[Air-l] One Laptop Per Child

[Ellis Godard]

Christian Fuchs wrote:
> If 
> the $100 laptop is widely diffused in the Third World, 
> Western actors selling these computers will derive profits, 
> and a global divide in technological progress and standards 
> will emerge that separates advanced Western technology users 
> from users of less-advanced technologies in the Third World. 

How does diffusing technology across a divide which already exists, enhance
rather than diminish it? How does giving them computers inhibit their
"technological progress", or have any deliterious effect on their
technological standards?

> ...what 
> is needed is an advanced $0 laptop with free software for 
> people in developing countries as well as criticism of the 
> logic that has caused the divide between developing and 
> developed countries and solutions to the social, economic, 
> political, and cultural inequalities that underpin the global 
> digital divide".

What is "the logic that has caused" of which you speak?

The implication that inequality and stratification are necessarily wrong,
much less demonstrably eliminatable, is very very close to absurd.

-eg