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

The Charisma Machine

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

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The Charisma Machine

The Life, Death, and Legacy of One Laptop per Child

Morgan G. Ames

The MIT Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts

London, England

© 2019 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

This book was set in ITC Stone Serif Std and ITC Stone Sans Std by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited. Printed and bound in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Ames, Morgan G., author.

Title: The charisma machine : the life, death, and legacy of One Laptop Per Child / Morgan G. Ames.

Description: Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, [2019] | Series: Infrastructures | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018050938 | ISBN 9780262537445 (pbk. : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Laptop computers--Developing countries. | Computers and children--Developing countries.

Classification: LCC QA76.5 .A4255 2019 | DDC 004.1609724--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018050938

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Carla

d_r0

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1 OLPC’s Charismatic Roots: Constructionism, MIT’s Hacker Culture, and the Technically Precocious Boy

2 Making the Charisma Machine: Nostalgic Design and OLPC’s XO Laptop

3 Translating Charisma in Paraguay

4 Little Toys, Media Machines, and the Limits of Charisma

5 The Learning Machine and Charisma’s Cruel Optimism

6 Performing Development

7 Conclusion

Appendix A: An Assessment of Paraguay Educa’s OLPC Project

Appendix B: Methods for Studying the Charisma Machine

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

This project has made powerfully concrete to me that intellectual development is a profoundly social process. Just as the motivations of the Paraguayan children whom I observed were influenced by their teachers, parents, and friends, my own research trajectory has been deeply influenced by many important people in my life. Indeed, at times it seems strange that research projects have ownership when we all owe so much to our intellectual communities.

First and foremost, I thank my graduate advisor, Fred Turner, for his intellectual guidance. Though our topics, methods, and even writing habits may differ, I have learned so much from him about how to navigate the halls of academe and to produce rigorous, intellectually honest, and (hopefully) insightful research—and work that reflects my own passions. Words cannot express the gratitude I feel for this intellectual and social guidance. My committee has also helped me along this path: Cliff Nass, Jeremy Bailenson, Tanya Luhrmann, and John Willinsky. I especially honor the memory of Cliff, who in many ways was like a second advisor. He hooded me in place of Fred in June 2013 and was always available to provide ever-upbeat and ever-insightful feedback. We miss you, Cliff.

Just as important to this research are my colleagues and participants in Paraguay. My fieldwork there was one of the most challenging and enlightening experiences of my life. The gracious hospitality and support of the employees of Paraguay Educa, especially Pacita, enabled my fieldwork. I also owe so much to my research assistant, Liliana, who not only came along to many of the house visits and interviews to help me with my nonexistent Guaraní but scheduled and transcribed many of my interviews, and moreover welcomed me into her home as if I were a member of her family. Her superb local knowledge and many friends made my fieldwork so much easier. I want to thank all of the teachers, students, parents, and others for allowing me to shadow their experiences and for patiently answering my many questions. Geeking out with Bernie, Sebastián, Martín, and the technical team gave me a welcome respite during my time in Paraguay. Bernie also provided a welcome counterpoint to my observations and theories in Paraguay and beyond. I honor the memory of Carla, who was not only my host but my friend. When cancer took her from us much, much too early, it took one of the brightest and most passionate advocates for Paraguayan children.

The lion’s share of day-to-day support came from my cowriters over the years: ShinJoung Yeo, Daniela Rosner, Lilly Irani, Megan Finn, Lilly Nguyen, Tricia Wang, Lauren Schmidt, Christine Larson, Anita Varma, John Alaníz, Mark Gardiner, and more. These incredible scholars joined me to write in cafés and libraries all over the San Francisco Bay Area, and most also offered generous feedback on chapter drafts along the way. I have come to learn that I love to write socially, and this group has seen me through. Equally important was the generous community of scholars who offered feedback on chapters throughout the writing process. The dissertation on which this book is based was honed with the help of the Stanford Humanities Center dissertation writing group, convened by Katja Zelljadt. The two years I spent in this talented, interdisciplinary group gave me countless ideas for how to both broaden my work to appeal to more audiences and deepen it to make it more theoretically impactful. More recently, I have bent the ear of insightful colleagues including Joseph Klett, Matt Rafalow, Amber Levinson, Alicia Blum-Ross, Antero Garcia, Jenna Burrell, Damien Droney, Anne Jonas, Richmond Wong, Noura Howell, Christoph Derndorfer, and Nick Merrill, who all provided constructive feedback on (in many cases) multiple chapters. Finally, Laura Portwood-Stacer of Manuscript Works helped me reframe an early draft, Georgia Saltsman and Charlotte Nix helped me proof the near-final draft, and anonymous reviewers gave me invaluable feedback in between, guided by the encouraging editorial leadership of Katie Helke at the MIT Press.

