Fionnáin reviewed The Charisma Machine by Morgan G. Ames
From Man-boy Dreams to Broken Screens
5 stars
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 …
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.
