Download - Future of the Internet – And how to stop it.

Conclusion 239
ture, and they are also appliances, painstakingly designed to be reliable to and
usable by someone who cannot read or write. They combine the hope of the
early Internet era with the hard lessons of its second phase. They represent the
confusion of the interregnum between the unbridled explosion of cheap and
flexible processors, networks, and sensors, and the tightening up that comes as
their true power is appreciated—and abused.
Perhaps the audience of schoolchildren in developing countries is remote
and uninteresting enough to those who want to control or compromise today’s
information technology that it will be helpfully overlooked during the critical
time period in which backwater status helps to foster generative development.
Just as domain names were originally first-come, first-served, and no major
companies reserved their own names or foresaw a trademark problem, poor
schoolchildren may not be deemed enough of an economic market to be worth
vying for—either in attracting their eyeballs to show them advertising, or in
preventing them from exchanging bits that could be copyrighted. There are no
preexisting CD sales among them to dent.
XO is but the most prominent and well-funded of a series of enterprises to
attempt to bridge the digital divide. Other efforts, such as the Volkscomputer
in Brazil, the VillagePDA, and the Ink have fared poorly, stuck at some phase of
development or production. 11 Negroponte’s impatience with tentative initial
steps, and with the kind of planning and study that firm-based ventures usually
require, has worried many in the international development community. They
fear that a prominent failure of the project could unduly tarnish other attempts
to deploy technology in the developing world. The Indian government announced
in 2006 that it would not sign up to buy any XO machines, in part
due to difficulties encountered with the Simputer, a for-profit project begun in
1998 to deliver handheld technology to India’s rural population, which is made
up mostly of farmers and laborers—many of whom are illiterate and speak regional
dialects. In 2001, Bruce Sterling lionized the Simputer as “computing as
it would have looked if Gandhi had invented it, then used Steve Jobs for his ad
campaign.” 12 It never took off. Instead India appears to be placing its bets on
the Novantium Nova or a similar device, non-generative machines fully tethered
to a subscription server for both software and content. 13
Will XO fail like the others Development experts view it as skeptically as education
experts do, seeing XO as yet another risky heaving of hardware at problems
that are actually political, social, and economic in nature. Debates on the
XO wiki wonder whether teching-up an entire generation of millions of children
will be good or bad for those already online. Some worry that the already-