This project was shaped by a number of people in the broader academic community. I thank my first postdoctoral supervisor, Paul Dourish, and the engaging community at the University of California, Irvine to which he introduced me, especially Chris Wolf, Noopur Raval, Silvia Lindtner, Katie Pine, Katherine Lo, Melissa Gregg, and the other members of the Intel Science and Technology Center for Social Computing. I hope the technology industry will again support such generative collaborations as the ISTC produced. I thank Eden Medina for including me in an incredible group of scholars studying science and technology in Latin America, and Juan Rodriguez and Hector Danilo Fernandez L’Hoeste for helping me sustain these connections. I have also benefited from the leaders and participants of the Values in Design workshops in 2008 and 2010, the Consortium for the Science of Sociotechnical Systems in 2011, the Digital Media and Learning Summer Fellows program in 2012, and the iConference Doctoral Colloquium in 2013.

I have saved the most important people in my life for last. To Josh, my wonderful partner: your faith in me has truly sustained me, and your commitment to an equal partnership has made this intellectual labor possible. Our relationship started around the time I embarked on this project, and I am so grateful for the strength you have helped me develop through the last decade to see it through. And to Mom and Dad, I credit you with nurturing my intellectual curiosity and cultivating a joy for living and learning throughout my youth. Your unconditional love and unwavering support mean more to me than I could ever express.

Introduction

On January 26, 2005, capitalists and leaders from around the world made their annual pilgrimage to Davos, Switzerland, for the World Economic Forum. A decade before, those worshipping at this altar of neoliberal globalization had supported missions to spread computers and connectivity to the far corners of the world, such as the Technology to Alleviate Poverty project and the Digital Divide Initiative, but the dot-com crash in 2001 had largely quashed the appeal of those kinds of technological visions.

Even so, Nicholas Negroponte, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), tested the waters for rekindling that vision under a new name. He plied the halls of Davos that January with a crude mock-up and what he hoped would be a compelling story of a hundred-dollar laptop for children across the Global South.¹ It would be cheap, it would be powerful, and it would be rolled out by the hundreds of millions to entire countries. He boasted that the project already had a backer—Advanced Micro Devices, a computer processor manufacturer—and interest from other technology companies. He had a vision, and he had the support of a number of fellow MIT professors—he just needed a market.

Negroponte was no stranger to sweeping digital dreams. In 1985, he had cofounded MIT’s Media Lab, which had a mission to invent the future as well as a penchant for flashy demonstrations of its big ideas for corporate sponsors, whose donations gave them access to all of the lab’s findings.² In 1992, he became a founding investor in Wired magazine, for which he wrote a column on Bits and Atoms—and reasons to transcend the boundary between them—from 1993 to 1998. These columns informed Negroponte’s 1995 book Being Digital, which detailed his vision for on-demand digital consumer content, personalized newsfeeds, and what would later be called the internet of things. The relentless utopianism of Being Digital captured the excitement that many felt about the electronic frontier, the burgeoning online world of the 1990s.³ It became a best seller and was translated into some forty languages. Negroponte largely shrugged off the sharp criticism his book and columns drew from some scholars, such as legal scholar Cass Sunstein, who has decried the echo chambers of Negroponte’s customized Daily Me newsfeed idea for polarizing the US political landscape, and cultural historian Fred Turner, who has linked Negroponte’s digital boosterism to the commodification of New Communalist utopianism in the 1970s and beyond.⁴

A decade later, in January 2005, Negroponte seemed to receive a relatively cool reception in Davos. His hallway pitch for a hundred-dollar laptop garnered a brief blog mention by Travis Kalanick, who was attending the World Economic Forum as a technology pioneer (and would later start the ride-sharing platform Uber), but this mention was more due to Negroponte’s other accomplishments than his idea for a hundred-dollar laptop. New York Times technology journalist John Markoff took up Negroponte’s pitch in more depth but concluded that Negroponte had not been given more of an official platform because the forum had moved on from the ideal of closing the digital divide to solving more fundamental inequalities.⁵

