The rural-urban tech divide is pushing us to a new civil war. Silicon Valley, step up

The lovechild of misinformation and an internet-disrupted economy is a metastasizing civil war, albeit a balkanized conflict — cold now, but warming, one with a digital divide tied to content consumed and fortunes turned, not battle lines drawn by Mason and Dixon.

It’s neighbor to neighbor. Brother to sister. And, of course, rural to urban.

Big Tech is joyfully annihilating rural and minority economies and radicalizing what the rulers of the Valley see as leftover humans — or more specifically, me and my neighbors in rural Iowa.

Into the brew steps Ro Khanna, a Silicon Valley congressman who writes with remarkable rural orientation in a just-released book — “Dignity In A Digital Age: Making Tech Work For All Of Us” — with what is the most effective, if not the sole remaining solution to lower discord and slow dislocation. All of America must share in the digital economy if America is to remain America. Extend the tech revolution or prepare for the civil war.

“How can we expect the working class to embrace the tech industry when the young tech elite often view working-class jobs as accessories to the main pillars of the new economy?” Khanna writes.

As we in rural America stared down our own mortality amid the pandemic, Khanna saw his life flash before him on Jan. 6, 2021.

“I watched firsthand from my window in the Cannon House Office Building as a mob of rioters rushed the Capitol, spurred by online conspiracy theories pushed by President Trump and Republican lawmakers,” Khanna writes. “Even amidst the bedlam, as I waited it out locked in my office, I was thinking about how social media had precipitated the day’s violence.”

Here is the issue: A full 72% of employment growth since 2008 has taken place in cities with more than 1 million in population. Rural America represents 15% of the nation’s workforce (20% of its population) but holds only 5% of digital careers.

The tech-driven economy is stranding millions of Americans. The online fever swamp of lies and conspiracies is an all-too-attractive refuge for those whom the 2022 economy leaves in its wake.

The wealth and security — and dignity of living — generated by the scooping of canyon-sized chunks of the economy to Silicon Valley, Seattle, Austin, Boston and other thriving tech tubs must river out to the rest of the nation, Khanna argues in a book he produced with an insider’s knowledge of his own district, and a reporter’s eye for the small towns of the Midwest and South to which he’s been a frequent visitor.

Fortune 500 companies could encourage employees to move to rural areas. Community colleges and four-year schools should house “digital grant” colleges, similar to land-grant programs. Tech companies should pay for training at centers or branches of companies in spots such as Jefferson, Iowa, and Paintsville, Kentucky — places where Khanna is directly involved in this type of collaboration.

Khanna’s Internet Bill of Rights would require tech companies to make their users affirmatively consent, or opt in, to have information collected and shared.

One of Khanna’s other ideas: Allow portability of data and information, allowing us to share all those photos, friends and posts on Facebook to other platforms to create more competition, break up the power of the online empire.

Khanna’s big lift, and he has the political and policy legs to do it, is to persuade his constituents in Silicon Valley that their Second Gilded Age wealth grab is destroying the nation. The jobs, the growth — the hope — must emerge in rural and minority communities.

Ro Khanna has to succeed, or the alternative, well on its march already, is a civil war of fractured motivations and missions, driven online, in places known to all and dark to most of us, by the absurd and frightening and downright mad, all leading us to the same destination: the extinction of our democracy.

This story was originally published February 16, 2022 at 5:00 AM.