The Charisma Machine: The Life, Death, and Legacy of One Laptop per Child

by Morgan G. Ames

A fascinating examination of technological utopianism and its complicated consequences.

In The Charisma Machine, Morgan Ames 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 captivated 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 fifty years of history and a seven-month study of a model OLPC project in Paraguay, Ames 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 children who were actually using them. The Charisma Machine offers a cautionary tale about the allure of technology hype and the problems that result when utopian dreams drive technology development.

Genres: Technology, Education, Nonfiction, Design, Science, Politics, Anthropology

328 pages, Paperback

Published November 19, 2019

Reviews

[Michael Burnam-Fink · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Charisma Machine is a hard-hitting deconstruction of the One Laptop Per Child project, conducted through the brutally unfair techniques of writing down what proponents of the OLPC program, primarily Nicholas Negroponte of the MIT Media Lab claimed it would do, and then looking at what children in the developing world actually did with the machines.


OLPCs at a primary school in Kigali, Rwanda in 2009, from Wikimedia

The goals of the program were quite ambitious, hundreds of millions of laptops for the world's poorest children, running open source software, made of durable and easy to replace parts. The laptops would inculcate these children into MIT's remix-reprogram-remake hacker culture, recreating the idyllic childhoods of the current technological elite, where an early childhood spent getting programs to run in BASIC turned into successful engineering careers. The OLPC project served to link a doable project of designing, building, and distributing low-cost laptops, with ongoing global concerns about education, nostalgia for the garage start-ups of the early PC days, and glossy TED talk futurism. All of this was backed up with the constructionist educational theory of Seymour Papert, where the computer was the perfect tool to learn to think with, in concert with elegant but limited programming languages like Logo. In Ames' theoretical framework (which I'll return to), this made the XO hardware a charismatic machine, capable of activating transnational networks to save the children.

Negroponte and other OLPC boosters had visions of tough laptops literally being dropped out of airplanes and used by eager children, but real world use required on-the-ground partners. Ames did her fieldwork in Caacupé, Paraguay, a district capital in a developing nation, where the NGO Paraguay Educa was heavily invested in making the OLPC project a success. Paraguay Educa installed wifi at test schools and provided teacher training and after school activities. They were thoughtful and well-resourced. They had the best of intentions.

But the friction of the real world is a far cry from the ideals of the program. The first bit of friction was that the OLPC was a profoundly limited machine, with 256 MB of RAM and 1 GB of Flash memory. Processor specs are roughly equivalent to a 2000-era PC, with the miniscule storage going back to 1995. In 2005, when the XO was proposed, the specs were bad. In the web-centric world of 2010, when Ames' primary fieldwork was conducted, the specs were crippling. Users complained that the OLPC took long minutes to book up, and the battery life was barely an hour when it was on. Even though Paraguay has good electrical infrastructure for a developing country, there were not enough outlets in homes and classrooms to enable long-term use of the OLPC by all students. Her description of a classroom exercising involving the Tux Paint app, which decays into a fiasco of tech support woes, is all too familiar. More friction was added as students removed apps to store more music or video content, and automatic OS updates deleted student projects. Rather than inspiring ownership, the broader context inspired a sense that these were someone else’s machines.

By Ames's calculation from Paraguay Educa stats, roughly 1/6th of XO's became unusably broken within a short time, with screens a particular problem. Beyond that, her ethnographic survey showed that fully one half of students in the program did not use their XO's beyond the minimal mandated activities, preferring to focus on non-digital activities like soccer, socializing, or helping around the house. Of the one third of program participants who were active users, the most common activities were playing music (Daddy Yankee was particularly popular at the time), watching cartoons, and playing emulated games via WINE, including Mario. Students became most adept not at the constructionist programming tools, but at pushing the limits of the hardware to make the OLPC a multimedia toy. My favorite part was her description of OLPC principle Walter Bender’s visit to Paraguay, and how a carefully stage-managed performance was used to cast him in the role of the technocratic patron. It was a display worthy of Secretary McNamara touring a strategic hamlet to demonstrate progress against Viet Cong infiltration.

