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The Charisma Machine:
The Life, Death, and Legacy of One Laptop per Child
by Morgan G. Ames
MIT Press, November 2019
Winner, 2020 Best Information Science Book Award
Winner, 2020 Sally Hacker Prize
Winner, 2021 Computer History Museum Prize
Buy it here: [mitpress1][mitpress2] [indiebound] [amazon]
[barnes] [powells] [indigo] [waterstone]
The Charisma Machine chronicles the life and legacy of the One Laptop
per Child project and explains why--despite its failures--the same
utopian visions that inspired OLPC still motivate other projects
trying to use technology to disrupt education and development.
Announced in 2005 by MIT Media Lab cofounder Nicholas Negroponte, One
Laptop per Child promised to transform the lives of children across
the Global South with a small, sturdy, and cheap laptop computer,
powered by a hand crank. In reality, the project fell short in many
ways, starting with the hand crank, which never materialized. Yet the
project remained charismatic to many who were enchanted by its claims
of access to educational opportunities previously out of reach.
Behind its promises, OLPC, like many technology projects that make
similarly grand claims, had a fundamentally flawed vision of who the
computer was made for and what role technology should play in
learning.
Drawing on a seven-month study of a model OLPC project in Paraguay,
this book reveals that the laptops were not only frustrating to use,
easy to break, and hard to repair, they were designed for
technically precocious boys --idealized younger versions of the
developers themselves--rather than the diverse range of children who
might actually use them. Reaching fifty years into the past and
across the globe, The Charisma Machine offers a cautionary tale about
the allure of technology hype and the problems that result when
utopian dreams drive technology development.
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Endorsements for The Charisma Machine
These endorsements were solicited by MIT Press and are also listed on
my MIT Press book page.
The Charisma Machine should be required reading for all ed tech
enthusiasts before jumping onto the next bandwagon. Morgan Ames
insightful and immensely readable analysis of the "One Laptop Per
Child initiative reveals how bold-faced ignorance results in
reifying privilege and power rather than addressing the needs of
learners and teachers.
--Yasmin Kafai, Lori and Michael Milken President s Distinguished
Professor, University of Pennsylvania
Morgan Ames, in a beautifully written account, excavates how and why
technologists, educators, and pundits cast the One Laptop Per Child
project as a societal savior. Incisive and extensively researched,
The Charisma Machine s searing critique of the OPLC is filled with
insights about the pitfalls of naive design endeavors all too common
in the contemporary era.
--Gabriella Coleman, The Wolfe Chair in Scientific and Technological
Literacy at McGill University; author of Hacker, Hoaxer,
Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous
The Charisma Machine delivers an unflinching, rich, and original
study of the One Laptop Per Child program. This clear-eyed critique
shows the allure of technology as a silver bullet to social
inequality and what happens when elites, policymakers, and unchecked
techno-utopianism run amok. This book is destined to become required
reading for those who want to understand why we must stop turning to
tech--and technologists--as saviors.
--Mary L. Gray, Principal Researcher, Microsoft Research; Affiliate
Faculty, Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard
University; co-author of Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley from
Building a New Global Underclass
OLPC is one of the great stories of technology and social change,
breathtaking in ambition, with noble but unexamined intentions, and
profound failures of execution. With an admirable mix of first-hand
perspective and scholarly distance, Morgan Ames provides a helpful
set of tools for understanding enthusiasm for a wave of new
technologies. The idea of a "charismatic technology" is one that will
influence technology scholars to come.
A deeply impressive book. Compelling, important, and potentially
impactful, this was a pleasure to read.
--Ethan Zuckerman, Director, Center for Civic Media at MIT
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Press Coverage of The Charisma Machine
2021. Jeremy Rochelle. Computers for Learning: Charisma that Fails to
Disrupt? Blog@CACM, January 5.
2020. Mark Guzdial. Developing Computational Solutions With Humility:
Recommending Morgan Ames' 'The Charisma Machine.' Blog@CACM, February
23.
2020. W. Patrick McCray. Selling a Charismatic Technology. LA Review
of Books, January 23.
2020. Amy J. Ko. An autobiographical synopsis of Morgan Ames The
Charisma Machine . Bits and Behavior (a Medium blog), January 3.
2019. Joe Agoada. The Power & Paradox of a Planet Saving Laptop feat.
Professor Morgan Ames. Let's Break Good podcast, November 20.
