Daniel Greene. The Promise of Access: Technology, Inequality, and the Political Economy of Hope. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2021. 260p. Paper, $30.00 (ISBN 978-0-262-54233-3).

Abstract

In The Promise of Access: Technology, Inequality, and the Political Economy of Hope, Daniel Greene sets out to examine “how the problem of poverty is transformed into a problem of technology” and the larger effect this has on public service-oriented institutions like schools and libraries. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2012 and 2015 at three organizations—a tech start-up, a public library, and a charter school—he tells a story of public institutions adapting to dwindling state investment by embracing simplistic technological solutions to inequality, even when those who staff them seemingly know better. Why do we look to tech start-ups as models of success for public institutions when they operate under vastly different conditions? The allure of access and the promise of technology makes an intractable problem like poverty into something that is actionable and legible to funders but sets these institutions on a path that may well end in their own undoing.