This tone changed considerably the following November, when Negroponte took the stage at the World Summit on the Information Society in Tunis. Joining United Nations secretary-general Kofi Annan in a presentation in the Access2Democracy session on November 16, Negroponte unveiled an updated mock-up, which he called the green machine: a bright green plastic laptop about the size of a hardback book. It was outlined in black rubber, sported a bright yellow hand crank that extended from the hinge between keyboard and screen, and had a printed picture of a group of grinning, brown-skinned children in place of a screen.⁶ Just one minute of turning the hand crank, Negroponte explained, would give the ultra-low-power laptop forty minutes of charge, making it usable even where there were no power sources.⁷

Despite its low power consumption, the device would still be a fully featured computer, ruggedized to withstand children’s explorations—and it would cost a mere one hundred dollars. The laptop was only available to country governments, and Negroponte claimed that many had already expressed serious interest, even with a high cost of entry: the purchase of at least one million machines.⁸ He wanted hundreds of millions to be in use by the end of 2007 and for every child in the Global South to have one by 2010.⁹ During the presentation, Annan demonstrated the hand crank on the mock-up—and promptly broke it off.¹⁰

This presentation, its technical difficulties notwithstanding, lit up journalists’ wires and captured imaginations around the world.¹¹ Even articles skeptical of the project’s feasibility generally presented its vision as compelling.¹² The most vocal critics were the African delegation to Tunisia, which as a group was largely unimpressed by the demonstration and voiced concerns about project and infrastructure costs, resources diverted from clean water and better schools, and machine obsolescence and recycling.¹³ But these voices were quickly marginalized within the broader discourse around the hundred-dollar laptop. This paved the way for Negroponte, who was on leave from MIT to work full time on this project, to give a marathon of similar presentations over the next two years. On January 27, 2006, Negroponte received a much more enthusiastic welcome at Davos than a year prior. At his presentation, he and Kemal Derviş, an administrator at the United Nations Development Programme, signed an agreement that the UNDP would help distribute the machines.¹⁴ In the months following, Negroponte gave a talk to technology-world luminaries at the Technology, Entertainment, Design (TED) conference, delivered a keynote talk at the World Congress on Information Technology, and spoke at many more conferences and meetings, spinning visions of technologically driven transformation while repeating the mantra it’s an education project, not a laptop project.¹⁵

Buoyed by these presentations, coverage of what came to be known as One Laptop per Child (OLPC) continued to be largely positive, even as the project struggled to fulfill Negroponte’s promises. Two of the features that had generated the most excitement at the November 2005 demonstration in Tunis were quietly rolled back. First, there would be no hand crank; these computers would ship with an AC adapter, like any other device, collapsing the vision of the laptop leapfrogging past regional infrastructural deficiencies. Second, the laptop’s cost would be nearly two hundred dollars, not one hundred—and that did not account for costs of infrastructure (such as power and internet access) and maintenance. Moreover, Negroponte’s claim of serious interest from countries around the world did not result in any orders beyond a few trial machines throughout 2006 and much of 2007. Sales never did reach the level that Negroponte had promised. To date, OLPC has sold less than three million laptops, more than 80% of them to projects in Latin America—far from the hundreds of millions that Negroponte envisioned.

And yet, these realities seemed not to matter. After Negroponte and Annan’s presentation in November 2005, OLPC and its charismatic laptop, the XO, quickly became the darlings of the technology world. The project’s 2005 funders, Advanced Micro Devices, Google, and News Corporation, were followed in 2006 by eBay, Marvell Technology Group, SES Astra, and Nortel, each of which reportedly contributed two million dollars to the initiative.¹⁶ Some companies also contributed employee time and expertise, such as Red Hat, Google, Brightstar, and Taiwanese companies Quanta (which eventually produced the laptop) and Chi Mei (which manufactured its display).¹⁷ Members of the open source software community, wooed by the promise of a generation of children raised on free software, enthusiastically contributed to the development of OLPC’s custom-built software platform, Sugar.

In place of the abandoned hand crank, Negroponte filled his presentation with unsubstantiated stories of children teaching themselves English and their parents to read, of impromptu laptop-enabled classrooms under trees, and of laptop screens being the only light source in a village (never mind how the laptops were recharged). These claims echoed enthusiastically and largely uncritically across the media and technology worlds.¹⁸ Some are still repeated today, even in the face of ample evidence that the project has not lived up to its promises—just as stories about the laptop’s hand crank continued to circulate long after the crank idea had been scrapped. These claims became part of the allure of One Laptop per Child’s machine. As with many who lead development projects, Negroponte and OLPC’s other leaders and contributors wanted to transform the world—not only for what they believed would be for the better but, as we will see, in their own image. Technology is the only means to educate children in the developing world, Negroponte told the MIT Technology Review in October 2005. Later, he said that the laptop project is probably the only hope. I don’t want to place too much on OLPC, but if I really had to look at how to eliminate poverty, create peace, and work on the environment, I can’t think of a better way to do it.¹⁹

...

