The Charisma Machine: The Life, Death, and Legacy of One Laptop per Child by Morgan G. Ames

Reviewed by: The Charisma Machine: The Life, Death, and Legacy of One Laptop per Child by Morgan G. Ames Daniel Lövheim (bio) The Charisma Machine: The Life, Death, and Legacy of One Laptop per Child By Morgan G. Ames. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2019. Pp. 309. Global digitalization, connectivity, and the vision of "computers for all" are examples of how narratives of technology and education can be combined to invoke powerful and far-reaching promises of social change in contemporary society. In The Charisma Machine, Morgan G. Ames gives a fascinating case study of these visions. Launched in 2005 and developed at the MIT Media Lab, the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) project built on the idea of giving all children across the Global South a computer of their own. It was led by Professor Nicholas Negroponte, who during that year toured the world stage and promised that the laptop was to be cheap but at the same time cute, powerful, and robust. Furthermore, his message was that the project not only had the possibilities to connect poor and rural areas with the rest of the world or to stimulate young kids to become programmers. It also held the potential, Negroponte claimed, to end poverty, save the environment, and create peace. The Charisma Machine sets out to follow the OLPC project from the beginning to its deployment in South America, with a special focus on Paraguay, where the author spent seven months as an observer. Ames uses different sources and methods in her study, from speeches, public mailing lists, and discussion boards to ethnographic fieldwork and interviews. The first part of the book traces the intellectual roots of the OLPC back to the 1960s and another influential professor at MIT, Seymour Papert, who was among the first to express visions of one computer per child. Papert's own learning theory, called constructionism, built on the idea of children as active learners in knowledge construction processes. Another important part of the OLPC's background was the hacker culture ethos of MIT, which from its early years had hailed passionate and playful attitudes to computers and programming. Both Papert's learning theory and the hackers' ethos relied, the author claims, on particular social imaginaries of childhood and technology that were invested into the OLPC project—imaginaries of a creative, boyish, and rebellious persona that in many ways was able to teach itself and thus leapfrog traditional ways of learning. In her analysis of both the utopian promises of the laptop's potential and the way it was planned and designed through the ideas of social imaginaries of childhood, Ames uses the concept "charismatic technology"—a term inspired by both Max Weber and the science and technology studies field to describe how objects, not only humans, can be seen as charismatic and having an agency. The charisma, she explains, lies not in what kind of object it is but in the promises that it invokes. The author does a good job at contributing to [End Page 608] existing research on computer-driven (educational) utopianism but also at placing the story of OLPC within a longer tradition of charismatic objects. In a historical perspective that involves the last two hundred years, the laptop becomes yet another part of a tradition in which new technologies—railroads, radio, the internet—have been understood as groundbreaking and as creators of new paths to freedom and (male) individualism. In the remaining chapters of the book, the author presents how the OLPC—which never really became the global success that the developers had hoped—along with its charisma, was exported to Paraguay, where it met with administrators, teachers, children, and parents of a completely different context than the one in which it was designed and developed. Ames convincingly shows that the project encountered obstacles of both a technical and social nature that together painted a different picture than the enthusiastic visions of reduced poverty and playful learning. Breakage and software problems were one aspect, language barriers formed another, as did gendered and socioeconomic factors. The findings demonstrate that even if some children did try to use the laptops in the hacker-inspired way that Negroponte and his team...