The British government is claiming digital skills will deliver economic growth to the country and social mobility to young people: its ministers call it ‘a pipeline to prosperity’. While declaring this pipeline, the government assumes the needs of the economy and young people’s needs are (or should be) synchronised. We challenge this assumption and the policy it sustains with data from questionnaires, workshops and interviews with 50 young people from communities in South Wales (including a former mining town and a deprived inner city area) about digital technology’s role in their everyday life. We use a new typography to compare the reality of their socially and economically structured lives to the governmental policy discourse that makes them responsible for their country’s future economic success. To explain these young people’s creative and transgressive use of technology, we also make an empirically grounded contribution to the ongoing theoretical debates about structure and agency.

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was funded by the European Union – TRANSLITERACY project 645238/Horizon 2020–Research and Innovation action.