RYNSA: WORDS

This coming Sunday, June 1st (which is tomorrow), the newly-established One Laptop Per Child, Australia crew will be hosting a conference in Sydney. I’ve got another volunteer opportunity this weekend (more on that in another post), which makes getting to New South Wales virtually impossible. Otherwise, I’d probably be there. Maybe. I don’t know… meh.

My hesitancy stems form the fact that OLPC News (among others–TechCrunch, Ars Technica, Gizmodo, Engadget), has been reporting on what appears to be a major shift in OLPC values. It seems that Nicholas Negroponte–the co-founder of the MIT Media Lab and the proverbial grandfather of the OLPC project–has agreed to align himself and the initiative with Microsoft. The new generation of OLPC laptops will all include simplified versions of Windows XP.

The problem here, of course, is that this will happen at the expense of Sugar Labs, the newly-formed company that created the educational, open-source, GNU/Linux-based operating system that currently lives, albeit temporarily, on the OLPC XO 1. Moreover, this is a relatively clear departure from the stated constructionist mission of the whole OLPC project in that the use of proprietary software (Windows XP) subjects children, it is sometimes said, to “a regime of social control.” Windows, which makes up over 90% of all operating systems in use worldwide, represents a more hierarchical, capitalistic, top-down instructionism. Or at least that’s what the OLPC fans are saying online. 

Honestly, I’m on the fence about all this. The idealism behind Sugar, etc., is certainly admirable, but it may be a little foolish in the face of global poverty. There’s a tendency in the privileged world (ie, the United States) to confuse techy, middle-class intellectual discussions with reality. I would venture to suggest, however, that the heated debates taking place online now have very little to do with the impoverishment experienced everyday in the ‘developing’ world. Trying to choose between constructionism and instructionism, for instance, is a radically different bargain than choosing between your child’s education and food for the family.

My understanding here, also, is that the OLPC project moved towards XP precisely because poor countries were demanding it. Whether correct or not, government and community leaders in the ‘developing’ world felt that independent, open-source software like Sugar’s wouldn’t be as useful as XP. They wanted their youth to learn on an operating system that was considered ’standard’ around the globe, and common to practices within business, government, education, NGO, etc., of wealthier countries.

Despite the fact that it emboldens Microsoft’s monopoly, and contradicts the premise of the open-source OLPC project, I can’t blame the disenfranchized and impoverished for wanting XP. They are making pragmatic decisions that reflect difficult, real-world circumstances. In this regard, I suppose I would rather protect and promote the rights of marginalized people to make (potentially) bad decisions, than force-feed them an idea that may not be useful. I mean, the technology isn’t as important as the people.

However this conflict is resolved within the OLPC community, I do think it behooves social justice activists to educate themselves simultaneously about technological alternatives and real-world contexts. Not every good idea is a workable one. Were it so, we’d have discarded with neoliberalism a long damn time ago.

This morning I found this new video from TED in my iTunes podcast list featuring the design work of Swiss entrepreneur Yves Behar.  He is probably best known for his role in designing both the OLPC XO and the Jawbone.

Initially, I was draw to this video and his presentation because of the title: “Creating Objects that Tell Stories.”  The thinking was that this was some new invention or concept, ala the work at MIT’s Media Lab or the art of Andy Goldsworthy, for example, that would provide new methods for helping people–real world, flesh-and-blood people–to tell their stories.  Perhaps this betrays my community bias, but new technology, no matter how sexy or well conceived, is fundamentally useless as a subject.  Humanity is subject, technology is object.  That is to say that technology is merely a tool, a resource, inanimate and inert, and therefore kind of boring.  Its existence is only significant when meaning is ascribed to it by human beings.  A loptop could be a tool for storytelling, or it could be an expensive paper weight.  The key variable here is the conscious human.

There is a tendency among some in the so-called ‘creative industries’–of which I mean designers, coders, graphic designers, web engineers, musicians, videographers and editors, etc.–to overly anthropomorphize the things they create.  The language they use to describe these artifacts is beyond positive, its downright poetic!  Quite literally the words they use to express the potential of a given thing, a technological product, are words that would otherwise be relegated to the human experience.  There is no differentiation.   

Far be it from me to be the semantic police, but this lack of distinction between thing and human is problematic for me.  The sci-fi coolness of cyborg philosophizing aside–which I actually find very compelling–the expansion of language ultimately distorts, or even hides, very real human circumstances and conditions.  It makes it exceedingly difficult, moreover, for human populations to effect change where and when change is needed.  Put another way, if a television and a mother share the same descriptors, how then should we raise our children?

I believe that there is a distinct financial incentive for blurring the lines between subject and object.  At one point in the TED presentation, for example, Mr. Behar betrays his allegiances by saying, “…We bring intellectual property, you know, we bring a marketing approach, we bring all this stuff.  But I think at the end of the day what we bring is these values, and these values create a soul for the companies we work with.” (00:10:30 – 00:10:40, timecode). 

It’s that word ’soul’ that bothers me.  How can an incorporated, for-profit, private enterprise have a soul?!?  Obviously, it can’t.  But the concept is none the less pervasive in the contemporary cultural imagination.  It is a common myth, the humanity of industry.  It is an insidious trope, disseminated by wealthy companies who seek, through elaborate PR and marketing campaigns, to animate their business practice and their products.  

My criticism, to be clear, is not against Yves Behar as an individual, or his designs, or the use of those creations in the public sphere.  I’m simply uncomfortable with the terminology he and his colleagues use to describe their work.  The convergence of the organic and the inorganic may be inevitable, but the liberalization of language most definitely privileges one over the other, and we should always remember that.  We should try to be more conscientious about how we ascribe meaning to technology.

UPDATE:

For real objects that tell stories, check out the Labcast from MIT’s Media Lab, and the invention of these amazing little things they call Siftables.  Imagine the human storytelling potential of these tools!