Two years ago I wrote about what is becoming known as the $100 computer. Nicholas Negroponte, who many futurists still regard as a guru for his work with MIT’s Media Lab, announced in that year the formation of a nonprofit group called One Laptop Per Child will supply a laptop computer to every child in…I will hold the punch line if you don�t know it already and instead ask a question: if you could supply a laptop computer to every child in some country in the world what country would you choose? India? Mexico? What about our own United States?
Well guess who Negroponte chose as his first test site: Libya. According to the Times’ story Negroponte was quite taken with Libyan dictator Muammar el-Qaddafi. Sounding like he had spent too much time in his media lab watching old Rudolf Valentino movies, Negroponte gushed, “When I met with Qaddafi, it had all the mystique and trimming expected: middle of the desert, in a tent, 50 degree’s C., etc.” Note that C., it’s intended as a not so subtle dig at those of us who still read their thermometers in Fahrenheit, a cut at all us boobs who aren’t MIT professors.
The laptops were designed by Negroponte and MIT to cost only $100–a price that has now climbed to $150. At the rate of a $50 increase every month they will rapidly approach the cost one one of those cheap machines you can buy in any mall. Maybe Negroponte should have bought a batch of used computers on eBay, where you can find $150 machines without too much trouble.
Instead of being made in the good old USA, Negroponte’s computer will be made in Taiwan by Qanta. A picture of one (see above) showed a small monitor with speakers and an attached keyboard. It will also have wireless network capability. The one thing it won’t have is Windows. Bill Gates decided his charity did not extent to providing every child a laptop if that meant selling Windows at a steep discount. So Mr. Negroponte’s system will use Linux. Mr. Gates may come to regret that decision. One Laptop Per Child has announced it is also signed tentative agreements with Brazil, Argentina, Nigeria and Thailand. Notice anyone missing?
It’s your school right down the street. Mr. Negroponte, whose brother is United States Intelligence Director John Negroponte, apparently does not think American students are deserving of his largesse. You may remember Mr. Negroponte as the inventor of one of the more crackpot ideas of our times: a computer that would fetch news, entertainment, clothes, etc. just for you. In other words, don’t expose people to new and different ideas or people, let them live in the technological equivalent of a gated community.
It would take some kind of dunce to not believe that the Negroponte brothers did not have a conversation about the target countries and that the Bush Administration also did not have any input. Libya has suddenly become our ally and the dictator once described as half-mad now has “mystique.” We’ll let the foreign policy types post comments about the whys of the other countries. I have only one comment: this country’s foreign policy is becoming more of a mystery to me every day. We send so-called terrorists to Syria to be tortured and now we send computers to Libya? What’s next Hummers to North Korea?
The important thing is that while inner city and rural schools in this country have trouble getting textbooks or bathrooms that work, the Negroponte brothers and MIT have decided that it is Libya not New Orleans (whose computers all washed away in Katrina), or Chicago, or Philadelphia, but Libya. In fact according to the Brookings Institution less than a third of the schools have reopened. What must the parents and children in New Orleans and other cities think when Mr. Negroponte and his brother again turn their backs on them and decide to reward a man who was once considered a terrorist?
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