A cool paper I've read recently is Morgan G. Ames' Charismatic Technology. In this one, she proposes the concept of Charismatic Technology as an explanation for the holding power that some technologies exhibit for long periods of times, even if they fail to deliver on their promises time and time again. The paper is written with a focus on the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, which had the XO laptop as a figurehead:
