A reader named Trent Krupp left this comment on my blog this morning:
I read your article on Slate today and felt that it was poorly researched with a fundamental lack of understanding as to what the $100 laptop is meant to do. While there are numerous errors of reasoning, a few that you should personnally look into are the real purposes of the WIFI adapter (hint: Ad-hoc networks are what is envisioned, not infrastructural networks). Also the mention of lack of support is really ludicrous. The kids using these things will be 100 times more knowledgable about their up keep in 10 years than anyone at MIT. Learn by doing, which, sadly, is not something that the typical Dell or Mac user appreciates while working with computers.
Funding will come from mostly private donors, who a project like this is best suited for. Also, I believe Netroponte will allow governments to charge for the laptops to, in his words, “Instill a sense of ownership.†While this may only be $10-$50 per laptop, that cuts government costs substantially.
This is an abridged overview of what I felt were obvious discrepencies. I am disappointed in Slate for publishing an article that even a cursory glance through the public record would have disproved much of the articles assertions.
Here is my response:
Dear Trent,
Thanks so much for leaving the comment on my blog and for reading my article.
Firstly, let me say that while I’m not fundamentally against teaching kids, particularly in the third world, how to use computers — I am not in favor of just dropping laptops from the sky, and having them be a miracle solution as Negroponte would have you believe.
I’ve lived in the third world — I studied as a university student in Senegal, West Africa from September 2002 to May 2003. I can tell you from first hand experience that kids need a lot of things first before a computer can even be useful to them. Yes, in our “new global economy” we need to teach them to use computers, but we also need to teach kids to read first. In Senegal, the literacy rate is 40%, and of those that are literate, they’re not even literate in their native languages — they are taught in the colonial (French) language. In Egypt, just over half the country is literate. What good is a computer if you can’t read? (Source: CIA Factbook)
I wrote my undergraduate thesis on the effects of the Internet in Senegal, which is linked on my blog below. You’ll see that I believe in the positive effects of technology — I’d love to have my Slate article be proved wrong. But the way that Negroponte is going about it, it would seem that this is massively poorly thought out and the experiences of similar projects, particularly the Simputer are telling.
All of that said, while an ad-hoc network (or “mesh computing”) as it’s called, can be used in the scenario that Negroponte has laid out, I’ve yet to hear an argument of why that’s actually useful. The whole reason why you would want WiFi, or any networking capability is for access to the greater Internet. Being able to network 10 or 100 local laptops for kids who may barely know how to use them — what’s the point?
Negroponte has yet to layout exactly how these things will be supported. While I will give you that a small fraction of the kids will be challenged and will learn how to fix the computers on their own, I doubt that all of them will. This is the same in this country, and not just with computers. Even if you were given or had access to a car at 16, do you know how it functions and how to repair it? Probably not. That’s why you take it to a mechanic. Likewise, only geeks know how to fix their computers on their own. Most people are willing to pay others to help them, because they either lack the know-how or don’t want to bother with it. This is certainly true in any other part of the world. This is the whole idea behind specialization of labor. But to think that by just dropping a truckload of laptops on a bunch of kids in rural Brazil is going to solve all their problems and that all of sudden they all will become programmers and hardcore geeks is just absurd and naïve.
On the scale that Negroponte is talking about is not chump change, so I’m not sure that even private donations will be possible. Assume for the sake of argument that he has five buyer countries that each buy one million laptops at $100 each. That’s $500 million. Now that’s just the cost of purchasing, to say nothing of distribution, delivery, support and troubleshooting down the road. Even $500 mil is not chump change. How many organizations out there have that kind of money and are willing to donate to this cause? Negroponte does have big corporations behind it, but does that mean that they’re going to be willing to fund it? To support the project 2, 5 and 10 years down the line?
I agree that instilling a sense of ownership is a good idea in the Western world — however, in rural developing countries, there is a long history of communalism and of sharing of resources. This is for reasons of tradition partly, but moreover for reasons of practicality. Buying every person a computer in a rural village is not always practical, let alone feasible. The telecenter model in Senegal and the cell phone model in Bangladesh have proven their success — and neither of those examples relied on each person owning a device.
While I respect your opinion, I strongly disagree.
-C
