TechBlog

One of the most satisfying gifts I’ve ever given was livestock to needy villages, via Heifer International. Everybody love it (except for my dad who called up demanding to know where the goat was that I’d given in his namesake… er I mean name). So I’m seriously thinking about giving the family two computers that they’ll never see either, two XO Laptops donated to needy children via the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) Project. For a donation of $399, you buy two XO laptops, one that goes to a child in need, one that comes to you to give to a child (or anybody) of your choice. I’d give my second one to the local homeless shelter.

In the late ’90s, when MIT Media Lab’s Nicholas Negroponte, the person behind OLPC (and Newt Gingrich), began talking about the benefits to the developing world of computers and Internet access, many people laughed it off. The critique even gained a rallying cry: “Let ‘em eat laptops!” It did seem a bit silly to be thinking about giving computers to people that didn’t even have basic food, water, and adequate shelter. And that’s still the case. But in the 1990s, the world wasn’t “flat,” to borrow an idea from NY Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman. And it still isn’t completely so today, but it’s a hell of a lot flatter. When you think of all of Google’s reach, all of the library collections online, the technical and how-to information, the ability to publish to a potentially global audience, the ability to organize, trade, fundraise online, the potential is amazing (for those within WiFi range, anyway). Alongside food, water, and shelter, knowledge could be an Earth-shaking power.

And since $300 isn’t that much, given what the average holiday shopper spends on family and friends (and I don’t know about you, but I sure don’t need much in the way of new sweaters and aftershave), you could give both farm animals from Heifer International AND laptops. Let ‘em eat AT their laptops!