Loud

Grumpiness warning, again.

The OLPC is screwed.

Despite what the sceptics have said, I’d like to think that this was not an inevitable consequence of the idea, to design a laptop specifically for learning that is loosely coupled from the country’s infrastructure (electricity, network connection, schools, etc.), but that it was an inevitable consequence of the nature of Negroponte’s leadership.

I’ve never been a fan of Nicholas Negroponte. The foundation of all his techno-utopianist programmes and ideas is the patently delusional idea that humans and human society changes as fast as the technology they produce.

The cultural and social forces of of technology and economics are interlocked. Negroponte’s tendency to gloss over that relationship and just focus on the technological weave in the social tapestry has doomed project after project of his and his similarly minded peers to failure.