Mile Zero

March 3, 2009

I see that the One Laptop Per Child program has been revealed. Since I didn't get any takers for the op-ed I wrote a few months back, here's my perspective on it:

Let Them Eat Cake
By Thomas Wilburn

Before the guillotine gave Marie Antoinette her final haircut and took a bit too much off the top, the legend says that she responded to news of a bread shortage with the words "If they have no bread, let them eat cake." There is, in truth, no evidence that Antoinette actually said any such thing, but the line is too good to pass up. It's the perfect encapsulation of the rich who do not understand--nor want to understand--the poor.

At the recent Microsoft Government Leaders Forum in March this year, Bill Gates made disparaging comments about the One Laptop Per Child program, which aims to create a cheap laptop for third-world schoolchildren as an educational tool. He noted that its screen would be difficult to share, that there is no money allocated for support or networking, and that the applications were not yet developed. Since he is Bill Gates, despite his own substantial work in fighting malaria and other diseases, he was immediately set upon by the tech-savvy. How dare he try to disparage the work of the project's leader, former Wired columnist and venture capitalist Nick Negroponte?

But Gates was right: "Let them eat cake" should be the motto of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program. It's a selfish bit of techno-utopianism that will do more harm than good. To understand why, we are going to have to spend some time with some basic development economics.

When organizations like the World Bank talk about learning programs for developing countries, they often use the term "capacity development." That's a fancy way of saying that communities should be taught how to develop themselves so that they're not reliant on outside parties for knowledge and technology. Before the problem of capacity became clear, development projects often failed as soon as the sponsor left, because they took knowledgeable personnel away with them, like a miniature brain drain. Development efforts still struggle to train workers and initiate a sustainable process--one that will continue after the rich sponsor has moved on.

The OLPC program, in theory, is designed as an educational tool. Of course, the project itself has not always been clear on what kind of education it plans to offer. Although originally pitched as a way for students to learn about technology, the primary justification now being offered is as a textbook replacement, most likely in a Wiki-style format. Putting aside worries about the mutability of electronic textbooks in the hands of potentially corrupt governments or corporations, what happens to the existing textbook industries for those countries?

Or even the existing IT industries, which are probably struggling already? Negroponte's plan won't employ labor, manufacturing, or software from the host countries. It simply dumps technology into the market, without taking into account the harm that could do to local companies. Instead of working within local markets to build a telecommunication infrastructure, the OLPC program calls for a spontaneously-generated, non-standard "mesh network" that will join the laptops to each other, and eventually to the Internet. Even assuming that this mesh network can overcome its technical problems and actually introduce students to the World Wide Web, it bypasses the wider population completely. It ignores the opportunity to build a real IT infrastructure, and the capacity to use it.

Finally, the problem of energy. OLPC has given up on hand-cranked laptops, because it's impossible for a child to generate enough power. That means that the machines must run on the local power grid. To most developed countries, that still sounds satisfactory because we have access to electricity 24/7. Yet there are 1.6 billion people out there who have no electricity at all, anywhere. Of the rest, many don't have constant access--they might have it for a few hours a day, or there might be regular rolling brownouts. Again, the laptop does nothing to address the problem of building electrical capacity. In fact, it completely skips over the problem--and treats that as a selling point, instead of the missed opportunity it really represents.

As with the other criticisms of the project, the real question becomes: isn't there a better place for that money to be spent? Wouldn't Negroponte be doing more for the developing world if he helped to build an electrical and information infrastructure with cheap recycled computers? Or even, as the Gates Foundation has done, poured money into disease research and vaccination programs? Let's not forget that the eventual target of the OLPC project is the very poor--people who, in many cases, live on less than a dollar a day. $100 spent on a laptop is money not spent on food, clean water, clothes, and medical care.

But then, money becomes an uncomfortable question when the project's organizers state that they will not be providing these for free, but will be asking host governments to buy the laptops with a minimum commitment of 1 million machines. $100 million dollars, to be spent on an unproven and so far unseen technology, in the developing world where more pressing problems abound, may go beyond foolish. The money being used, once it becomes a matter of large-scale government funding, is not Nick Negroponte's to waste. It is being taken from the poor themselves. It is difficult to believe, given the choice, that this is how they would choose to spend it--on cake, rather than the bread and essential services that they really need.

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