Projection of new roots for global human capital

As examples of large-scale experiments with new educational technology initiatives, Latin America and the Caribbean have proved especially productive terrain, since a 2011 World Bank report indicated that some 18 countries in the region had launched one-laptop-per-student programs by 2012 alone. Thus, the promotional language and tactics of educational technology products appear to be aimed at urban leadership and governing classes through the exaggerated promise and hype they promote. Among the promotional maneuvers of the OLPC program is Nicolás Negroponte’s infamous promise, and its eventual execution, to drop OLPC tablets from the air over rural villages in Rwanda in order to demonstrate, as he claimed, that even without teachers or classrooms, mentioned because of their relation to the rural context, and only with access to the right technology, it would be possible to obtain different kinds of knowledge, but at a digital level. The different private and public partners of the OLPC program, designed by MIT engineers, led by the founder of the Media Lab, and involving AMD processors, were the ones that truly motivated much of the project. It was quickly adopted, with almost 70 percent of the deployment taking place in Latin America; states such as Peru and Uruguay became partners through ambitious national-scale programs. Certainly, the public-private, multisectoral and global partnerships of the OLPC project promised that they could bring to those areas of international deployment the means to transform national educational and economic systems. That promise was the reason for the project’s popularity among different cosmopolitan audiences.

In previous years, several representatives of the OLPC program were regular speakers on the international TED conference circuit, Technology, Entertainment, Design, recognized for bringing together a wide range of technology experts, global professionals, planners and entrepreneurs. Rodrigo Arboleda, the Colombian president and CEO of the One Laptop per Child Foundation, begins his presentation at the 2011 TED Conference in Brussels with a short video about the Uruguayan program and by reminding the audience of the OLPC program’s commitment to universal inclusion: “The challenge is not to exclude people and to make every primary school child in the Third World have the same opportunities and access to knowledge in the same quantity and quality as the most privileged children in New York, Tokyo, Berlin or Brussels. That is the challenge!” We can say that the “insufficient” production of “engineers, innovators and knowledge workers” in Latin American and African countries remains tied, in his view, to a fascination with material commodities. As he added: “We are still in love with commodities, and we know how to produce them.” For this reason, pausing to emphasize what he defines as a self-evident global solution for the production of twenty-first-century commodities, as goods and values not necessarily extracted from the natural world but rather produced from the immaterial fruits of the human intellect, he added: “We need to create wealth for the 21st century, and it has a specific name: Intellectual Property.”

Arboleda points out that, with the right educational technology, capable of turning future generations in developing countries into creators of intellectual property, the problems of economic development around the world can be solved. It does not matter that the projections contained in these statements have long been recognized by different critics in the social sciences as distorted; their evident popularity and approval among technological audiences can be seen in their circulation across several global contexts: from the OLPC program’s website to articles in Wired magazine and the global TED conference circuit, where Arboleda, Nicolás Negroponte and a series of key figures behind the OLPC program have appeared several times as speakers. That support is markedly disconnected from the current debate on intellectual property, supposedly a universal tool for innovation-based economic development, which could be said to show that the Informational Ideal is capable of silencing testimonies from the past in order to implement the future within shared historical consciousness. Over the last few decades, after all, different fields of the social sciences, from anthropology to more recent critical legal studies and science and technology studies, have questioned the definition of intellectual property as a resource for creating a twenty-first-century knowledge economy, emphasizing the contradictory impact that the widespread use of copyrights, patents and trademarks has had not only in accelerating the commodification of knowledge and culture, but also in effectively preventing access to cultural and knowledge-based commons, while exacerbating economic inequalities among different producers. A wide range of affected sectors is evaluated for further analysis.