Technofetishism

During a small forum on open culture at the University of the Philippines last month, the discussion veered toward the use of technology in providing access to information and cultural products to underprivileged communities. One example that was mentioned was the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) project. The idea of the OLPC was to “create educational opportunities for the world’s poorest children by providing each child with a rugged, low-cost, low-power, connected laptop with content and software designed for collaborative, joyful, self-empowered learning.”

It is indeed a heady solution to imagine. Think of the possibilities of having computers that are linked to each other in the hands of elementary students. Imagine what they can share with each other. Imagine how the nearly 13 million elementary and more than six million high-school students can benefit if such technologies are available to them.

During the lively discussion several points emerged. One was the creation of content, or simply put: what would those laptops contain? Although one can digitize libraries and put it in a hard disk, would publishers allow these to happen without a stiff fee? There are alternatives to these such as sites like Project Gutenberg that puts into the web books with copyrights that have expired and materials that are in the public domain.

Software can be free. Free in the sense that it is a matter of liberty, not price. Free software is a matter of the users’ freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. In the same line of thought, artists and writers can also create and write as freely as they can. They can put their works under copyleft and Creative Commons licenses that allow copying and use without fetters.

Still there is the issue of hardware. We do not have the domestic capacity in the Philippines to produce the requisite hardware to make such a machine and are left to the mercy of the big chip makers and computer assembly corporations. Even the OLPC had problems with its system when Intel decided to split from the project and compete with a similar program of their own. The response of computer makers is to produce netbooks, essentially lightweight and lower end laptops, which are very popular nowadays. Yet even these netbooks are still expensive for most families in the country.

Even in the case of the OLPC and similar projects, the cost of hardware, and thus access to it, becomes an issue despite lower cost relative to higher end computers. If we stick to the original target cost of the OLPC pegged at $100, the price would still be equivalent to nearly half a month salary at the nominal minimum wage of a working man (assuming that he is not part of the 4.2 million unemployed and 6.6 million underemployed Filipinos nowadays).

Looking even deeper on government’s educational budget, we see that only around P9,250 were allotted in 2006 per elementary student. This would already cover teacher’s salaries, infrastructure and support to the child’s educational development. The infamous New York dinner taken in a few hours would have already put a hundred students to school for a year. This situation should already put into context technoprojects that we think would solve the crisis our educational system is in.

Yet as with other problems in society, the solution does not lie solely on technological fixes. If we blindside ourselves and engage in technofetishism, we lose the essential features of the problems and become embroiled in solving the problems of the technological fix itself.

While projects like the OLPC or similar ones that seek to put in a computer in every barangay are welcome, they do not address the more fundamental lack of a school house, a school teacher, desks, chairs and support in these barangays. Solutions that depend solely on the deployment of technology are often one-sided solutions that are vulnerable to the failings of access to that technology itself.

Technology does play a part in development. Saying that one should not engage in unnecessary technofetishism is not saying that one should reject technology as part of the solution. In fact, those who would want to make things better should be adept with the available technologies at hand—from the high tech to the low tech. We would like to think that technology should make production activities and daily routine easier and more meaningful but only a few can access these technologies, what value is it for the rest of us? It seems that these new technologies that could unfetter us from the daily grind is being developed not to address our own problems but more for the companies that produce them to profit from it.

Ricardo “Rick” Bahague Jr. is an AGHAM member and the Coordinator of the Computer Professionals Union. CPU will celebrate their eighth year anniversary tomorrow. –Ricardo Bahague Jr., Manila Times

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