The Charisma Machine: The Life, Death, and Legacy of One Laptop per Child (Infrastructures)

by Morgan G. Ames

Moreover, in light of OLPC’s mission to bring these ideas to children across the Global South, constructionism and OLPC could also be seen as imperialist, and Paraguay Educa’s faithful adherence to OLPC’s vision as problematic.34 After all, Paraguay Educa uncritically adopted a set of ideals largely developed at MIT, an elite institution in a country with a history of both military and cultural imperialism in the region: the United States. It moreover chose to invest in an untested technological intervention instead of food, vaccinations, working bathrooms, or any number of other kinds of much-needed aid. OLPC’s claim that a country could merely replace its textbook budget with a laptop budget and access online textbooks, for instance, assumed that the target country had a textbook budget to begin with and that schools in that country regularly used textbooks. In Paraguay, for one, this was not true.