As some light relief from the news from Burma and China, it looks as if the One Laptop Per Child project is falling apart under the weight of - well, mainly under the weight of Nicholas Negroponte. Ivan Krstic explains in a fascinating essay on his reasons for leaving his position as security director of OLPC:

In fact, I quit when Nicholas told me — and not just me — that learning was never part of the mission. The mission was, in his mind, always getting as many laptops as possible out there; to say anything about learning would be presumptuous, and so he doesn’t want OLPC to have a software team, a hardware team, or a deployment team going forward.

Yes, that’s right - welcome back to Magic Future Kingdom, where technology will solve everything! One thing that’s interesting is that Krstic (and I think many of the OLPC team) didn’t share this view - for them, the public mission of improving education in developing countries was what fired their hard drives up. However I’m not sure that this focus on education is any different in terms of misplaced idealism - even Krstic admits that

As far as I know, there is no real study anywhere that demonstrates constructionism works at scale. There is no documented moderate-scale constructionist learning pilot that has been convincingly successful; when Nicholas points to “decades of work by Seymour Papert, Alan Kay, and Jean Piaget”, he’s talking about theory.

I’ve never said exactly what I thought about OLPC on this blog, for three reasons. First, my opinion is irrelevant. Second, my opinion is frequently wrong. Third, everybody deserves a chance to test their idea against reality and see if it breaks. However as far as I was concerned, OLPC was broken as soon as it ran into the reality of logistics - actually distributing these laptops to their intended recipients - but nobody seemed to want to talk about this aspect of the project, as if it would somehow corrupt the purity of the vision.

Peru’s first deployment module consisted of 40 thousand laptops, to be deployed in about 570 schools across jungles, mountains, plains, and with total variance in electrical availability and uniformly no existing network infrastructure. A number of the target schools are in places requiring multiple modes of transportation to reach, and that are so remote that they’re not even serviced by the postal service. Laptop delivery was going to be performed by untrusted vendors who are in a position to steal the machines en masse. There is no easy way to collect manifests of what actually got delivered, where, and to whom… Other than the incredible Carla Gomez-Monroy who worked on setting up the pilots, there was no one hired to work on deployment while I was at OLPC, with Uruguay’s and Peru’s combined 360,000 laptop rollout in progress. [my emphasis]

What I don’t understand is that I could have told them about all these problems. Anybody with any experience working in the development sector could have told them about all these problems. Hell, anybody who’s ever been outside of the G8 countries could have probably have told them about all these problems, which raises the tricky question of - why didn’t anybody tell them? There are two possibilities. The first is that the people they asked only told them what they wanted to hear - this seems very likely, especially if they were mainly listening to governments, who don’t like to admit that they haven’t in fact been able to extend basic services to rural areas. The second is that they didn’t bother to ask anybody, which in light of Krstic’s essay seems to be equally likely - he quotes from a memo that he sent in December 2007:

We still have not a single employee focusing on deployment, helping to plan it, working with our target countries to learn what works and what doesn’t. Evidently our “deployment plan” is to send whichever hotshot superhacker we have available to each country such that he may fix any problems that arise on the spot. If that is not in fact our plan, then we have no plan at all.

To his credit, Krstic recognises that the

the last key problem, transforming laptops into learning is a non-trivial leap of logic, and one that remains inadequately explained.

What I don’t quite understand is who he thinks is going to do that explaining. It seems clear - not just from this essay, but from general observation of the way in which OLPC has been built up and the claims that it’s made - that this project was not in fact designed to meet the educational needs of poor children around the world. Instead it was about proving a series of ideological points - about private versus public sector, about Open Source software, about constructivist learning - and the impact that it’s had on the technology sector (and it has had a not insignificant impact) has been incidental to proving those points. Now, slowly but surely, each of those points has been tested against reality - and broken. At least now we know what doesn’t work - but we knew that before.

One Laptop Per Child has been a textbook example both of the worst kind of development (broadly, rich white people believe that they know what’s best for poor black people) and the most egregious kind of technotopianism (broadly, complex social problems can be solved if only we have the right technology). These two strands of thought were summed up in a comment by Guido van Rossum:

I’ve thought for a while that sending laptops to developing countries is simply the 21st century equivalent of sending bibles to the colonies.

Amen.