Marx argues that we have no reason to expect the emerging sociotechnical system built around information technology to remedy social inequalities in our society, or to relieve the plight of the poor, any more than other massive sociotechnical changes-for example, those associated with the railroads, electricity, or automotive technology-have had such effects in the recent past. In the short term, the new information-technological system is likely to produce dislocations that affect the weakest first-low-income populations and especially minorities among them. In the long term, widespread adaptations to the new technological system will likely take place, just as broad social adaptations have occurred to other sociotechnological shifts. But these adaptations are unlike to remedy the fundamental, structurally based inequality between the poor and the well-to-do. Structural inequalities can be solved only by attacking them "within the larger historical, cultural, and socioeconomic matrix that generated them."