One Laptop per Child serves as a case study in the complicated consequences of technological utopianism. The puzzle of this book is to untangle what made this project and its laptop so captivating and even the most outrageous claims about it so compelling. Despite OLPC’s high profile, hailing from the MIT Media Lab and becoming known around the world, very little is known about how the project’s laptops have been used day to day and what impact they have had—a gap this book will fill. But the reasons this is important go beyond mere historical interest. We will see that the same utopian impulses that inspired OLPC had also inspired previous starry-eyed projects in education and development—and they have continued to inspire subsequent projects, from massive open online courses (or MOOCs) to makerspaces, from technology-centric charter schools to coding boot camps. All of these projects have had material effects in the world, some positive, some negative. Although I will explore these dimensions, my primary goal here is not to pass judgment on what counts as a good intervention. More importantly, all of them have failed to achieve their utopian goals—yet it seems as if many technologists, designers, educators, policy makers, and others have failed to learn lessons from them, instead remaining moonstruck about the potential for technological transformation.

This book is thus more than just an account of One Laptop per Child. It is a cautionary tale about technology hype that explains how technologies become charismatic and what the consequences of that charisma can be. We will reach a half century into the past and across the globe to critically examine the consequences of utopia-inspired design, technology’s role in play and learning, and the sometimes-fuzzy divide between education and entertainment. We will begin with this central question: why did so many so enthusiastically accept Negroponte’s and OLPC’s claims—especially when similar promises had been made and broken before? Then, we will explore how these promises were kept, broken, or transformed when OLPC’s laptops were put to use. Were the charismatic visions of OLPC compelling—or even recognizable—to the project’s intended audience of children in the Global South? Finally, we will examine OLPC’s legacy. How have the same promises lived on in new projects, even after the dissolution of the original One Laptop per Child foundation and its apparent failure to achieve its lofty goals?

The Case for Charismatic Technology

Social theory can help us understand, and keep in perspective, the holding power that One Laptop per Child and its laptop have had on technologists and others around the world. Part of OLPC’s allure was Negroponte’s stories about what the project would accomplish in the world. These referenced some powerful cultural mythologies, or foundational narratives that are ritualistically circulated within groups to reinforce collective beliefs. Mythologies have an element of enchantment to them, making certain futures appear at once magical and inevitable, straightforward and divine.²⁰ Vincent Mosco and David Nye have each shown that for nearly two hundred years, mythologies have been central to the way that the United States and Europe think about technology, connecting what might otherwise be a rather mundane artifact to feelings of awe, transcendence, and a sense of greater purpose—or what they call the technological sublime.²¹ Paul Dourish and Genevieve Bell juxtapose mythologies against the messiness and contested nature of everyday life and conclude, like Mosco, that mythologies are much more than simple falsehoods; they animate individuals and societies by providing paths to transcendence.²²

These mythologies invoke certain social imaginaries that define our collective social existence, and social imaginaries of childhood and technology’s role in it are especially important to OLPC’s story. Social imaginaries were originally theorized by Benedict Anderson to explain the imagined political community that creates feelings of nationalism—the set of myths, stories, and group identities that, for instance, make being American distinct from being Canadian, despite intertwined histories and similar material conditions of life in the two countries.²³ This book builds on later scholarship that understands a social imaginary more broadly as a set of coherent visions by a group of people to collectively imagine their social existence, as philosopher Charles Taylor puts it—the ways that people imagine themselves as part of a group and the identities that this group takes on in their minds.²⁴ Central to a social imaginary is the role of the imagination, as well as the requirement that imaginings be collective.²⁵ Imaginaries go beyond individual and fleeting fancies; they are coherent and often powerful ideas held by groups of people (whether members of a nation or some other social world, such as hackers or open-source software proponents). Imaginaries also have a normative side that shows us, as Sheila Jasanoff and Sang-Hyun Kim put it, how life ought, or ought not, to be lived.²⁶ Moreover, they direct our actions—on an individual level but especially on a group level (e.g., through national policy or group norms)—toward such ends.²⁷ In the first chapter, we will explore how OLPC’s promises were linked to broader imaginaries of childhood, creativity, play, and learning, and in chapter 2, we will see how these imaginaries influenced the design of OLPC’s laptop. Whether these imaginaries can be translated to children in the Global South will be a guiding question in chapters 3 through 6.

