The myth of a $150 dollar computer

For $150 Dollars, third world laptop stirs a big debate - IHT

I’ve been reading about this thing for a while – it’s a computer designed for use in ‘third world’ countries, and people from MIT (and now Rupert Murdoch) seem to think promoting it serves some philanthropic goal, though no one seems to know what that is exactly. With quotes like

"It's as if people spent all of their attention focusing on Columbus's boat and not on where he was going," [Nicholas Negroponte, instigator] said in an interview. "You have to remember that what this is about is education."

And

"The soldiers inside this Trojan horse are children with laptops," said Walter Bender, a computer researcher

I’m not sure why anyone really thinks this is a good idea.

First, in terms of goals. No one seems to know what people would actually do with a computer, except… learn how to use other computers. Remember, media is the message (have we still not figured this out? Seriously, remember McLuhan, it’s been 40 years, can we get past the idea that media is value neutral?), and considering that this project isn’t linked to any broader political/economic goals, the only educational development computers bring is computers. There’s no new content, only a medium that will develop a limited skill set and influence delivery towards a model of education that prioritizes technological prowess.

What educational good does this bring?

Does it create a more sustainable world? (no, it makes communities more dependant on a tenuous network of high tech high energy info networks for the sake of economic competition, ultimately a development paradigm which is killing everyone through ever increasing consumption) Who does it benefit? (Probably very few in the ‘recipient’ countries, considering the sources of production as well as a history of scientific ‘brain drain’ to larger wealthier countries) What kinds of wealth does it create? (kinds dependant on investment schemes by development banks and an export economy)

That gets to a second problem, which is the supposed philanthropy. This seems more like a Trojan horse of profits for technology companies posing as philanthropy. The company producing the machines, Quanta, is the second largest laptop producer in the world, and will turn a profit. Along with that immediate benefit, they get a brand new market to potentially sell to for an indefinite future. This gives something people don’t need for the sake of turning a profit. This is a poisoned gift meant to secure the interests of a narrow portion of the world. This seems particularly evident in the structure of the donation, which does not provide the means to produce these computers, only the computers themselves. A genuine act would allow them to begin producing on their own, instead of using mass importation of new machines.

Neither of these things really gets at some basic questions: how will they be paid for? Is this a donation or another ‘aid’ loan like those that continue to wreck third world economies? Where do the resources to produce the computers come from? Computer production is resource intensive: it takes 10 gallons of water to produce one chip. What impact does producing 5 million computers with hundreds of chips each have? The perverse structure of the ‘donation’ also comes up in the production techniques, which require resource extraction in the form of minerals and oil from the countries to which the machines will be donated.

The costs to people everywhere belies the myth of the '$150 computer.'

Duncan

Pleasure in joy but no joy in pleasure

The difference between joy and pleasure comes at a relationship to the present and past. Too often we accept pleasure as a substitute for joy in living, and I wish to uncover the difference for me in order to embrace the truly good in my life. Pleasure has a repetitive and lethargic relationship to change. Pleasure allows us to be content with our lives, it accustoms us to being where we currently are. To be pleasured, pleased with something implies a judgement of the activity/item, and then an acceptance of it as good for you as such: neither you nor the object must change. Joy concerns a process that transcends a particular moment in time. Joy relates to events that involve and transform you into a new person, something that pushes you to discover what is good. There is a stronger correlation to thought with joy in my experience – a joyous event challenges me to discover something about myself or the world in the process of living it. This is why joy can come from unpleasurable experiences, as they often challenge me to find something new by fact of my unhappiness with a situation. So is it good to seek pleasure? Yes, but to be pleased is not an end, and joy often brings pleasure as a result of self discovery.

Duncan

From Yesterday: ethics/language

Ethics emerges only through the organizational power of language. The ability to define an object as something other than itself through language allows for the creation of ethical norms. Only by the ability to include an object of ethical concern under a metaphorical or categorical sign in language does the ability to construct ethical categories make sense. The abuse of ethical norms and codes emerges in the indeterminate but dividing role of language. People use language decisively to include or exclude, but it has no definite value. The flexibility of language – its inability to totally describe something – allows for interpretative space which judges (juridical or social) use to exclude in accordance with their own interests. Language is intrinsically tied with language, but because of language’s flaws as a guideline-setting tool, which leaves space for interpretation-misapplication.

