generally presented its vision as compelling.12 The most vocal critics were the African delegation to Tunisia, which as a group was largely unimpressed by the demonstration and voiced concerns about project and infrastructure costs, resources diverted from clean water and better schools, and machine obsolescence and recycling.13 But these voices were quickly marginalized within the broader discourse around the hundred-dollar laptop. (Location 158)

One Laptop per Child (OLPC) continued to be largely positive, even as the project struggled to fulfill Negroponte’s promises. Two of the features that had generated the most excitement at the November 2005 demonstration in Tunis were quietly rolled back. First, there would be no hand crank; these computers would ship with an AC adapter, like any other device, (Location 170)

One Laptop per Child serves as a case study in the complicated consequences of technological utopianism. (Location 196)

Charisma is not legitimized through bureaucratic or rational means but by followers’ belief that a leader has extraordinary, even divine, powers that are not available to ordinary people.34 (Location 273)

In their promises of action, however, charismatic technologies are deceptive: they make both technological adoption and social change appear straightforward instead of as a difficult process fraught with choices and politics. (Location 308)

technological determinism (or “technological solutionism”), whereby progress that a technology is supposed to cause is framed as natural and inevitable, thus overriding individual, social, institutional, or other kinds of agency—much like the “exceptionalism” of Weber’s charismatic leaders.45 Scholars in STS have been studying technological determinism for decades now and have sussed out the many ways it is wrong.46 But outside of those circles—and particularly in the technology development and design world—the belief is still commonplace. It can lead believers to underestimate the sustained commitments (social, political, financial, infrastructural, etc.) needed for both technological adoption and social change. (Location 310)

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for instance, that when the United States was building its rail network in the mid-nineteenth century, the feelings of sublime awe and transcendence that the locomotive evoked across the nation led the United States to pay an enormous price in resources and lives in an attempt to realize the utopian promises of rail: the end of wars and parochialism, the merging of cultures, the very “annihilation of space and time.” (Location 318)

have laid out departs from Weber’s account. A charismatic technology may promise to transform its users’ sociotechnical existence for the better, but this book will show that charisma is, at heart, ideologically conservative. Charismatic leaders confirm and amplify their audiences’ existing ideologies to cultivate their appeal, even as they may paint visions of a better world.50 A charismatic technology’s appeal likewise confirms the value of existing stereotypes, institutions, and power relations. This unchallenging familiarity is what makes a charismatic technology alluring: even as it promises certain benefits, it simultaneously confirms that the ideological worldview of its audience is already right—the charismatic technology will simply amplify it. By referencing and reinforcing existing ideological norms, charismatic technologies can also, by extension, appear unchangeable, inevitable, and natural—and their promises may still hold power even when a technology does not deliver. One (Location 330)

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Another question is what happens when charisma fades. In Weber’s account, the charisma of leaders is ultimately unstable. Weber details a process that he calls “routinization,” wherein charismatic authority is supplanted by another form of authority such as traditional hierarchies, legal frameworks, or bureaucratic procedures. What happens when the charisma of a particular technology or technological project fades? (Location 339)