This account also takes seriously the role of media in creating and sustaining these social imaginaries. More than mere pastime, media help shape our shared understandings of the world. As Arjun Appadurai explains, people see their lives through the prisms of the possible lives offered by mass media in all their forms.²⁸ OLPC invoked particular social imaginaries in part through a strong media presence: the high-profile talks by Negroponte and other OLPC leaders spawned many news articles and other commentary that largely adopted the project’s worldview and echoed its claims, as we will see in chapters 1 and 2. The media will likewise be a potent force among the child beneficiaries of the project, though not in the way that OLPC imagined—one that, instead, may well lead to what Lauren Berlant calls cruel optimism, wherein unachievable fantasies and desires can become obstacles to living in the present, as chapters 4 and especially 5 will highlight.²⁹

These cultural mythologies and social imaginaries are aspects of what social theorists call ideologies: the frameworks of norms, generally taken for granted and unconsciously held, that shape our beliefs and practices and that justify differences in power between various social groups.³⁰ Cultural theorist Stuart Hall describes an ideology as a system for coding reality or a way of representing the order of things which endow[s] its limited perspectives with that natural or divine inevitability which makes them appear universal, natural and coterminous with ‘reality’ itself.³¹ What is important in this definition is the way that ideology fades into the background: by one metaphor commonly used in anthropology, ideologies are as invisible to many people as we imagine water is to a fish.³²

Some branches of social theory tie ideologies to the operation of state power, just as Benedict Anderson connected social imaginaries to feelings of belonging to a state. The meaning of ideology that this book uses is not specific to statehood but is no less powerful a force in people’s lives. We live with many ideologies, reinforced across our sociopolitical landscape: neoliberal economics, patriarchal social structures, and Judeo-Christian ethics are among the dominant ideologies in the United States, for instance. In Hall’s words, each of these ideologies works because it represses any recognition of the contingency of the historical conditions on which all social relations depend. It represents them, instead, as outside of history: unchangeable, inevitable and natural.³³

Many of those speaking on behalf of OLPC were certainly discussing the project’s world-changing goals as inevitable and natural: as long as the project managed to get its laptops out in the world, success would follow. This book interrogates that claim. It first analyzes the social imaginaries that influenced the design of OLPC’s laptop and how those social imaginaries were meant to be encoded in the laptop itself. It then follows the laptop out into the world to see whether those social imaginaries really were able to travel with it—and what other imaginaries factored into how the laptop was understood in use. This endeavor requires a social theory that can move with the laptop itself—something that can account for how these ideological commitments were designed and built into the laptop and how they traveled with it, while also accounting for the organizational, infrastructural, and cultural narratives that it either invoked or contradicted.

For this, I borrow an idea that originated with the study of populist and religious movements: charisma. Max Weber, one of the founders of modern sociology, used charisma to explain the exceptional, even magical, authority that religious leaders seem to have over followers—an authority he witnessed firsthand in the German Empire during the lead-up to World War I. This charismatic authority stood in contrast to the other types of authority that Weber was interested in understanding, in particular traditional authority and legal/rational authority. Charisma is not legitimized through bureaucratic or rational means but by followers’ belief that a leader has extraordinary, even divine, powers that are not available to ordinary people.³⁴

Although a few social theorists have invoked charisma to describe technologies or ideas, charisma is generally used to describe the power of humans, especially religious and cult figures, not objects such as laptops.³⁵ (Nicholas Negroponte, for instance, is a leader that some have found very charismatic.) However, the field of science and technology studies (STS) has shown us that sociological concepts that have been useful in understanding humans can also be used to explain the actions of nonhuman actors, such as scientific instruments, technological objects, or even scientific theories.³⁶ Indeed, these actors can and often do take on lives of their own beyond the intentions of their creators.³⁷ As Bruno Latour’s humorous analysis of the complicated dance between an automatic door-closer and the humans interacting with it shows, these nonhuman actors have agency—they can act on the world beyond the intentions of their designers—and the way that they reflect various ideological commitments can and often does shift between design and use.³⁸ By this token, analyzing OLPC’s laptops as active subjects, not just passive objects, becomes a necessary component of the work we will undertake here.