Available on Spotify, Apple, and SoundCloud.
2019. Hope Reese. The One Laptop Per Child Program Was Supposed to
Revolutionize the Developing World Then It Imploded. Medium OneZero,
November 20.
2019. Jeffrey R. Young. What Happened to the '$100 Laptop ? EdSurge
Podcast, November 5.
2019. Morgan G. Ames. The Smartest People in the Room? What Silicon
Valley s Supposed Obsession with Tech-Free Private Schools Really
Tells Us. Los Angeles Review of Books, October 18.
2019. Staff. Morgan Ames The Charisma Machine: A Deep Dive into One
Laptop per Child. School of Information News, October 15.
2019. Henry Jenkins. Interview with Morgan G. Ames on The Charisma
Machine: The Life, Death, and Legacy of One Laptop Per Child.
October 7. Available in three parts: Part I, Part II, and Part III.
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Chapter Descriptions
0. Introduction
One Laptop per Child provides a case study in the complicated
consequences of technological utopianism. This chapter begins to
untangle what made this project and its laptop so captivating and
even the most outrageous claims about it so compelling. The reasons
this is important go beyond mere historical interest: the same
utopian impulses that inspired OLPC had also inspired previous
starry-eyed projects in education and development--and they have
continued to inspire subsequent projects. This is thus more than just
an account of One Laptop per Child. It is a cautionary tale about
technology hype that explains how technologies become charismatic and
what the consequences of that charisma can be. This chapter
introduces the One Laptop per Child project, describes what it means
to call this project charismatic, and outlines the salient features
of a charismatic technology.
1. OLPC's Charismatic Roots: Constructionism, MIT's Hacker Culture,
and the Technically Precocious Boy
Why did so many so enthusiastically accept One Laptop per Child's
charismatic promises? When people imbue technologies with charisma,
it is because they expect these technologies not only to be able to
solve what they see as problems in the world, but to do it in a way
that agrees with and amplifies their deeply held core beliefs about
how the world works. So, in order to understand why OLPC's laptop was
charismatic, this chapter describes the cultural history of OLPC,
which originated in MIT's early hacker groups in the 1960s through
its core learning theory, constructionism. This chapter then
discusses the social imaginary of the technically precocious boy as
a motivator for these groups, the learning theory, and the technology
world more broadly. This imaginary draws on related imaginaries of
the innate technical creativity and rebellious nature of children
(especially boys) and the stultifying effects of school as factory
as a target for this rebellion. Its resonance explains why successive
constructionist projects--from Logo to Lego Mindstorms to Scratch to
One Laptop per Child--have all been charismatic to many in the
technology world and beyond.
2. Making the Charisma Machine: Nostalgic Design and OLPC's 'XO'
Laptop
While Nicholas Negroponte traveled the world in 2006 giving talks
about the hundred-dollar laptop project, the newly formed nonprofit
One Laptop per Child got to work designing the machine. This group
was motivated by beliefs about the innate creativity and rebellious
nature of the archetypal technically precocious boy and its
counterpoint, the stifling school as factory. OLPC's promise of
social transformation based on these beliefs gave its members a
strong sense of purpose--and inspired the design of the laptop itself,
with particular ideas of technical play, authority-subverting
connectivity, and freedom to tinker at its core. In the process,
OLPC's contributors leaned on rose-tinted memories of their own first
encounters with computers in childhood, a process I call nostalgic
design. While nostalgic design is common in the technology world,
this chapter highlights how flawed it was for OLPC in the assumptions
it made about children, technology, and cultural change.
3. Translating Charisma in Paraguay
In 2008, Paraguay Educa was established to bring OLPC's distinctive
laptops to Paraguay, with the expectation that if the NGO was able to
simply line up the right resources, the laptop would be able to speak
for itself, as OLPC promised. This chapter highlights the extensive
work that was needed to achieve even partial translation in Paraguay.
Translation refers to a process that requires knowledge of two
worlds and work to bridge them (what is needed, for instance, to
translate from one language to another) as well as a framework for
discussing the contexts of the various actors involved. Leaning on
this understanding of translation, this chapter explores where and
why the work of translation succeeded--and where and why it failed. In
the process, it shows that OLPC's charismatic promises of
computer-aided learning and child-driven cultural change were
brittle--easy to break and labor-intensive to repair and maintain--when
put into practice.
