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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:
* Probably the most valuable concept I got from the book was its definition of charisma that is something based inherently in nostalgia. Charismatic leaders, under this definition, are appealing because they promise bold, utopian changes to how things work, awesome ways to solve all our problems... but with methodologies that are ultimately on the familiar side. And a charismatic object (e.g., the laptop, the titular charisma machine) is appealing since it promises you can change the world with... the very laptop that revolutionized your own world, as a kid. It’s not a coincidence that the folks running OLPC were all hacker-types themselves.
* The author deliberately chose to study OLPC in Paraguay, because the program volunteers all pointed to it as the most successful OLPC case study. And the Paraguay program was kind-of sort-of successful—but this was partly because it had a lot of support. A bunch of anime-watching cosmopolitan tech nerds living in Paraguay’s capital helped found a nonprofit to manage OLPC operations in Paraguay. They developed special trainings to teach teachers how to use the laptops and integrate them into their lessons. Which is all well and good... but it definitely drifts from the programs “just give laptops and they’ll figure it out” initial promises.
* Even within Paraguay, the divide between those cosmopolitan urban hackers and the countryside is vast, in ways they radically underestimate. Kids in the countryside go to school four hours a day; the teachers are super strapped for time teaching the national curriculum; they are egregiously underpaid; the laptops break and you can’t just breeze to a repair shop to get the parts to fix it because you’re way out in the middle of nowhere, and so on. It’s a cliché that Americans come in and do all kinds of boneheaded shit when they try to push programs in the developing world—but this book importantly points out that like, hey, the alleged boots-on-the-ground are clueless, too, because even though they’re of the same nationality, life in the urban/cosmopolitan elite is very different.
* Parental involvement is huge. It is so so huge holy shit. The author goes to interview some of the biggest OLPC success stories, and while there aren’t really any ur-hackers, there’s definitely a handful of kids using their laptops in creative and fun ways (e.g. one kiddo makes art and posts it to DeviantArt, another kiddo uses it to write fiction, etc). And the common strain between all of them, is, the parents (or the uncle raising them, or the grandparents, whoever) encourage their interests, are often educated, and pretty hands-on when it comes to making sure their kids are learning. The parents don’t have to be computer people themselves; it just matters that they think their little girl’s DeviantArt posts are neat and good and not a waste of time.
(This goes back to a rant I was making at someone else today—having basically-decent parents who basically have their shit together is such a massive advantage that I don’t think is talked about enough. I mean, we don’t talk about it because it’s so often invisible. The MIT ur-hackers all had visions of themselves as self-driven, self-taught, wholly self-motivated—but the thing they don’t mention is, they had a mom who noticed them taking apart the TV remote, and thought, hey maybe my kid likes electronics, and bought them some stuff, and didn’t get mad when they totally broke that one kitchen appliance they were tinkering with, and so on.)
* Sure is fun how the project exports not only laptops but sexism, ugh. The author points out a pair of kiddos who were promoted as success stories for OLPC—a brother and a sister, who had made really elaborate games together in Scratch using their laptops. When the author interviewed the siblings, and asked who did which parts, they both insisted they’d worked on the game equally... but MIT only invited the boy to take a free trip to campus to check the place out, and MIT only advertised the boy as a child genius, and then I wanted to throw my book at a WALL and PUNCH something but I was in a MEDIOCRE SUSHI RESTAURANT so I couldn’t just DO that, UGH
* Another heartbreaking bit: a handful of boys in the rural village where the author is based do get really into programming, and do decide to form a team to enter a major programming competition in the nation’s capital. They meet up a few times a week to practice—taking precious time away from helping their families with chores and business, time the families can’t really afford to spare, but do, because they love their kids—and the boys work hard and are so jazzed.
The morning of the competition, they get up before dawn, to catch a bus to the capital—the capital’s really far away—and even though they’re tired, they’re excited, and chattering about what they’ll do with the grand prize, how they’ll take their victory to leverage it into good high-paying tech jobs in America, and they’ll send so much money back to their families, and it’ll be great.
Oh no, you’re thinking as you read, because God if you’ve been anywhere with a rural/urban divide you already know how this is going to play out.
And sure enough, during the competition, they are absolutely trounced by some kids from an elite private high school. Kids who get access to actual English classes, kids who get admitted to nice American universities, kids whose parents have money..
The kids from the village, they did so well, so well, given that all the decent resources are in English and they didn’t really speak English and they didn’t have anyone to teach them and barely had time to prepare. But it still didn’t matter. The deck was stacked against them from the start.