A handful of students did become adept users, and Ames follows these exemplars in detail. But a closer looks reveals that these students had exceptionally supportive parents, and generally came from the upper reaches of Paraguayan society. Breaking into the ranks of international hackers requires English proficiency to learn a real programming language like Python, which in a country like Paraguay already means being part of a cosmopolitan elite. If the OLPCs had any effect, it was rendering the computer a little less of a novelty for participants. Perhaps now, nearly a decade on, some of Ames’ respondents are entering the workforce with a sense of how to use basic office programs, google for help on a technical problem, and generally not freeze when confronted with new technology. I’m skeptical any are programmers today. Measured against its original goals, OLPC met almost none of them.

The fieldwork is dedicated and detailed. As a researcher, Ames has a remarkable talent for objectivity. The simple facts are damning enough. If this book has a flaw, it’s in the STS theoretical paradigm, which takes up the first chapter. Ames blends Weber’s charismatic authority with Jasanoff’s sociotechnical imaginaries and Latour Actor-Network Theory to argue for the OLPC itself being charismatic. And there is a sense in which certain technologies (hyperloop, deep learning, blockchain!) warp discourse around them, when there are much less sexy realities (trains, linear regression, SQL) which actually solve those problems. This is very much an STS dissertation, which means that it has to push STS theory in a new direction. It’s just that, if I may get on a soapbox as somebody with an STS PhD for a moment, the gap between the objective of STS as a field, to think critically about the relationship between humans and technology, and the rigor and usability of major paradigms in the field is so deep that the best use of most of the theories is being buried in a hole in a desert.

The heavy STS theory is a shame, because Ames uncovered a far better theoretical paradigm in nostalgic design, in this case the tendency of the OLPC leadership to create something for their idealized childhood rather than the actual lived experience of children in the developing world. A second theoretical lens is the role of psychological theories in educational programs, and particularly the weaknesses of Papert’s constructionism for real classrooms and real students. As in most of these things, I blame Reviewer #2.

Griping about the discipline aside, Ames’ fieldwork is exceptional, the writing clear, and while the case-study is perforce limited to its specific site, the results are extensible to any number of ‘one clever design hack to fix a complex sociotechnical problem’ charades.

(Disclosure Notice: I received a free copy of the book from the author, and no other compensation.)

[Al Sweigart · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ames' The Charisma Machine covers the emperor-wears-no-clothes story of the One Laptop Per Child project, and how the technical gurus of MIT's famed Media Group set out to change the world and got it so wrong.

I remember the OLPC project. I followed news of it in the late 2000s and could get behind the idea; create a $100 laptop and give it to poor kids across the Global South and encourage them to learn to program. I loved the idea, because I had the same upbringing as the OLPC promoters who loved the idea. I was one of those kids who taught themselves how to program, making little video games in the BASIC programming language. This interest led me to major in computer science and then on to a successful career in Silicon Valley. So I thought these kids would teach themselves to program, express their creativity in code, develop a curiosity and an internal motivation to learn, become highly paid software engineers and tech entrepreneurs and Make The World A Better Place TM.

OLPC is a classic story of Silicon Valley hubris by way of MIT's famed Media Lab, but Ames does a fantastic job of dissecting the missteps, grand delusions, and false presumptions that went into constructing this fiasco. This is a book for several audiences: educators, policy makers, social workers, or even just jaded techies like me who gasp with relief that someone else has pulled back the curtain on these so-called wizards.

Ames uses the term "technically precocious boy" to identify the archetype that many in the OLPC project would identify with and, consciously or not, identify their targeted laptop-recipients as. I certainly was one of these "gifted" boys (and they were overwhelmingly boys) who taught himself to program at a young age by making little video games. I was independent, had a curiosity to learn outside of school, and had general anti-authority streak. Or at least I liked to think I did. Like the members behind OLPC, I was rather blind to the privileges I had: growing up with a PC and even internet access in the 90s and parents who encouraged my computing interest.

