But it doesn’t matter whether they can browse engineering jobs on their phones. Online opportunity isn’t always actual opportunity. Of course, Smith herself wouldn’t argue that a tenth-grade dropout from East Palo Alto and a Stanford computer science PhD have the same ability to hack software. Nevertheless, by equating the Internet with opportunity for underprivileged people, she has made a dubious assumption – an assumption that the Internet can make up for severe non-Internet deficiencies.
