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Fixations, Charismatic technologies and the perennial enthusiasm of techno-solutionism  
 
Disruptive Fixation: School Reform and the Pitfalls of Techno-Idealism, by Christo Sims, 
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017, 232 pp., (paperback), 
ISBN: 9780691163994 
 
The Charisma Machine: The Life, Death, and Legacy of One Laptop Per Child, by Morgan 
Ames, 328 pp., Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2019, (paperback), ISBN: 9780262537445 
 
Keywords: techno-idealism, disruption, technology, developmentalism, education 
 
Hundreds of ethnographies have followed in the steps of James Ferguson’s The Anti-Politics 

Machine to document the failure of developmental or “disruptive projects.” Through them, 

Ferguson’s point that technical solutions are fundamentally unable to solve other-than-

technical problems and tend to reproduce them became a sort of anthropological common 

sense. Relatively few, however, take on Ferguson’s other exhortation: to examine how 

developmentalist enthusiasm remains impervious to these failures and what it is that such 

projects do accomplish, how, and for whom. Avowedly heirs to this tradition, Sims and Ames 

address these last questions in their ethnographies of education reforms, Disruptive Fixation 

and The Charisma Machine respectively, with a twist: how do certain technological 

imaginations mediate the ghost of failure and shield and buttress these enthusiasms? 

 

Disruptive Fixation examines the planning, concretisation and functioning of the 

“disruptive,” tech-oriented Downtown School in Manhattan; The Charisma Machine traces 

the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, from its inception at the MIT’s media lab to its 

deployment, and by most metrics failure, in rural Paraguay. Both projects involved similar 

understandings of 21st century children. Downtown School planners imagined children as 

inherently creative, active learners failed by an antiquated, inflexible schooling system 

disconnected from reality and unfit to train them in coding, design thinking and the 

technological skills they are allegedly both keen on and in need of (40; 48). These 

commitments and imaginations of children, technology and the role of the school congealed 

in moral imperatives (53), and as such entered the design of a student experience were social 



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media networks, hacking, coding, programming, and media production were built into 

lessons and school-sponsored extracurricular activities. Similarly, from the outset, addressed 

to the children of nations lacking in schooling budgets and infrastructure, the OLPC project 

hinged on disembodied universal notions of children’s autonomy, free-thinking rebelliousness 

and technological curiosity, able to learn on their own regardless of peers, teachers, funds and 

culture. This imagined “technically precocious boy” (38), echoing MIT hackers’ self-image, 

was built into a machine whose affordances were loftily aimed at enabling play, connectivity 

and freedom (47-61). MIT media lab’s founder and best-selling author Nicholas Negroponte 

had been scouring markets to place this developmental fantasy of his for years, and Paraguay 

agreed. 

 

These projects flopped for reasons fundamentally similar to those that led to the failure of 

Lesotho’s developmental overhaul in The Anti-Politics Machine. Imagined as a racially and 

socioeconomically inclusive space, the Downtown School did not actually engage any of the 

racial or socioeconomic inequalities of New York society it interacted with, inevitably 

reproducing them. Sims’s nuanced ethnographic gaze is particularly sharp in showing how 

BIPOC families struggled to place their kids in the school to begin with (60-62), how these 

children’s extracurricular activities did not count as “creative” to the school’s “disruptive” 

gaze (135) and how vaguely-coded moral panics around bullying worked through 

socioeconomic and racial inequalities with an obsessive, differential policing that resulted in 

these students leaving the school (152). Many of these students were by all metrics among the 

highest academic achievers in their classes. Similarly, although the school’s pedagogic 

project was constantly vaunted as innovative, when facing technological malfunction, 

students’ disinterest, poor exam results or other unexpected hurdles, educators reached for 

age-old, canonical discipline and control measures to stabilise the project (96). All of these 

issues were compounded by an increasingly active clique of parents with greater cultural, 

economic and logistical resources: aggressively lobbying for zero-tolerance policies, 

monitoring the school’s exam performance and teaching techniques, they effectively co-ran 

the school (144-148). 