This is why animals have not been granted moral agency. The inability to communicate in the terms that define ethical agency excludes them from consideration as moral agents, which often means humans deny them ethical value. Perhaps the relative contingency and arbitrariness of animalistic action causes us to recoil? I don’t think this necessarily denies them the capacity to judge, but merely denies their capacity to communicate consistant/categorical norms for their actions.


Duncan

More on communication and technology

A relationship of exclusivity and choice creates the difficulty with the notion of a global village, created through communication technology. A village has one forum, a single mode in which people meet – in one language, in face to face communication, with the caveat that often there is no choice but to interact with someone. A village has some feature of co-dependance, particularly in terms of a commons area or shared resources. The internet and other media technologies employ processes that allow a wide variety of choice in communication, with multiple channels, codes and addresses which create very little opportunity for random encounters. In order to get anywhere on the internet, you must know an exact site URL, and have foreknowledge of the proper codes to use to access the information that has been put online. The same applies for email, or even telephones. The people in a global village are the people we already know, our families and friends who we have met through more chance, random encounters. For this reason, I believe that the internet, and communication technology serves a negative purpose for the goal of creating cultural harmony or understanding. It allows for the intensification and maintenance of very particular relationships already readily apparent to us before the internet existed. It does not necessarily create new bonds, only affects old ones.

Duncan

Zarathustra Thus Far...

A lot of Zarathustra resonates with what I have been thinking about for a while

Crisis and independance. The affirmation of crisis (personal and political) means the embrace of what transforms us in these moments. In this, there is an implicit relationship to a norm that never existed - the 'secure' or 'stable' situation that much of our politics aims to restore. So, when we enter times of personal crisis, we have an opportunity to find and affirm the good in life, and to question the forms of life that produced the crisis we seek to address. I know this sounds vague. Example: being in UGA, which hasn't been great, but I wouldn't trade it in for anything else, because in the process of being here I have discovered more about myself and where I want to be in life than I would have anywhere else.

The will to power. This relates to debate. Because an empirical, universal reality cannot be proven after the death of god, our descriptions of truth and justice can only be interpreted as extensions of the will to power. Descriptions of the good or the transcendant are an extension of an individual's personal reality, and serve their individual interests. Thus, the will to describe or act on Truth is acctually a will to personal power.

Independance- this relates to previous posts about mass production and my reactions to it. I am a little but put off by the idea of my life being subject to political/economic forces beyond my control. Affirming independance is a way to transcend that.

Duncan

Why I Hate Charles Rangel

Of course, there are probably more reasons than I already know. Included in what I do is his position on the military draft. As a sheer publicity stunt (with the only end being his own self glorification), the move to call for a draft probably worked. However, it fails on every other possible count.

Ideologically - There are much better ways to encourage the US to avoid pre-emptive war. As a the incoming chair of the House armed services committee, I suspect you could find some. Maybe it has something to do with the military budget? Or the nice lightning speed technology that we keep paying for? The notion that the military is OK but maybe we just need to think harder about how we use it is absurd: the sacrafice of anyone for political ends doesn't become more acceptable because the people with theif hands on the lever are even more convinced of the justice in their action than usual. Thinking harder does not create justice.

Ethically - Charles Rangel has chosen to make me a political bargining chip. Calling for the draft to prove a point is playing a really high stakes game that shouldn't be played. His logic is internally inconsistant: he is now willing to gamble with the lives of potential draftees to prove that politicians shouldn't gamble with life. His bill bets for a norm that was established over 30 years ago. Which brings me to his last failure:

Political - Continually (this is at least the 2nd time I have heard of) using the draft to prove a point makes actual reinstatement of the draft much more likely. It makes the issue politically palatable, and spawns editorials such as this, this, or this. To prove his point, people will undertake 'serious discussions' about the draft, an impossible notion in a politcal world controled by televisual media and centralized media conglamorates. In the context of a very de-mobilized political space like ours, it doesn't take much more than a handful of very motivated people to construct an earthquake. Re-introducing the draft idea makes this kind of coup more likely.

Basically, Charles Rangel needs to keep his ideas to himself.

Duncan

100 years of...

Today thinking of what to write, stuck in mental deadlock, I came to the question of who I was writing to. Why the internet? Why an audience? As I thought more, I decided that ‘who I was writing to’ was a question of process and not of purpose. I am writing ‘to’ as in a goal, a direction. I am writing to be me, to define myself more closely and effectively, and to use method in writing to become something new. Isolation is a strange thing, but the calm power of selfhood gives the isolated the opportunity to find themselves in new ways and new places never thought of before.

I need to stop seeing myself as on screen, as under observation. I do this in my head to explain myself to passers by or potential encounters. I imagine my actions when alone as if being filmed, in order to externally explain my actions to whatever imagined force or person that I find. This becomes a form of self censorship, and I need to learn to be myself, not to tell good stories or make poetic pictures, but to make myself.

Duncan

Ecological Time

In environmental rhetoric, activists often refer to a natural system’s rareness or long history. This has both pragmatic and political origins. First, the rarity or temporal durability of a natural ecosystem indicates its importance to a constantly changing earth. If the ecosystem is rare, it would be hard to make up for its role if it were to be destroyed, making an overall, global ecological catastrophe more likely.

The idea of an ecological history, or ecological rarity has rhetorical impacts also. The first concerns the historical/personal notion that the earth is an infinite resource that will absorb any stress humans put on it. If ecological systems can be explained in terms of niches and specific places, the impact of any individual action looks less absorbable. It contextualizes the real impact of human actions in a personal way: rather than seeing the ecological question as one person versus an entire world, the frame makes the question more of one person versus much smaller systems.

These rhetorical tools also inspire a sense of ecological humility. The historical question literally transcends any human experience, and contextualizes human use of ecological resources within history, something much greater than any individual use. This has the effect of dethroning humanity as the master of the environment, and supporting the notion that a force greater than any person or group of people animates our world, as well as our reasons for existing.


Duncan

Speed/belief

What happens when our own thoughts are not so self evident as we once supposed? I am beginning to grasp the complexity and obstacles to articulating my beliefs in arguments and realizing moreso the inherent barriers to changing someone’s outlook in life. Perhaps this is the onset of ‘mature’ argumentation, or simply disillusionment, but the sum of my feelings comes to the understanding that powerful structural norms determine people’s outlook, that rationality often has nothing to do with why someone believes as they believe. Reasoning (deciding actions based on logic [even though this isn’t even quite enough, who knows why people find some arguments logical and others not]), seems to require time, a paused period of comparison and introspection. In this regard, the most powerful ideology is that of scarcity. If someone perceives a scare resource, or a need to act for the sake of survival, it compels them to act quickly. Speed begets a decision making structure that encourages action in terms of pre-defined norms, whereby the content of decisions has already been made. Practice rearticulates our beliefs into reality by means of decisions we don’t realize we are making. Part of the problem lies in beliefs that people don’t know they have – the assumption of naturalness which refuses situatedness universalizes our beliefs, creating the ‘facts’ against which we determine ‘opinion.’ People don’t know why they act as they do, and yet they continue to act.

Duncan

A New Language for Privilege

I want to find a better way to engage people over questions of privilege. I want to find a more effective way to divorce the issue from individuals. The agent focus of most of my discussions up to this point obscures and frustrates an honest discussion of privilege and disparities in two ways.

First, in framing the problem and garnering support. The focus on individuals creates a focus only on choices people make, rather than examining how choices come to be offered to specific groups of people over others. The response “this person could have chosen not to do XXX regardless of social pressures…” creates a credible copout and a structure of victim blame. Creating a systemic picture of privilege/oppression as a distribution of available resources and options is necessary to understand why bad choices are less likely to be made by those empowered by racial, class or gendered privilege. There also remains a question of why certain practices are rewarded as ‘good choices’ that undergirds this discussion that can only be described by a systemic analysis.

