In The Charisma Machine, Morgan Ames chronicles the life and legacy of the One Laptop per Child project and explains why—despite ist failures—the same utopian visions that inspired OLPC still motivate other projects trying to use technology to “disrupt” education and development.
Announced in 2005 by MIT Media Lab cofounder Nicholas Negroponte, One Laptop per Child promised to transform the lives of children across the Global South with a small, sturdy, and cheap laptop computer, powered by a hand crank. In reality, the project fell short in many ways—starting with the hand crank, which never materialized. Yet the project remained charismatic to many who were captivated by ist claims of access to educational opportunities previously out of reach. Behind ist promises, OLPC, like many technology projects that make similarly grand claims, had a fundamentally flawed vision of who the computer was made for and what role technology should play in learning.
Drawing on fifty years of history and a seven-month study of a model OLPC project in Paraguay, Ames reveals that the laptops were not only frustrating to use, easy to break, and hard to repair, they were designed for “technically precocious boys”—idealized younger versions of the developers themselves—rather than the children who were actually using them. The Charisma Machine offers a cautionary tale about the allure of technology hype and the problems that result when utopian dreams drive technology development.

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?