 

Meanwhile, OLPC’s materialisation in Caacupé, in rural Paraguay, was spectacularly short of 

utopian from the outset. Infrastructurally speaking, the computers cost almost twice as much 

as originally advertised, spare parts were hard to find, computers froze and broke down 

regularly, batteries were deficient, children uninstalled software, schools and village homes 



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had no or little electricity and there were not enough qualified trainers to provide IT support. 

In a despairing, brilliant vignette tracing a single morning at school, Ames shows how ¾ of 

already preciously scarce lesson time was lost trying to get enough computers to work as 

intended (81-92). Dreamed of as a Trojan horse pregnant with freedom, autonomy and the 

promise of progress, the computer hijacked the learning experience with so many 

breakdowns that teachers dreaded using them and engaging in the onerous and unpaid labour 

of reorganising classes to fit laptops’ affordances. The precious few children who coded, 

designed, and used the computer as the learning and exploratory tool it was supposed to be 

were those who had familial and institutional encouragement, support and infrastructure, 

from celebratory remarks to electricity at home (140-152) – that is, the other-than-technical 

structures that, as Ames shrewdly points out, were all allegedly ancillary in OLPC’s techno-

solutionism. 

 

So far these are well-chartered dynamics in anthropology; the key to both books’ contribution 

lies in their examination of how those involved in these projects sustained their belief in their 

promises despite mounting evidence to the contrary. Sims refers to this phenomenon as a 

work of repairing idealism, which in the Downtown School project meant an array of “as if” 

dispositions: the affects, sensibilities and orientations of educators, designers and many 

parents helped them inhabit these experiences as if they were really ground-breaking. This 

“as if-ness” hinged greatly on what the author calls sanctioned counterpractices: “the periodic 

orchestration, documentation, circulation and ritualistic celebration of practices that appear to 

fulfil the intervention’s innovative philanthropic promise” (18). These included the 

overperforming of enthusiasm, the constant signalling out of novelty and a general emotional 

and performative work that, even if openly acknowledged as contrived and occasionally 

cringe-y, allowed the framing of the school’s activities as innovative. This was the case even 

when, as Sims repeatedly shows, pedagogies, disciplining techniques, use of time and 

resources and kinds of activities were increasingly identical to those of “traditional” schools, 

sometimes enhanced and sometimes encumbered by gadgetry and the fixation with 

innovation (87-88, 94-95). The author’s argument against cynicism here is subtle and 

convincing: the point of these counterpractices was less to produce actual change than to 

work as ritual reparations of the moral feeling of the goodness of the intervention many of 

these people genuinely believed in (105).  

 



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“As if” dispositions also generated a rationale to protect utopianism from failures in the form 

of unsanctioned counterpractices, that is, new or unscripted practices that challenge or do not 

pay heed to this utopianism. When high academic achieving BIPOC students were effectively 

chased out of the school for not being disruptive in “the right ways,” a rhetoric of personal 

choice and of not being “a good fit” morally shielded the experience of innovative disruption, 

ironically touted as striving for social justice, from coming to terms with its own inequalities 

(153). Readers coming to this book from Ferguson’s tradition will recognize in this 

legerdemain a variation of the de-politicizing logics of technical intervention, working in this 

case by bleaching structural issues with a grammar of choice and individual responsibility. 

Sims spotted it too, and convincingly extended it to the school’s dealing with elite parents 

who described themselves as risk takers and unconventional but increasingly lobbied to run 

the school in the logics of a depoliticized “community” as they forced the curriculum and its 

pedagogy down increasingly conventional paths (143-145, 158). The point is that the project 

now had rationalities and affects to experience the failure, or at least inconsistency, of being 

openly taken over by neurotic, privileged parents, in a manner that did not threaten the 

promise of its success. This is how techno-idealism, as Sims calls it, outlives its blatant 

failures and inconsistencies: through immense work to repair it “live,” on the go, a kind of 

work that is emotional, performative, rhetorical, ritualized and fundamentally, even if in other 

guises, ideological (99). 