* The paradox of charisma, I think, is that it’s the right instinct to have with those close to us, it’s only wrong when applied blindly on a large scale. Parents share their nostalgic loves with their kiddos, hopefully because they know their kiddo, and think something may resonate there—a proud papa giving his kiddo a laptop with hopes that he’ll learn to make websites is just a plain sweet thing to do. You make friends by sharing your love of a thing with them. But if you want to help strangers, if you want to help people in other countries... I mean, God, I just couldn’t get over how poorly paid and stressed out the poor teachers were. Start there.
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:
* Probably the most valuable concept I got from the book was its definition of charisma that is something based inherently in nostalgia. Charismatic leaders, under this definition, are appealing because they promise bold, utopian changes to how things work, awesome ways to solve all our problems... but with methodologies that are ultimately on the familiar side. And a charismatic object (e.g., the laptop, the titular charisma machine) is appealing since it promises you can change the world with... the very laptop that revolutionized your own world, as a kid. It’s not a coincidence that the folks running OLPC were all hacker-types themselves.
* The author deliberately chose to study OLPC in Paraguay, because the program volunteers all pointed to it as the most successful OLPC case study. And the Paraguay program was kind-of sort-of successful—but this was partly because it had a lot of support. A bunch of anime-watching cosmopolitan tech nerds living in Paraguay’s capital helped found a nonprofit to manage OLPC operations in Paraguay. They developed special trainings to teach teachers how to use the laptops and integrate them into their lessons. Which is all well and good... but it definitely drifts from the programs “just give laptops and they’ll figure it out” initial promises.
* Even within Paraguay, the divide between those cosmopolitan urban hackers and the countryside is vast, in ways they radically underestimate. Kids in the countryside go to school four hours a day; the teachers are super strapped for time teaching the national curriculum; they are egregiously underpaid; the laptops break and you can’t just breeze to a repair shop to get the parts to fix it because you’re way out in the middle of nowhere, and so on. It’s a cliché that Americans come in and do all kinds of boneheaded shit when they try to push programs in the developing world—but this book importantly points out that like, hey, the alleged boots-on-the-ground are clueless, too, because even though they’re of the same nationality, life in the urban/cosmopolitan elite is very different.
* Parental involvement is huge. It is so so huge holy shit. The author goes to interview some of the biggest OLPC success stories, and while there aren’t really any ur-hackers, there’s definitely a handful of kids using their laptops in creative and fun ways (e.g. one kiddo makes art and posts it to DeviantArt, another kiddo uses it to write fiction, etc). And the common strain between all of them, is, the parents (or the uncle raising them, or the grandparents, whoever) encourage their interests, are often educated, and pretty hands-on when it comes to making sure their kids are learning. The parents don’t have to be computer people themselves; it just matters that they think their little girl’s DeviantArt posts are neat and good and not a waste of time.
(This goes back to a rant I was making at someone else today—having basically-decent parents who basically have their shit together is such a massive advantage that I don’t think is talked about enough. I mean, we don’t talk about it because it’s so often invisible. The MIT ur-hackers all had visions of themselves as self-driven, self-taught, wholly self-motivated—but the thing they don’t mention is, they had a mom who noticed them taking apart the TV remote, and thought, hey maybe my kid likes electronics, and bought them some stuff, and didn’t get mad when they totally broke that one kitchen appliance they were tinkering with, and so on.)
* Sure is fun how the project exports not only laptops but sexism, ugh. The author points out a pair of kiddos who were promoted as success stories for OLPC—a brother and a sister, who had made really elaborate games together in Scratch using their laptops. When the author interviewed the siblings, and asked who did which parts, they both insisted they’d worked on the game equally... but MIT only invited the boy to take a free trip to campus to check the place out, and MIT only advertised the boy as a child genius, and then I wanted to throw my book at a WALL and PUNCH something but I was in a MEDIOCRE SUSHI RESTAURANT so I couldn’t just DO that, UGH
* Another heartbreaking bit: a handful of boys in the rural village where the author is based do get really into programming, and do decide to form a team to enter a major programming competition in the nation’s capital. They meet up a few times a week to practice—taking precious time away from helping their families with chores and business, time the families can’t really afford to spare, but do, because they love their kids—and the boys work hard and are so jazzed.
The morning of the competition, they get up before dawn, to catch a bus to the capital—the capital’s really far away—and even though they’re tired, they’re excited, and chattering about what they’ll do with the grand prize, how they’ll take their victory to leverage it into good high-paying tech jobs in America, and they’ll send so much money back to their families, and it’ll be great.
Oh no, you’re thinking as you read, because God if you’ve been anywhere with a rural/urban divide you already know how this is going to play out.
