The Negropontes Must Be Crazy

I could not resist this, even though I really should have spent the last hour doing something productive. But I read Mike Caulfield’s post on True of EdTech As Well, where he latches on to a criticism of the TED technocratic approach to world problems, and this quote from a quote just cried out to be animated:

According to the Khannas, “centuries of colonialism and decades of aid haven’t lifted Africa’s fortunes the way technology can.” Hence the latest urge to bombard Africa with tablets and Kindles””even when an average African kid would find it impossible to repair a damaged Kindle. And the gadgets do drop from the sky””Nicholas Negroponte, having spectacularly failed in his One Laptop Per Child quest, now wants to drop his own tablets from helicopters, which would make it harder for the African savages to say “no” to MIT’s (and TED’s) civilization. This is la mission civilatrice 2.0.

Look! From the sky (sorry this GIF is a 1.4 Mb bomb)

I grabbed the famous bottle drop scene that triggers all the action in The Gods Must be Crazy:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gCQIGiXf0JA

and loaded it into MPEG Streamclip to get a shorter segment. I then used Quicktime player to move ot fmor an MP4 to an MOV and used the Photoshop Import Video into Layers thing, using every 8th frame. That made like 120 frames, so I went through and deleted about 40% of them.

Then I found some images of OLPCs and went through frame by frame, doing a bunch of selection, Paste Into steps to place the OLPC in the scene, merging the new layer into the video frame.

It’s a rush job, and I could have gotten some smoother action, but I could not stop doing this.

This is my silly playing out, but Mike’s words are ringing strong in my head:

And my point of departure from just about everybody is that even in the Corporate/Open-source debate we are still submerged in the idea that the solution is technology and not governance or laws or additional funding, but if we all adopt the right technologies we can avoid messy messy politics. If Browser 1 is stealing your info and selling it to porn sites, your best personal option might be to go to Browser 2 or to buy additional software. Your best societal option is to make and enforce laws against stealing info. Getting those two things confused is a recipe for disaster, and it is what happens when a self-help culture collides with governance.

Yeah, we must be crazy.