Nicholas Negroponte used to annoy me back in the nineties when I still took Wired seriously (we were all young once) when he’d bleat about his simplistic solutions to real problems in their backpages. These days he’s involved in doing crappy computers for third world countries, with the business plan there being something like
- create a new rugged tablet pc and drop them in Africa
- ????
- A whole continent achieves its true potential and becomes a free market paradise.
Jamie has the mindset behind this down pat:
Why do you want to do this? Because it’s a laptop. It will promote learning! How? Because its information technology with information in it. The child just switches on the laptop and gets the information out of it. Then it will be educated.They’ll just use it to play games. No they won’t, because it will be a special computer which won’t be able to play games. How are you going to make that work? because its new technology and new technology is flexible. Anyway, How can you deny a child a shiny new laptop, with a software package kindly provided to us by the manufacturers at only a third more than the normal retail price. What kind of progressive are you, anyway?
This is a vanity project to salve the conscience of guilty liberals, a solution in search of a problem, undertaken by people who don’t want to believe the problems their pet project is trying to solve are hard. It’s magic thinking.
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