?

My first reservation is giving computers to any young kids, Third World, First World, Eighteenth World, whatever. I'm not giving Cariysa one. She's a kid! She sings, dances, plays, and memorizes her favorite passages from The Giving Tree, all without the faintest hint of a crutch, parental or technological. Sure, she plays with my computer once in awhile, but I have not solemnly bestowed one upon her as an essential tool for experiencing the world.

Of course, casting laptops about is only is a short paragraph in a long history of questionable cultural philanthropy. I don't mean that adjective as an automatic perjorative. I mean questionable, open to question, requiring thought, and almost certain to contain both good and evil. What troubles me is the assumption that handing out laptops to kids must be a Good Thing.

For instance, every kid with an XO will be able to use an app called Neighborhood to to interact with every other local kid with an XO. Like this:

XO Screenshot: Experience your village as a 1985 ATARI clone.

Before the XO, all they could do together was climb trees, shout in each other's faces, laugh their heads off, and (presuming a poverty of cars) run wild through the streets. Now, at last, comes a bountiful wealth of experience.

If there is a shared document or activity being collaborated on by a number of children, it will show up within this view.

Shared documents! Wow!

I have no firsthand experience of Third World life and it seems nearly impossible to strike an agnostic balance between the technocrats, who chant nasty, brutish, and short about countries with lower infant mortality rates than America, and the eager devotees of Natives Know Best. But one thing I jolly well know is that a real rural village is one of the last places on earth where a kid can walk out his own door and pop over to see any friend he likes without even having to dodge cars. He doesn't have to wait for Mom to strap him in a booster seat. He is free and rich in a way that most of our own incarcerated kids, not to mention ourselves, can only dream of. To replace this with X's on a 9-inch screen is...man, just fill in a damn adjective, I've got twenty.

The worst part is, I'm sure the XO folk are just trying to help. Heck, since the laptops are probably going to kids who are already stuck in schools, they are helping. I'm not roundly cursing the whole project; assuming the teachers manage to keep porn off the things, I'd rather see kids exploring the Internet and playing video games than getting lectured and worksheeted into future employees.

But school ends every day. Laptops are all the time. I have no idea whether all these kids will actually get mesmerized and spend all their free time collaborating on documents. Many of us sure seem to, but then we're here, in the Sprawl Diaspora. But to even design such a tool as Neighborhood for village children suggests a disquietng disregard for the treasures these children already have, and may lose. As have we.

"...We moderns believe in a great cosmopolitan civilisation, one which shall include all the talents of all the absorbed peoples—"

"The Señor will forgive me," said the President. "May I ask the Señor how, under ordinary circumstances, he catches a wild horse?"

"I never catch a wild horse," replied Barker, with dignity.

"Precisely," said the other; "and there ends your absorption of the talents. That is what I complain of your cosmopolitanism. When you say you want all peoples to unite, you really mean that you want all peoples to unite to learn the tricks of your people. If the Bedouin Arab does not know how to read, some English missionary or schoolmaster must be sent to teach him to read, but no one ever says, 'This schoolmaster does not know how to ride on a camel; let us pay a Bedouin to teach him.' You say your civilisation will include all talents. Will it? Do you really mean to say that at the moment when the Esquimaux has learnt to vote for a County Council, you will have learnt to spear a walrus? I recur to the example I gave. In Nicaragua we had a way of catching wild horses—by lassooing the fore feet—which was supposed to be the best in South America. If you are going to include all the talents, go and do it. If not, permit me to say what I have always said, that something went from the world when Nicaragua was civilised."

G. K. Chesterton, The Napoleon of Notting Hill.