Hacking digital universalism: OLPC & information networks in the Andes

Channeling the promise global interconnection, and framed as the mark of contemporary optimization, “the digital” has come to represent the path towards the future for diverse nations, economies, and populations alike. Pursued in a broad range of national initiatives to prepare populations for an innovation-driven information society, digitality now operates as an object – to echo Gayatri Spivak’s and Anna Tsing’s reflections on “the universal” – that we cannot help but want. In the midst of accelerating pursuits of the digital across distinct global spaces, however, little has been made of the “universalist” underpinnings that allows a vision for digital connection generated by a cosmopolitan techno-elite, to speak for and represent the "global” rest. This paper will attend to experiments in innovation spaces from the periphery, including regional deployments of the One Laptop Per Child Project in Peru, that distinctly engage materialities of nature, technology, and information. By fostering collaborations between  Latin American free software activists across a range of rural and urban site, and between transnational media producers and indigenous communities, such networks press a cosmopolitcal urging to “think with the unknown,” and open up possibilities for uncovering distinct collective futures through an interfacing with multiple local pasts.