

Two children with new OLPC laptops in Soweto, South Africa Photograph: Reuters

Last week saw yet another depressing announcement from the One Laptop Per Child project – more redundancies, further cutting back on the project's commitment to its free and open operating system, and a general scaling back and winding down of one of the most ambitious, inspiring projects of the past 10 years.

In case you missed it, OLPC's mission is to put a small, flexible, hackable laptop in the hands of every child on the planet. There's been endless debate on the wisdom of this. Detractors say that the developing world needs food, literacy training and mobile phones – not laptops. These sceptics are sure to see the OLPC's woes as confirmation that the project was doomed from the start.

But I disagree, on both counts. I believe that the world's poor will derive lasting, meaningful benefit from widespread access to technology and networks. And I believe that laptop computers will eventually find their way into the hands of practically every child in the developing world, even if the OLPC project shuts its doors tomorrow.

First, the case for laptops as tools for sustainable, appropriate, community-driven development: the original, audacious OLPC plan envisioned its laptops as pedagogical and development wonder-boxes. They were to be wide open and trivially modifiable by their owners, ensuring that inspired young programmers could develop any and all software and hardware add-ons that suited their needs. Their networking stacks were built on the idea of forming ad-hoc meshes that made it easy to connect any OLPC units to one another, and to share Internet connections among them.

In short, the OLPC vision is to deliver to children in the developing world the capacity to play and work together to produce tools and networks and communities at the lowest possible cost, with the highest possible flexibility. Poverty and its associated problems – hunger, poor health, lack of education and disenfranchisement – are fundamentally information problems. Poverty is exacerbated by the high cost of discovering how your peers have solved their agricultural problems, of accessing government services, of communicating with distant relations who have gone to the city to earn on behalf of the family. Poverty and oppression thrive in situations where people can't communicate cheaply and widely with one another about corruption, injustice and violence.

The success of mobile phones in defraying these co-ordination costs shows just how profoundly technology can change the cycle of poverty. Whether it's electoral monitors armed with mobile phones who watch the ballots move from the polls to the counting houses in Kenya, the citizen reporters who exposed the brutality in Myanmar, or the fishermen and farmers in Africa and Asia who use networks to find the best market for their goods. A mobile phone network can multiply the food, education, health and democracy that is already there, and be used to bring new resources besides.



It may be that OLPC won't be the entity that puts a laptop into the hands of every child on the planet. Certainly, they've disappointed me more than once along the way: for example, the decision to add remote kill-switches to the machines to deter thieves (incidentally creating a situation where a thuggish state or despot could shut down the network), and the decision to emphasise running Microsoft's proprietary, non-customisable, toll-bearing operating systems at the expense of the free, locally modifiable GNU/Linux systems they started with.

But so what? I remember the decades during which I (and others of my bent) went around telling people that PCs and the internet were destined to change their lives for ever, no matter who they were, no matter what they did. Over those years, we had many failures, mostly due to bad preconceptions of why and how our loved ones and co-workers would benefit from our beloved systems. We told our grandmothers that the PC would be the ultimate cookbook, told our bosses that the internet would let them field better sales brochures, told our kids that educational CD-Roms would teach them to read faster. From Sinclair to Commodore to Acorn, computing platforms rose and fell, breaking up on the cliffs of the unguessable public taste.

Slowly and surely, though, IT infiltrated every social group. Whether you're looking for an underground dance party on Friday or help coping with your terminal cancer or a way to feed your compulsive need to acquire plush stuffed animals, the internet is where you live. Each new group came online when one key person within it figured out what all this technology was for, as far as his social circle was concerned. My grandparents steadfastly ignored PCs until they worked out that all their friends were getting scads of email from their grandchildren, while they were stuck with a few paltry letters and cards. In record time, a PC and internet connection were purchased, installed, and mastered – at least, far enough to tackle the key task for which the machine was purchased.

The protean nature of IT is its greatest weakness – it's impossible to say what it's for – and its greatest strength – it's for anything you can think of. The OLPC detractors who say that the rich, northern minority can't know what the world's majority need are right. And that's why giving the world's poor access to the tools that they can use in any way they can imagine is so powerful. It's a break from the centuries-old model of development and aid. It's an invitation for the world's majority to simultaneously access all of human knowledge as equal participants in the global conversation, all the while having the power to modify their systems to match their needs.

Early PCs such as the 1975 Altair were unrelentingly hostile to their users
and functionally useless except as systems for occupying the spare time of their owners. And yet, these early efforts led inexorably to the continuous refinement of technology, as larger and larger populations of users were captured by the promise of these systems. The eventual failure of the Altair (discontinued in 1978) did not invalidate the promise of computing. It would have been a visionary entrepreneur indeed who invented the perfect system the first time out.

Likewise, the OLPC may falter and vanish. But the vision of a world where we can all talk to one another, where we can all modify our tools to suit our needs, where we are not charged a toll for our access to democracy, communities and ideas – that will live on forever.