4. Little Toys, Media Machines, and the Limits of Charisma
This chapter examines the kind of laptop use that OLPC leadership
claimed would make the biggest difference in student learning: use
initiated by children themselves, outside of the classroom. The
laptop's subversive qualities were meant to be charismatic to
children in particular, who would soon leapfrog past adults in
ability. So what did child-directed laptop use in Paraguay look like?
About two-thirds of students hardly used their laptops at all.
Fifteen percent did not use their laptops because they were unusably
broken, but the rest--about half of all students--were just not very
interested or found using the laptop too frustrating to use. The
remaining one-third were using their laptops for media consumption,
for which its hardware was ill suited. Captivated primarily by the
internet, not by the unique features of the XO, these students
learned and then taught one another to overcome the limitations of
the machine to play video games, music, videos, and more, passing
files to one another. The limits and transformations of charisma that
this chapter illustrates highlight the agency of Paraguayan children
in laptop use--and how media corporations shaped this agency.
5. The Learning Machine and Charisma's Cruel Optimism
Juxtaposed against OLPC leaders' claim that the laptop could be a
universal learning tool were also statements that suggested that the
project could still succeed even if it did not reach all children, as
long as it reached enough. Even if only a small number of children
were inspired, they might transform not only their own lives but
their regions or even whole countries. This chapter explores the
lives of several Paraguayan children and teenagers who would
generally be considered OLPC success stories--those few exemplary
youth for whom the charisma of the laptop did seem to resonate--and
what became of their inspiration.
In OLPC's eyes, these youth's motivations were a matter of them
finding something irresistible about engaging deeply and meaningfully
with the laptop, which in turn came from the natural creativity and
technical inclinations that all children are born with. But this
chapter uncovers a much more complicated story. Even when the
project's charismatic promises appeared to be fulfilled, its
individualist focus failed to shift the larger structural
inequalities--gender, language, social class, and more--that
marginalized these youth.
6. Performing Development
This chapter describes a visit by one of the founding members of OLPC
in 2010, and the way that Paraguay Educa and local schools mobilized
to perform success for him. It shows both how such performances are
important, and why they are risky. On the one hand, they are acts of
devotion, commitments to a collective ideological framework that
makes social change seem easy, at least for a short time. Yet
participants risk getting caught in these visions, fixated on a
future that may well be unattainable in lieu of a present that might
be messy and difficult but is real and here. Likewise, projects in
development or education that lean on such performances risk
compromising their long-term sustainability with them, performing the
discourse of disruption in the past tense: we have disrupted, the
disruption is accomplished, and we can all go home.
7. Conclusion
It has been well over a decade since the One Laptop per Child project
was publicly announced in 2005 and more than half a century since
Seymour Papert, the intellectual father of the project, began to
pursue the dream of children learning with, and from, computers.
Though OLPC has faded from public consciousness in that time, its
legacy continues. This concluding chapter describes--and
historicizes--this legacy, and summarizes the ideological stakes of
charismatic technologies more generally.
Those who create, study, or work with technology ignore the origins
of charisma at their own peril--at the risk of always being blinded by
the newest charismatic story of technology-enabled cultural change.
Moreover, the pressure that educational or social reformers are under
to produce charismatic projects that can attract attention and
funding also leaves them in a situation stacked toward failure,
rewarding showy but myopic projects. This work suggests another
course by documenting the tremendous amount of work--social,
infrastructural, and ideological--needed to produce even incremental
social change.
Appendix A. An Assessment of Paraguay Educa's OLPC Project
Appendix B. Methods for Studying the Charisma Machine
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Errata
Despite my very best due diligence and the careful attention of a
fact-checker hired by MIT Press, a few errors slipped through! Please
let me know if you find any others so they can be fixed in a future
edition, should there be one. Errata are listed below.
p. 74: "Castiglioni's candidacy did not last through the presidential
primary (he later became Lugo's vice president)" - the parenthetical
statement should be removed. (He had previously been vice president.)
p. 74: "Cecilia had visited the MIT Media Lab during her time in
Massachusetts, where she learned about the One Laptop per Child
project and was similarly captivated by its promises." This sentence
should be removed. (Though I heard this story from one project team
member, another has since stated that the timeline for Cecilia
learning about the project was different, and this contested detail
is not important to the story.)
p. 77: "Paraguay's vice president" should read "former vice president
Castiglioni" (see above).
Contact: webmaster@morganya.org