Fishing In The Web
June 6, 2007-
It’s G8 time again. Well actually there are more than 8 people around the table in Hamburg, Germany and a lot more outside the meeting site. Summit doesn’t go very well. The usual stuff. USA doesn’t want to hear about climate change, Russia is pissed with USA missiles brought under its nose. Blah, blah, blah. Yet, actually, I’m afraid that all these family rows are just a pretence for not talking about everything else. Things like poverty, hunger, economic aid towards third world, etc. Well, that’s why there are all the other people out on the streets. Meanwhile G. Monbiot has an interesting analysis of a case where these eight are “giving with one finger and taking with both hands”. -
Nicholas Negroponte has long had a dream called One Laptop Per Child (or OLPC). That means making a cheap laptop computer with extra low energy consumption and extended wireless networking capabilities, able to work fine in poor countries which lack expensive fixed networks or even power grids. Plan was that OLPCs [1] would be bought from these countries governments at cost prise and then distributed to children. Ultimate aim, is to allow access to education to more children and beginning to bridge the educational gap between underdeveloped countries and the more developed ones.So far, so good. You may make fun of his dream or you may cheer up to it but you can’t deny that it’s done with the best intentions at heart. Yet, I can’t be so sure about the noble intentions of Intel that’s doing very good in sinking the whole non-profit OLPC project to promote its own version of “OLPC” laptop (which by the way costs more and it’s technically worse than the original).
Notes/Credits/Etc:
1. To be accurate, OLPC is the name of the initiative that aims in building and dispersing these cheap laptops which come under the official name XO-1. Here I use the term OLPC to reffer to both the initiative and the laptop itself.
2. 1st image from here
3. 2nd image from here
I like the fact that you don´t mention the demonstrations when you talk about the G8 meetings.
I think it´s hard to find out these days what it´s all about – since the established media seem to be more interested in water guns than in how to make a more economically just world.
And as usual it´s more interesting to notice what the G8 meeting is NOT talking about than what it´s actually debating.
the olpc project has been in the air for such a long time that, taking it’s low cost into account, i have to thnk that the g8 simply doesn’t want it to happen…
@ Allan: Yes, media are always interested in spectacle rather than essence. That makes them usually part of the problem. Regarding the shift of G8 interests I think that at least now they are talking what really matters to them, that is how to split the pie (yet again). I’m afraid they were never there to counterfeit world poverty and all.
@ Dule: OLPC has been around for fairly long but the project is now at deployment phase. Yet, corporation vultures (like Intel) want to get a share of a market they neither created nor ever believed in. Of course this market, the developing countries, were never supposed to work like a market (N. Negroponte and OLPC isn’t in it for the money). That just makes Intel’s move all the more disgusting (and me a happier owner of an AMD
). I’m afraid that G8 doesn’t want anything good to happen to the developing countries. If they stopped being “developing” they’d be harder to exploit.
Thank you both for commending pals
Zero.
Wat’s up homey. Been awhile. So, does “The Sold and Fuckenful” have a place on this blog? I guess I could search. My first time here. Nice.
How ya been?
Hi man
. Nice to see you around. It’s been an unconnected period from me but I hope I’ll make up soon.
Yes – I think I’ll keep on with “The Sold And The Fuckenful”. It’s the only meaningless thing full of meaning that I can write.