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Stupid kiosk in the Cyber Park
(Morocco: Marrakech)

May 2006
Morocco: Marrakech: Stupid kiosk in the Cyber Park

I just took this photo to give myself an excuse to rant about how much I hate these kiosks.

All over the developing world, governments have been convinced by fast-talking hucksters to install these idiotic touchscreen info machines as part of some recipe for overnight development. And it's always exactly the same:

  • Nobody, nobody, nobody ever uses them, except for little children who bang on them just to see what will happen, and quickly get bored when they discover that all they can access are out-of-focus, out-of-date maps and embarrassingly bad translations of puff pieces about how developed the country is about to become.
  • Eventually they stop working, and nobody knows how to fix them (or cares to try).
  • Then the location looks even more pathetic than before, because now it has some dated, stupid, broken-down kiosk that just highlights the development gap, but which can't be removed because it was a pet project of some prince's nephew.

The people who go around foisting these things on unwitting victims should be hung up by their thumbnails. The money that went into installing 20 of these white elephants in this park in Marrakech could have gone to medicine instead and saved hundreds of lives.


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