This paper examines the issue of technology optimism through critical ethnographic research from two years of study within four upper secondary schools in Sweden. These schools have invested in one-to-one lap-top initiatives as a claimed means to solve important problems and transform educational settings to the better based on a belief in the capacity of technology to change things in a progressive common interest. We examine the degree to which this seems to have happened. We discuss the technology optimism discourse as one that has allowed a marketization process to take over schools in the interests of corporations and examine if a process of false marketing can be said to have taken place as part of an exploitation of education in the interests of corporate profit. There is strong empirical support for this suggestion. One-to-one technology has not had strong effects on pedagogy in the two schools whilst corporations have made vast profits from the sale of computer hard- and software to schools in one-to-one and other similar ventures.