When addressing people empowered by privilege, persuading them to understand oppression and responsibility requires a more subtle tactic. Often my arguments frame the discussion in such a way that too directly undermines people’s self perceptions. People like to believe they have achieved what they have in their lives through personal hard work, and my discussions of privilege too often end up sounding like an argument about why their hard work and effort should not matter. It’s like telling someone that they haven’t earned their lives and deserve to be punished for their achievements, which is a difficult argument to win.

Second, in framing solutions. Looking too much to the individual makes remedies sound like handouts, which sounds patronizing to those they intend to help, and unreasonable to those it does not. In a similar way as described above, arguing that classes or groups of people require ‘assistance’ can enfeeble and disempower them. Agent focus makes responses to privilege look like handouts or even reverse discrimination, which alienates key sources of support for change

A note on difference and oppression. The ability to term social situations as ‘opressive’ requires a notion of a universal subject. Without this tool, situations that empower particular groups can be treated as the natural result of inherent differences between the privileged and the disempowered. A potentially universal subject also creates the foundation for deconstruction of particular gender norms which emerge as the result of social systems aimed at oppression. Only by the ability to see people as having a universal will or humanity can we construct arguments for social change.

Available choices lies at the heart of the discussion of oppression I would like to have. I would like to describe oppression by discussing why certain choices are only available to particular populations, or why making certain choices disproportionately impacts other populations. Yes, that homeless person should not have started drinking. But why is it that that choice resulted in homelessness, while it did not for the alcoholics on campus?

Duncan

The development of desire in space

Development has to conquer more than primitive sociality. Develoment must conquer space in order to secure its grip.
http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/1116/p01s04-woaf.html

This article demonstrates the point. The designated ‘winner’ of an election in the Democratic Republic of the Congo won most of the votes from the eastern part of the country, but has lost the west. The seat of government, Kinshasa largely voted for the candidate said to have lost. The transition to a steady democratic model for a large country relies on the subordination of local interests to the recognition of the theoretical privilege of government. Spatial, proximate relationships become subordinated to the ideograph of democracy and stability. In many ways, development is about overpowering the local to the purpose of ideological relationships and structures – democratic stability, etc…

Development – or at least the notions of convenience, luxury and efficiency – also primarily deal with the differentiation of space. The ultimate luxury in housing is space – the ability to create more rooms, each with a unique function. This also occurs in the factory, where each space/worker occupies a specific role.

This has to do with the production of social relationships in the world of television. Being socialized through television means socialization through the desire structures of television, which necessitates constant stimulation and simple affect. (been writin about this before…). Social relationships become a way to replicate this feeling of affect and stimulation, creating several scripts that replicate television norms to accomplish this. The specificity of form that comes from this produces specific spaces to play out acquired scripts upon. The repetitiveness of our social environment does not come from any specific desire to be the people we see on TV, but rather to feel the things we feel when watching TV. This is the mental trick that preserves feelings of individuality even as we become ever more socially homogenized. As long as we believe in the authenticity of our produced emotions, we will never know freedom. Television structures desire, and so structures space.

Duncan

In Response to Nancy Pelosi

"The difference between the sexes is not whether one does or does not have a penis, it is whether or not one is an integral part of a phallic masculine economy."

- Antoinette Fouque

From bell hooks' Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center

In the face of total defeat

We live in an incomprehensible world. Incomprehensible in the scope of human cruelty and the degrees of power that support it. Total defeat is the feeling that there isn’t even hope in beginning. Total defeat demobilizes you before you begin. Total defeat also comes when feeling better can only be catharsis, when feeling better is counterproductive. There is no more comfort in comforting ourselves, we face catastrophe so great that comfort should make us nervous.

The only hope that remains external to crushing annihilation comes from other people: the hope that we can form connections with other people so that we may escape together. Our goal must be communication and cultivation of communities so that we can eradicate the crushing weight of an individual response to the constant war of existence. Technology delimits communication in communities, defining to whom and how people interact. The terrain of struggle must occur beyond content; it must occur on the ground of technology (of people, posture, cities and sitting in front of screens) to offer new and collaborative definitions of the problems we face, and how to overcome them.

Duncan