book post: The Charisma Machine: The Life, Death, and Legacy of One Laptop Per Child by Morgan Ames

Oh hey, I remember One Laptop Per Child! The project was announced in my teens, and I remember being giddy with delight over it—there was probably a multi-page spread in Wired magazine, I was like oh wow tech’s gonna change the world I can’t wait to do hacker things with hacker kids in other countries—so uh, how did that whole thing turn out?

Ha. Ha ha.

So it wasn’t a total disaster, to be clear. This book is not a flashy exposé of some Fyre Festival-level fuck-up. But neither did the utopian dreams of “kiddo hackers using hand-powered laptops to leapfrog them ways into the Modern Tech Elite” pan out, either.

Some bullets:

( Read more... )

book post: The Global Minotaur by Yanis Varoufakis

( blah blah econ blather, i am not an economist, etc )

also, i swear that's the last of the book posts for a while! sorry to flood your reading pages, y'all, i've been meaning to write some of those up for months, and wound up just... doin' em all in one go, lolwhups