Chapter 1: Democratizing the Digital Revolution1DEMOCRATIZING THE DIGITAL REVOLUTION After the coal industry took a hit in Eastern Kentucky, Alex Hughes''s business went under. Alex found himself unemployed for nearly six months in what was the lowest period of his life. Nearly two decades earlier, Alex was stabbed in the face by a drunk stranger, and the scar still stretches across his jaw and cheek. If given the choice, Alex told me, he would prefer being stabbed again to losing the business he owned for fifteen years and going without work. When you''re unemployed, Alex explained, "No one sees you''re injured." But a lack of income can be a lot more stressful than physical trauma when your family depends on you. He lost his house and car, and he worried constantly about his wife and family. Some of his unemployed friends began drinking, while others saw marriages dissolve.
Unemployment leaves scars of its own. To this day, even when times are good, Alex still fears he could lose everything at any moment. Alex never gave up searching for work, however. He comes from a proud family tradition with an I can fix that attitude. Alex told me, "I am certainly not the type of person that is going to sit around. There has to be something to do. Letting someone take care of me is not the thing that comes to mind." Whenever he felt dejected, he tried to think about his newborn son.
"When he grows up, what''s he going to think if I lay down and quit?" Alex, now in his mid-forties, has a heavy build and a dreamcatcher tattoo on his forearm. After high school, he attended Big Sandy Community and Technical College, but stopped to provide for his daughter. At the time, he worked construction jobs, then opened a tattoo shop to make ends meet. After saving money and teaching himself about electronic equipment, he started his now defunct business installing large-format printers at offices that oversaw coal mining. Like so many small businesses in the region, it had depended on the coal economy to survive. In 2017, while unemployed, Alex saw a television ad for the Interapt technology services program, which paid $400 a week for six months of intensive training in Apple''s iOS software. Interapt was founded by Ankur Gopal, an Indian American who was born and raised in rural Kentucky and sought to bring quality tech jobs to the region. Hughes applied to the program and was accepted.
He now describes it as "on the miracle level." It led to a full-time job that allows him to "have a pretty good life" and provide for his family. After finishing his training, Alex earned $42,000 per year as a basic coder, and now makes $77,000 as a lead software developer. He is responsible for managing a team which has members in Chicago and Atlanta that implements software solutions for General Electric Appliances, headquartered in Louisville, to build smart appliances including refrigerators, coffee makers, ovens, and laundry machines. Alex can schedule his own hours and feels lucky to have worked remotely every day during the pandemic. Stories like those of Alex were on Representative Hal Rogers''s mind when he invited me to visit Paintsville, Kentucky, or "Silicon Holler" as he calls it. Rogers is an eighty-three-year-old Republican who has served in Congress for forty years in the heart of Trump country. His referring to the region as Silicon Holler indicates how much Appalachian Kentucky aspires to build a tech-savvy workforce to support their broader economic ecosystem.
They reject the emptiness and elitism of the mantra that all laid-off middle-aged workers or liberal arts students should now become coders. Instead, they recognize that digital wealth can sustain a wide diversity of jobs. My trip to Paintsville captured the imagination of many. Headlines followed dubbing me the "Ambassador of Silicon Valley." I suspect the interest in this story was about more than just tech jobs. It was noteworthy that people from different parts of the country like Alex Hughes and I were even talking to each other. Alex shared with me that although he comes from some of the "whitest" parts of Kentucky, he never saw "a whole lot of divisiveness" when "people from foreign countries ended up being doctors and business owners that we all rely on." Now, a man by the name of Ankur Gopal, the son of immigrants, gave him the best opportunity of his life.
He compares being a software professional to being a member of a club with its own identity, common language, and shared way of thinking. These days he receives frequent recruitment inquiries on LinkedIn. Our nation gains when people like Alex are working on distributed teams tackling common projects online. This book imagines how the digital economy can create opportunities for people where they live instead of uprooting them. It offers a vision for decentralizing digital innovation and wealth generation to build economically vibrant and inclusive communities that are connected to each other. We need a development strategy that fosters a nucleus of tech jobs with myriad applications for different industries and local entrepreneurs in thousands of rural and underrepresented communities across our nation. The digital revolution is reshaping our economy and society, but it continues to sideline, exclude, upend, and manipulate too many in the process. My aim is to advance our democratic values by empowering all of us to direct and steer these digital forces.
Placing democratic values at the center of the twenty-first-century tech revolution is about more than unleashing untapped talent like Alex, facilitating his rise, and allowing him to support the cultural life of his hometown. It demands that we uplift service workers who face economic precarity. It requires the regulation and redesign of digital platforms to prioritize online rights and quality discourse over profits. We must make the high-tech revolution work for everyone, not just for certain Silicon Valley leaders who commodified our data while amassing fortunes and now have a disproportionate influence on our national culture and debate. This concentration of digital prosperity makes the already difficult task of becoming a functioning, pluralistic democracy harder. A key pillar of building a multiracial, multireligious democracy is providing every person in every place with the prospect of a dignified life, including the potential to contribute in and shape the digital age. MY FAMILY''S JOURNEY My story, as you may have guessed, is quite different from Alex Hughes''s. My earliest memories are of Amarnath Vidyalankar, my maternal grandfather.
I remember playing chess with him and listening to his tales about the Mahabharata, a sacred Hindu epic, and the Indian Independence movement. He was and remains a legend in our family. My grandmother talked about the time he was in jail for four years starting in 1942 as part of Gandhi''s Quit India movement that demanded an end to British rule of the subcontinent. During this period, she never spoke to him and did not know whether he was alive. Every six months or so she would send Dev, her oldest son who was barely twelve, on a train from Amritsar, where they lived, to the prison in Lahore. Dev took new clothes and my grandfather''s favorite Indian sweets like halvah. The guards took the sweets and clothes, promising to give them to my grandfather. They told Dev he was doing fine, but my grandmother never knew what to believe.
Although he never did receive those sweets and clothes from the guards, my grandfather was one of the fortunate ones who made it out in good health and spirits. After India attained independence, he served as an MP in India''s first Parliament in 1952. He was proud to serve as part of India''s founding generation, which outlined the nation''s principles for liberal democracy. My grandfather would never have conceived of the possibility that his grandson would one day serve in Congress. The cliché rings true for me: only in America is a story like mine possible. My mother came to the United States because she fell in love with my father, who was studying chemical engineering at the University of Michigan. Their parents arranged for them to meet. My father, born a year before India''s independence, traveled back to India to meet her and won her over after three dates.
She and my father started their life in Bensalem, Bucks County, a suburb of Philadelphia, where my father took a job with a manufacturer of specialty chemicals. My father stayed with that same company for almost thirty years, while my mother worked as a substitute schoolteacher for special needs kids. Both benefited from the civil rights movement that opened emigration from non-European countries and America''s policy of recruiting engineers and scientists to compete with the Soviets. I was born in Philadelphia in 1976, our bicentenary. While growing up, I attended public schools and took out large loans to finish my education at some of the most elite institutions in the world. My most formative years, however, were in Bucks County. I lived in a community in Holland, Pennsylvania, that was economically mixed. We were comfortable and never lacked for anything meaningful, but we were not rich.
We were careful with what we spent on clothes, eating out, cars, and tickets to games. On our street were midlevel professionals like my father and also an electrician, a nurse, a teacher, an HVAC technician, and a couple of senior executives at corporations. Our neighbors and a few families in the township became our extended family. We played Little League and touch football and watched the Rocky movies. We went to each other''s homes for meals, had sleepovers, and celebrated holidays together. For.