Treating an object as a charismatic subject with some degree of agency borrows perspectives from actor–network theory (ANT), a theory in STS that uses the same analytical lens to understand both human and nonhuman actors within a mutually constituted network of relations. All actors, human and nonhuman alike, are products of a number of social choices and technical constraints and capabilities (a combination that is often referred to as sociotechnical in STS) and in turn shape future sociotechnical relations, a process that STS scholars call coproduction.³⁹ This book brings actor–network theory, which provides tools for analyzing the scripts that designers build into technologies but tends to favor materialism and actor-centered accounts of the world, into conversation with cultural studies, which focuses more on the beliefs that underlie these networks.⁴⁰ In this way, charisma theorizes a specifically utopian circuit of culture and provides the means to account for how ideological frameworks inhabit and animate these tools.⁴¹

In this account, a charismatic technology derives its power experientially and symbolically through the possibility or promise of action: what is important is not what the object is but how it invokes the imagination through what it promises to do.⁴² The material form of a charismatic technology may be part of this but is less important than a technology’s ideological commitments—its charismatic promises. This means that a charismatic technology does not even need to be present or possessed to have effects. A charismatic technology is thus an active subject within a sociotechnical web of other actors and social imaginaries—and its promises can be enthralling. As sociologist Donald McIntosh explains, charisma is not so much a quality as an experience. The charismatic object or person is experienced as possessed by and transmitting an uncanny and compelling force.⁴³

Charisma moreover implies at least some degree of persistence of this compelling force even when an object’s form or actions do not match its promises. This is part of the magic of charisma and where a charismatic technology’s link to religious experience is especially strong: charisma taps into an ideological framework that is at least partially maintained and strengthened outside (or even counter to) rational thought or evidence. This is also one of the places where the seams between charisma and the world are most visible, as a charismatic technology’s acolytes maintain their devotion even in the face of contradictions.⁴⁴

In their promises of action, however, charismatic technologies are deceptive: they make both technological adoption and social change appear straightforward instead of as a difficult process fraught with choices and politics. This gives charismatic technologies a spirit of technological determinism (or technological solutionism), whereby progress that a technology is supposed to cause is framed as natural and inevitable, thus overriding individual, social, institutional, or other kinds of agency—much like the exceptionalism of Weber’s charismatic leaders.⁴⁵ Scholars in STS have been studying technological determinism for decades now and have sussed out the many ways it is wrong.⁴⁶ But outside of those circles—and particularly in the technology development and design world—the belief is still commonplace. It can lead believers to underestimate the sustained commitments (social, political, financial, infrastructural, etc.) needed for both technological adoption and social change.

By the same token, charisma’s naturalizing force can make critique and debate appear unnatural—they are, after all, up against what appears to be a natural and inevitable path toward technologically determined progress. Historians have shown us, for instance, that when the United States was building its rail network in the mid-nineteenth century, the feelings of sublime awe and transcendence that the locomotive evoked across the nation led the United States to pay an enormous price in resources and lives in an attempt to realize the utopian promises of rail: the end of wars and parochialism, the merging of cultures, the very annihilation of space and time.⁴⁷ Mosco and others have traced the sublime paths of a host of other technologies: radio, film, atomic energy—and of course computers and the internet.⁴⁸ Although charisma is distinct from the technological sublime—it does not necessarily subsume reason with feelings of overwhelming awe—it is similar in upholding a belief that a technology such as OLPC’s laptop and its specially-designed software can provide a shortcut to peace and prosperity, even if governments do not actively recognize its potential for this. This also reflects a technologically determinist faith in the power of the laptop itself to create change. Even though over four decades’ worth of scholarship on technological determinism has explored in detail its many pitfalls, it is still prevalent in popular culture and especially in technological circles.⁴⁹

However, charisma contains an irony, and it is here that the conception of charismatic technology that I have laid out departs from Weber’s account. A charismatic technology may promise to transform its users’ sociotechnical existence for the better, but this book will show that charisma is, at heart, ideologically conservative. Charismatic leaders confirm and amplify their audiences’ existing ideologies to cultivate their appeal, even as they may paint visions of a better world.⁵⁰ A charismatic technology’s appeal likewise confirms the value of existing stereotypes, institutions, and power relations. This unchallenging familiarity is what makes a charismatic technology alluring: even as it promises certain benefits, it