 

Through the case of the OLPC project, Ames argues that techno-solutionism is impervious to 

its own failures because its appeal is less premised on actual results and more on their 

charisma. In the genealogy of the notion of the technological sublime, charismatic 

technologies seduce through the promise of a possibility of action: it is not about what they 

are or do, but what we imagine they could possibly do (9). This charismatic quality is not 

only immune to the pettiness of evidence against its promises and the messy complexity of 

reality: particular kinds of charismatic performances create a salvific distance that ensures 

charisma and its promises remain unsullied by “facts.” When a funders’ envoy was sent to 

Paraguay to check on the project’s progress, educators, state officials and selected children 

participated in a ceremonious, scripted performance to “show” how much progress the 

computers had brought about. In a sophisticated spin, Ames argues that what matters here is 

not to unmask the contrived character of these performances, because the fact that they are 

obviously contrived to everyone involved was always beside the point: the visit’s actual 

purpose was less to assess progress and more to uphold and reinforce the imaginations that 



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what everyone was doing was keeping alive the promise of progress. All actors involved had 

internalised through this promise what success should look like (170-173), in a purifying 

ritualization akin to that identified by Sims in New York.  

 

There’s yet more to the story of how charisma survives the disenchantment of reality checks. 

Charismatic technologies make sense within various different social imaginaries, and titillate 

in different ways those that come be invested in their promise. In the universe inhabited by 

Nicholas Negroponte, MIT hackers, Paraguayan elites and other globalist, highly educated, 

socioeconomically resourceful actors, charismatic technologies promise to reproduce the 

world those people already thrive in. For Paraguayan children, however, the charisma of 

OLPC hinged on their investment in other kinds of promises. On the one hand, these laptops 

generated, exacerbated, and offered a way to satisfy desire for access to media like Youtube, 

gaming portals and Nickelodeon (120, 134), enfolding these children as consumers of global 

products designed precisely to (re)produce their condition as consumers. On the other hand, 

the computers allowed some enthusiastic and programming-oriented children to prepare for 

and participate in competitions awarding trips to the US and other kinds of recognition of 

entrepreneurialism, coding and digital shrewdness. In so doing, these children were not 

seeking the promise of the hacker and coding identity of MIT ideologues: the charismatic 

promise laptops sustained for them pointed to a horizon of well-paid jobs, English language 

proficiency, and what they identified as a land of opportunities. The fact that, unsurprisingly, 

English-speaking students from well-resourced schools and families in Asunción, Paraguay’s 

capital, won every year, may confirm how structurally naïve techno-utopianism can be, but if 

anything it exacerbates its cruel optimism around the charismatic promise of being included 

(156-163).  

 

In the immensely crowded subfield of studies of how developmentalism does not work, Sims 

and Ames manage to stand out through highly nuanced contributions. Their arguments are 

persuasive, their prose is lively and both books will capture readerships across social sciences 

and would make excellent course reading material, separate and together. In a sense, too, 

beyond the solidity of their arguments, perhaps the greatest contribution they both make is 

epochal. Across disciplines, researchers of technologies - algorithms, AI, social media 

platforms, platform economies, robotics – seem to be converging in the peculiar conclusion 

that techno-utopianism is dead. The recently published (ironically, in light of Ames’ work, by 

MIT Press) Your Computer Is On Fire confidently claims that people and societies are 



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increasingly aware of the dystopian effect technologies have on our lives. The subset of 

“people” that academics of a certain ideological extraction make may be in near-universal 

agreement here, and would probably discount the study of techno-utopianism as “old news,” 

committed as we are to our endogamic pursuit to go “beyond” what “we” know already. 

Disruptive Fixation and The Charisma Machine are sobering, sophisticated invitations to 

realise not only that techno-utopianism is as alive and well in the centre of the developed 

world as it is in a remote rural enclave, but that dismissing the study of how it sustains itself 

despite all “we” know about its shortcomings could well be, ironically, extending it a new 

lease on life. 

 

Juan M. del Nido is a Philomathia Research Associate at the Max Planck Cambridge Centre 
for Ethics, Economy and Social Change, University of Cambridge, UK. His research focuses 
on political and economic reasoning; the logics, rhetoric and affect of neoclassical 
economics, consumption, markets and popular sovereignty; and new technologies. His book 
Taxis vs. Uber is forthcoming with Stanford University Press. 
 
 

 

 

© 2021 Juan M. del Nido 

 