So I am especially primed to fall under the charisma of the One Laptop Per Child's cheap XO laptops. All these poor kids need is a laptop, and they'll follow the same path that I did and have successful careers and bring economic prosperity to their home countries and the world at large, right? Socioeconomic problems like poverty and lack of opportunity are hard; a quick, cheap technical fix can seem like a miracle. If that sounds too good to be true, it's because it is.

Not that the OLPC was a scam, but it did have some cult-like features. The charisma of the backers such as Nicholas Negroponte, who also had the connections to bring in funding and code contributions from open source volunteers, was overwhelming. The input of actual teachers, social workers, and local community organizers was glossed over, as was tracking the actual effectiveness of the program.

Ames spent months in Paraguay in the actual communities that were recipients of OLPC laptops, cataloguing the experience of students and teachers. She also saw firsthand the many shortcomings of these laptops. Some of these were simple: classrooms often didn't have enough electric outlets or power strips to sustain everyone's laptop. But some were large: kids mainly used the laptops, not for creative expression, but just to consume media on the internet. They more often played video games than programmed them.

I lived in Silicon Valley for over a decade and I've personally seen the strain of naivety of these tech-based utopian vision. Some guy will claim that he's going to teach JavaScript to homeless people and solve poverty. They never have any previous experience in education or social work, but this doesn't matter. After a few weeks, they, and the internet audience enrapture by their first blog post announcement, lose interest and quietly move on to their next venture. The One Laptop Per Child project was this, scaled up into millions of dollars spent by project funders and recipient governments, along with the countless time of open source volunteers, local teachers, parents, and the students themselves. In the end, the time and money would have been better spent on more conventional, but not-so-charismatic, educational programs.

Ames' The Charisma Project is a cautionary tale that is important to read for anyone who follows developments in the tech industry. These institutions and companies frequently make grand claims of innovation and salvation. I, for one, appreciate Ames' efforts to expose these hollow proclamations and her guidance on how to avoid repeating their mistakes in the future.

[Livi · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5/5
got insanely repetitive after a bit, but very informative.

[Kentrell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing ethnographic work that challenges mythologies around technology and provides the reader with tools to recognize "charismatic technology" when they encounter it. Grateful to the author for putting this book together.

[Doni · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Charisma Machine is a well-written, well-researched critique of the project of One Laptop Per Child. It is also a cautionary tale of the hubris involved in many technocratic solutions to educational needs. I find it particularly interesting during this pandemic when so many are resorting to online tools to continue educating students. Though its applications are perhaps not broad enough to inform us how we should approach our current situation, it certainly carries within it many warnings about how we should not approach it.

One might think that if someone had devoted as much academic bandwidth to this project as Ames has, that they might gloss over the weaknesses of the program. Instead, Ames offers an even-handed critique on the weaknesses of the program such as insufficient memory, lack of training for its pedagogical applications, and a design based on the designers' nostalgic childhood rather than customized with its users in mind. I particular enjoyed the glimpses of context Ames provided such as a teacher union strike for lack of benefits among other issues, and a transfer of political parties in Paraguay that both contributed to the conditions that impacted the use of these laptops.

I also appreciated the contrast Ames provided between constructivism within education fields and constructionism within technology fields. I was familiar with constructivism, the idea that a child actively constructs their understanding by engaging with the world, but not constructionism. Indeed, given a background in constructivism, constructionist focus on computer usage as a source for spontaneous play and individual ingenuity, strikes me as odd. Constructionist ideals both informed the project design and served as a measure for its success or lack thereof. By their own measures, the founders of OLPC are demonstrated to be woefully out of touch with the realities of its implementation.

