[filmgirlcw]

I think the assessment, harsh as it might be, is fair. Morgan Ames' excellent 2019 book on the OLPC project, "The Charisma Machine" [1], does a really good job looking at all the things that went wrong in the project. There was a lot of hubris in this project from top to bottom -- a lot of Ivy League intellectuals who believed they knew how to best teach the developing world and that somehow, this device would be the one to do it. It wasn't.

Well-intentioned or not, I think its broader impact is probably overstated in many circles (the notion that we wouldn't have sub-$300 laptops without OLPC is just silly), especially since many of the promises behind the device (the price, the crank, the way it would "reshape" education") were just untrue.

Is it a blind waste of investment looking for a problem to solve like Juicero? No. Is it a scam like Theranos? Also no. But given the poor-execution of the project, the imperialist nature of its whole raison d'être, and the negative effects its failure had on the EdTech movement as a whole, I think it is definitely worthy of critique.

[1]: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262537445/the-charisma-machine/