If you do not choose to log on and skill up and connect to this unlimited opportunity,

then you are going to be a drag on national economic productivity,

and you need to be contained by the carceral wing of the state. Hello and welcome to Tak Won't Save Us.

I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Dan Green.

Dan is an assistant professor at the University of Maryland's College of Information Studies

and the author of The Promise of access, technology, inequality,

and the political economy of hope. Now, I have to say, I know I speak to a lot of authors on the

show, but I really think that Dan's book is an essential read because it connects changes in

the political economy of the United States, and certainly these changes also happened

around the world as well, to the narratives that we have been sold about technology, and how that

changes the welfare state and the way that we understand poverty, inequality, social reproduction,

and so many important aspects of society. Dan goes back to the

Clinton administration and how that coincided with the growth of the internet. And Clinton was not

only the Democratic president that embraced neoliberal policy by slashing the welfare state

and increasing the carceral state, but he also oversaw the privatization of the internet.

And he used the internet as kind of the rhetorical tool to justify the changes that he was

making to the welfare state and largely to the orientation of government to say that no longer

were these social programs necessary to protect, you know, the poor,

the unemployed, people like that, but now the opportunity and their redemption would come

through technology. If only they had access to the internet and developed their digital skills,

then they would be able to access a global labor market, and we might say pull themselves up by their

bootstraps. And what Dan describes is important because he also shows how those changes to the

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