The XO laptop design was supposed to be cheap, durable, and open to customization by its users (aka the children.) Instead, it exceeded its quoted costs, particularly due to infrastructure that was required to make it work. The laptops often broke with no means of repair. And the students often deleted educational software in order to make room for videos, music, and games (which arguably does succeed at being customizable at the expense of being educationally worthwhile). Honestly, though, some of these drawbacks were ones I saw with use of technology as a classroom teacher in the U.S. though the users in Paraguay had less recourse for fixing them. Generalizable issues such as children getting distracted by other uses of the computers than the teachers' intentions, were further compounded by how unreliable the infrastructure was for using them.

[Shane · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was a surprise to me. I knew very little about the "One Laptop Per Child" programme, and never really set out to learn more. I also did not expect a book about such a niche topic to be interesting enough for a duration. But Morgan G. Ames' brilliant critical analysis is about far more than that programme. It is about techno-utopic dreams and how they get inflated by the charisma of those who come up with them. OLPC was the brainchild of some of the founding members of the MIT Media Lab, and was put forward as a scheme that would empower poor children into becoming keen technologists in the future.

Ames' anthropological writing is sharp and often funny, her analysis is bulletproof, and her conclusions are damning. The programme was a complete failure: The machines were expensive, prone to breaking, under-used, poorly designed for purpose and unpopular with the children. Although those behind it still hail it as at least a part-success.

What Ames does brilliantly is look at how the failures happened, how they are presented as successes, what the motivations behind these presentations are, and how bias is embedded in the (white, male, wealthy) ambitions of those who roll out technological dream-goals like OLPC. The perfect moments come when Ames takes aim at individualism as a learning mechanism, and how the OLPC founding team seem to neglect all the social roles that were involved in their own early love of computers.

The book is a brilliant application of Donna Haraway's methodology for "staying with the trouble" (which Ames references near the end of the book). It is also a very enjoyable read that uses accessible language and ideas and shrewd humour alongside even shrewder analysis.

[Lisa Eckstein · Rating 5 out of 5]

The One Laptop per Child project aspired to build cheap, sturdy laptops that kids in the developing world would use to teach themselves software programming and hardware maintenance. From the beginning, OLPC failed to live up to many of its goals, but the project still captured the public imagination due to the charismatic ideas and personalities behind it. Morgan Ames spent half a year in Paraguay observing schools with OLPC laptops to discover the reality of how they worked in classrooms (frustratingly, with much breakage) and how children used them in their free time (more for media and games than learning). In this book, she examines OLPC in the context of other utopian projects, presents findings from her fieldwork, and considers how cultural and gendered biases shaped the project.

THE CHARISMA MACHINE traces a fascinating subject with care and insight. While the writing is generally accessible, the book is a work of scholarship from an academic press, and parts were a bit dense on theory for me, especially the first chapter. I wouldn't fall into the usual audience, but Morgan is a friend, and I've followed this book's progress from fieldwork to dissertation to manuscript. Once past the more abstract section, I read the rest with interest, curious to learn about the development of the laptop and eager to discover how it was received by the children of Paraguay. This is a thoughtful, thoroughly researched book with a charisma of its own.

[Marina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Super interesting, but unfortunately dense and repetitive. I'd recommend skimming this, but I would fully recommend reading it (especially if you're in global public health/education or working at the Media Lab). Some telling quotes I highlighted:

▪ Technology is the only means to educate children in the developing world,” Negroponte told the MIT Technology Review in October 2005. Later, he said that the laptop project “is probably the only hope. I don’t want to place too much on OLPC, but if I really had to look at how to eliminate poverty, create peace, and work on the environment, I can’t think of a better way to do it

▪ This chapter explores how this justification for these hardware choices is an example of nostalgic design: it targeted the social imaginaries that resonated best with OLPC contributors’ own identities, especially the social imaginary of the technically precocious boy who found joy in understanding the machine deeply. However, nostalgic design violates some of the core principles of user-centered design: to design for one’s users, not for oneself, and to account for the messy realities of use. Indeed, the project did little to engage these realities: there was no OLPC-specific pilot or user testing to speak of.

▪ We saw that others in OLPC’s leadership likewise ridiculed teachers, particularly teachers in the rural Global South, whom they accused of being undereducated, undertrained, “drunk,” or even “absent entirely.” Ivan Krstić said in a talk at Google about OLPC, “Kids should be able to have some kind of way to get curious and get answers regardless of whether their teacher can provide them or doesn’t know or isn’t there.”

▪ OLPC hoped that its hardware design would encourage kids to tinker with the laptop and even to be able to repair it themselves, which would let them really understand the machine inside out, the way the developers themselves understood computers. Like the old hardware specification described above, this illustrates another clear instance of nostalgic design: it assumed a world with easy-to-obtain peripherals that were compatible with one another, such as the self-designed and easily repairable desktop “tower” computers that were especially prevalent in the 1990s [...] ▪ But a former OLPC employee informed me that the goal of having the XO’s various components soldered onto the machine’s motherboard rather than permanently glued, to make it possible to swap them out, was scrapped by OLPC’s hardware manufacturer Quanta, which had different priorities and constraints—especially keeping the laptops low in cost and its vendors happy.

▪ Paraguay Educa and the local government framed the requirement to have a cédula as part of “being a good citizen” (it was needed to vote, for instance). Yet it could also allow the state to more easily track a citizen’s taxes and fines, enforce the required year of military service for men, and potentially suppress dissent. These concerns were especially salient because just a few decades earlier, Alfredo Stroessner’s Paraguay, like Augusto Pinochet’s Chile and Jorge Rafael Videla’s Argentina, had been a repressive dictatorship that abducted and murdered citizens deemed troublesome.24 In the 2011 Phase II laptop distribution, this requirement was extended from just cédulas to both cédulas and current vaccinations

▪ The smallness of the XO laptop’s hard drive in particular meant that children who downloaded music, movies, games, and other content quickly ran out of space on their hard drives, pushing them to figure out how to uninstall software. In a way, children were doing what OLPC had hoped for—they were customizing their laptops—but most were later at a loss for finding and reinstalling missing activities when it came time to use them in class. This put the burden on teachers to manage the process, complicating their duties by introducing unpredictability and usurping their agency in the classroom.

▪ “I can see that we’re innovating our old pedagogy with the XO. It’s a difficult change. ... If the teacher has training, the XO, and space but no change of attitude, nothing happens.” Her framing of the problem as one of individual “attitude” placed the blame on the teachers themselves rather than on structural issues such as a lack of time and pay for these extra duties.

▪ This challenges one of the claims in Papert’s writings on constructionist learning that paints those who don’t engage as “schoolers,” lost souls already conditioned into a life of acquiescence to authority. What we find when we examine why these children did not engage with computers is not an uninteresting mass of automaton “schoolers” but a set of diverse children with their own opinions, motivations, and lives—ones that may not include an often frustrating-to-use laptop.

▪ She had become the most enthusiastic teacher in the whole project and also a staunch advocate for her talented children. As a teacher, she had learned about the various programs available on the XO laptop in teacher-training sessions and then from the trainer in her school, and she later introduced Scratch and other programs to her children. With her encouragement, they soon outstripped her knowledge, and she sometimes purposefully played up her ignorance to get them to explore more. “To find out what they were doing,” she explained in an interview, “I used to pretend to be a fool and ask them, ‘How do you use this?’ And they said, ‘Oh Mom, come, and I’ll explain,’ and then I would say, ‘Oh, that’s how it is—and here’s another way!’ [..].] Even though much of Manuelo and Elisa’s work was jointly created, Paraguay Educa extended more, and more exciting, opportunities to Manuelo than to Elisa.

▪ Negroponte explained in a 2010 editorial in the Boston Review that “owning a connected laptop would help eliminate poverty through education. ... In OLPC’s view, children are not just objects of teaching, but agents of change.”28 Statements such as this sound as though they give agency to children, but within this is also a sobering individualist responsibility: if change fails to materialize, it is not the fault of the schools or economic conditions or social structures or national policies or infrastructure—those have already been written off. It is the fault of the individuals.