And sure enough, during the competition, they are absolutely trounced by some kids from an elite private high school. Kids who get access to actual English classes, kids who get admitted to nice American universities, kids whose parents have money..
The kids from the village, they did so well, so well, given that all the decent resources are in English and they didn’t really speak English and they didn’t have anyone to teach them and barely had time to prepare. But it still didn’t matter. The deck was stacked against them from the start.
* The paradox of charisma, I think, is that it’s the right instinct to have with those close to us, it’s only wrong when applied blindly on a large scale. Parents share their nostalgic loves with their kiddos, hopefully because they know their kiddo, and think something may resonate there—a proud papa giving his kiddo a laptop with hopes that he’ll learn to make websites is just a plain sweet thing to do. You make friends by sharing your love of a thing with them. But if you want to help strangers, if you want to help people in other countries... I mean, God, I just couldn’t get over how poorly paid and stressed out the poor teachers were. Start there.
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ideas, like plants, are great in certain gardens, but weeds in others
that's such a cool lil phrase; i'm gonna save that for myself, haha.
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actually, sidebar!
so i didn't grow up in The Biggest Of Cities (our high school academic team regularly got trounced by the magnet school in The Big City, lol), but i did grow up in a university town, and i think a lot about how the fact that the US basically has multiple goddamn world-class research institutions per state is such a massive boon that cannot be overstated. having even an okay state university nearby means there's still some music major you can pay to take oboe/trumpet/whatever lessons. having even an okay state university nearby means there's multiple free or low-cost dance/theatre/orchestra performances every year, and also a pretty diverse set of associated job opportunities, and so on.
my rough understanding is that a lot of other countries take the more concentrated approach—there's like, 1-3 Big Goddamn Name Schools that suck up most of the resources; you should probably just go there.
but in the US we've got so many state land grant universities and they're all kinda great? and like, for as much of a fuss is made over the Ivy League, most of the US's science R&D comes out of places like Michigan and Purdue and Georgia Tech and whatever. (even very small universities can be a huge help for rural economies.)
so uh tl;dr I THINK OUR UNIVERSITY SYSTEM IS GREAT AND WE SHOULD HAVE MORE OF THEM NOT LESS, etc, and i haaaate how their funding structure is increasingly turning into like, a "big university + satellite campuses" model (instead of like, just, each corner of a state has its own good university), and also just sky-high tuitions that make stuff inaccessible to locals, since... i honestly kinda think if you have enough of 'em, it's a really impressive means for distributing some vital resources at least a little more broadly than you'd get otherwise
(sorry this got long, i forgot this is my hobbyhorse lol)
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The university thing is amazing and I agree with you that the spread-out nature is great. Sure, you could get some efficiencies of concentration, but having lots of little nuclei spread out is great for diversity of thought and experimentation as much as it is the local troupes and music lessons and things like that, too. University libraries! The restaurants and shops that spring up to support a college town! the sheer entertainment of watching colleges fight with their towns! (okay, yes, I'm that popcorn girl.)
Plus, locals (especially local retirees) being able to take classes? My alma mater has a program where local retirees take classes in random stuff, and the student center offers evening classes taught in niche subjects for non-credit by professors who just wanted to wax rhapsodic about, idk, a really gentle overview of the history of porcelain without having to grade papers and shit, and you pay like $200 and get a ten-week course, and it's great. Or a casual writing workshop where the students get the advantage of a college professor giving them some gentle guidance and the professor gets a break from a bunch of college students all wanting to be the next Hemingway.
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haha yes, me too. i am here for the d r a m a
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I remember OLPC and have vague memories of being at a few talks related to the topic (cannot remember where or why) and having an immediate underlying sense of cognitive dissonance that I couldn’t entirely name despite wanting to like/support the idea rather than make a pissy face, because no one in techmania wanted to see my pissy face much less hear me say, “welllll but... did you consider XYZ?” Back then, the result of my cog diss in response to OLPC was me largely ignoring the whole idea as hype or, at the very least classifying it as “not my problem.”
But now, and this framing. Charisma nostalgia etc. I feel my brain reaching back in time for forgotten memories, attempted to unpack the cog diss I felt not just then but throughout way too much off my former career in comp sci related stuff.
Because like, frankly, I spent my final decade in that arena consistently complaining about all of the hyped projects that were based on myopic visions of creators thinking they know the solution to every problem in the world merely because, idek, they can do hex arithmetic in their head and computer technology is the glorious hammer they hide behind (to avoid a world of complexity) ...and thus the big wide world of everything real all looks like nails for their hammer when viewed through a green on black terminal window.
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