I appreciated Murli's questions, and replied to him yesterday when I intended
to respond to the list. I've included a slightly edited version of my reply
below. I also appreciate Jeff Axup's response, and his point of view that OLPC
may be a step in the right direction. I may agree with Jeff, but not without
reservations.
I have not seen a working model of
the laptop, though I applaud the effort to make it affordable and build
it around open source software.
Is anyone here familiar with the
Boxer Rebellion, when China drove away the outsiders who were bringing
too much in the way of foreign technology, including the opium trade?
After a century of intense Western trade in the southern Chinese
seaports, and after repeated and desperate attempts to resolve the
problem in other ways, the wisest of those in the crumbling Chinese
empire understood that they could not accept new technology without
accepting the implications upon which that technology was based. The
strict social and moral fabric of China had been disrupted badly by the
consequences of foreign trade, and communist rule followed a few years
after the death of the last dowager empress, Tzu Hsi (or Cixi, in the
pinyin transliteration). The communists brought China into the machine
age, which may have prepared the Chinese people for the much more rapid
modernization happening today. But at the dawn of the 20th century, it
was necessary for China to shun all modernization and take one big
collective breath. That function was served by the Boxer Rebellion.
Technology
is not culture, but culture is implicit in all technology. Besides
their overt purpose, technologies are languages by which we transmit
our culture. If we buy into this idea that we really are improving the
world by exporting computers or any other technology, we may one day
have to accept the inevitability that all world cultures must be
assimilated into one world culture. Altruism aside, I promise you that
somebody is making money on this deal and I suppose that is the real
motive force at work in the OLPC program.
I like diversity in
theory and in practice, and I believe that cultural diversity is an
advantage to all of us. Some of that advantage may be forever hidden from us
until such time that diversity is no more. Perhaps this technology won't
eliminate
cultural diversity, but the possibility is something to consider. At worst I
think the desire to disseminate such technology is a well-intentioned
arrogance, and certainly not the first or the last in human history.
Jeff Seager
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