[Christopher · Rating 4 out of 5]

A relatively damning indictment of tech hubris and the industry's pursuit of confirmation bias to gain funding for their projects. Delivering the vision and feeling good about oneself seems to trump any concerns over the actual effectiveness of the project, especially over the long-term.

Negroponte's repeated vision (over two projects that are noted in the book; maybe there are more?) of raining devices over perceived backwater villages, thereby "planting seeds" (my words) that will grow into tech entrepreneurs is almost laughably unrealistic as to be parody. I can envision a Steve Jobs type in a helicopter throwing iPhones at a village of straw huts, proud of his own accomplishment, while the people below are being smashed in the head by his "gifts."

It would be an SNL skit otherwise, yet here we are and The Charisma Machine does a great job of showing real hands-on research and data to expose the ugly truths hidden behind the curtains of mythology that those like Negroponte generate.

[Adrian Hon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Smart and cutting look at the overblown promises of OLPC, which from its birth was based on the devastatingly inaccurate belief that all kids in Global South are like the rich white boys who became MIT hackers in the 80s

[Zach Rzicznek · Rating 5 out of 5]

It was refreshing to see ethnographic fieldwork of this rigor. The most salient feature of this work was its consistency in description and definition; the project was clearly explicated from beginning to end. Get ready for a "thick description."

[Kathleen · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have an XO laptop (got it through the give one get one program in 2007). I remember seeing a prototype/early version even before that, in the context of some connected hacker friends. Even though I found it clunky and awkward and didn’t actually make much use of it, I confess I have long been caught up in the charisma of it. This book pulled away the curtain to describe the actual reception of these computers to kids across Paraguay — how tedious it actually was to try to use them for classroom learning and how they mostly got used for media consumption and/or broke. How instances of taking the tech and running with it didn’t come from the tech itself but from supportive and interested adult mentors and other important social contexts. I appreciate all the background and critiques offered by this book, including the origins of this project from mit hacker culture and independent learner “technologically precocious boy” ideals. I have seen a Lot of folks assuming their relationship to technology or their specific learning path is The One True Path that everyone should follow.

This quote from the end is a good final thought to reflect on:

“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 next best thing, with little concept of the larger cultural context that technology operates within and little hope for long-term change. Recognizing and critically examining charisma can help us to understand the effects it can have and then, if we choose, to counter them.”

[Kasper · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book presents an ethnography and critical analysis of the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) project. I appreciated how fearlessly the author took on many well-known researchers in the critique; I also appreciated the details of the ethnography of OLPC. It seems well done and was interesting.

My reasons for ultimately not liking the book were twofold. First, I think the author fails to build and develop an empirical case for the critique. The writing is always ascribing motives (mostly bad ones), using biased terms (Davos attendees are "capitalists and leaders"), and often making the least charitable interpretation of the actors possible. This simply did not work for me as a way of developing an argument. Second, the recommendations for how to move forward are limited and rather superficial. This is a bit annoying for those of us who are not opposed to technologically driven projects. It feels strange that we cannot learn something more concrete from this case.

[R Lance Hunter · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ames is extremely thorough and academic in this writing, a style that can be frustrating when it becomes obvious to the reader the amount of dishonesty prevalent among certain actors in the OLPC initiative.

This is a very important read that I highly recommend. It provides a conceptual framework that will let you more easily recognize and deconstruct the tech hucksterism that is so prevalent today.

[Lorin Hochstein · Rating 4 out of 5]

Clear-eyed look at the impact of the One Laptop Per Child project through the eyes of an ethnographer.

I also recommend checking out the comments section of Mark Guzdial's blog post, which has comments from David Cavallo (who was involved in the project): https://computinged.wordpress.com/202...

[Marcela · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful analysis and critique based on some amazing ethnographic fieldwork in Paraguay.

[fren · Rating 4 out of 5]

learn to code