YakShaving

Alright alright, I should weigh in on the latest scuffle in regard to the Digital Divide.
In this corner, we have Mr Bill Gates, the wealthiest philanthropist to have ever lived on the face of this earth. And in the other corner, we have OLPC’s Nicholas Negroponte, Director of MIT’s media lab (one of the places I am/was looking into for graduate school, by the way).

Wikipedia has most of the history behind it, but essentially Negroponte’s foundation built a $100 laptop that does NOT run a microsoft operating system. Bill pokes fun of the OLPC concept, and claims that a hand-cranked laptop is not particularly useful to those in third world countries. Nick retorts “Bill, you punk, you’re just mad we’re not usin’ Windoze, aren’tcha?”

So you expect me now to say Bill is a crazy capitalistic pig at the trough. But sadly, I think I agree with the guy. If you’ve ever seen a slum up close (no I mean actually spend time to *look* at/in it), you’d think to yourself.. Holy carp. These people have nothing. How is a $100 hand cranked laptop going to help them? Let’s assume for a second that no one was going to sponsor these laptops, that these families would have to buy the unit of their own accord. I think in all of India, maybe three poor families would. Doesn’t that say something about their notion of perceived value of these pieces of junk? If you’re going to spend $100, buy them a bicycle with a rack on it, so someone in the household can deliver goods in exchange for profit. Buy them a roti-making tava so that someone can make food and sell it to others in the gaav. The only way you’re going to impress anyone in the BOP is to teach them to “fish”. Engendering micro-industries will be vastly more successful than giving someone a fancy $100 doorstop.

Oh, but wait, you say. The point of “decreasing the digital divide” is to enable economic equality. With access to the vast abundance of knowledge available on the internet, people are going to be able to learn valuable skills that will enable them to contribute in tomorrow’s technology dependent world. To you, I say emphatically, “pffffffffffffffffft”. You have to be joking if you think that people are going to learn necessary skills from a hand-crank laptop that runs a minimal set of applications and is not scalable. Sure, its a good way for them to glean information about solving immediate problems… healthcare, for instance. But I feel that many times, without context or additional tangible resources, most information available on the internet is non-actionable. So what if I can find a recipe for a gorgonzola-pear salad? I only have enough $ to eat rice and 2 teaspoons of daal a day, jerk! Sure I can participate in democracy… But what good is that if I am not educated objectively by a neutral party?

Ok so I bitched plenty (Sorry). What’s my solution? Nix the laptops, spend $ on literacy, microenterprise, and create small internet-cafe for free type places that operates like a time-share.. So each family in a village or slum gets a chance to use the computers for an alotted amount of time each week. AFAIC, the operating system doesn’t really matter (Sorry, Bill)… Give them the cheapest (free) software available… Ubuntu..anything!

Also, I remember seeing recently this concept that I want to say a prof at Mellon was working on; Given the slow nature (and exorbitant cost) of connectivity in the remote parts of India, narrowband is the only feasible option. So this concept is based on multiple users requesting answers to questions that they post. Overnight, the appliance could connect to the internet, and conduct extensive research, coalesce it into a usable format (think AskJeeves), and present it to the user the next day in the form of a communique (email). Forget where i saw it now but I can’t find it. Anyway, would be neat to combine my solution with this idea.