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you know what i find more wrong than the kids browsing porn? that the OLPC folks are now gonna put filters on the computers.

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25 July 2007 at 4:16 am

Not to say there’s anything wrong per se with Nigerian kids browsing porn on their laptops — why shouldn’t they be able to do what countless western kids are doing — what really bothers me about OLPC is that endless well of naive optimism the tech industry seems to trade in. Maybe it’s having to spend a life thinking in marketing-speak to raise venture capital, but the bullshit to reality ratio in the tech industry is staggeringly high.

I feel like I’ve heard at least three waves of rhetoric now about how the Internet/technology will liberate us all, how it will raise people out of poverty and lack of education, and the inevitable result is always: porn, spam, and retarded animated gif’s. The Internet isn’t going to liberate or educate anyone any more than television or radio did. Meanwhile, people throw billions at this kind of shit and people in the regions continue to starve and live in complete squalor, contracting diseases that were eliminated in the rest of the world half a century ago. Yay, progress.

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25 July 2007 at 4:56 pm

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