California Rep. Ro Khanna advocates for rural tech jobs, criticizes social-media giants for prioritizing traffic over truth

Information-technology jobs in Silicon Valley make Rep. Ro Khanna's Northern California district one of the nation's wealthiest, but the Democrat is a longtime champion of rural economies and rural newspapers, and wants rural areas to get a piece of the tech economy.

In his new book, Dignity in a Digital Age, Khanna "proposes sweeping fixes for what, in his view, ails America: too much wealth concentrated in too few hands, and too many digital jobs crowded into a handful of tech hubs. He wants to decentralize those opportunities so that places like Paintsville, Ky., or Jefferson, Iowa, can also thrive," Blake Hounshell and Leah Askarinam report for The New York Times.

Rep. Ro Khanna

He conceived the book after veteran Republican Rep. Hal Rogers invited him to visit his southeastern Kentucky district, perhaps the nation's poorest. Khanna saw the devastation brought by the coal industry's slow demise, and met former blue-collar workers who, thanks to Louisville tech start-up Interapt, have launched second careers as software developers, Hounshell and Askarinam report. He realized that remote tech jobs could transform rural economies and wants to make sure they can capitalize on the increasing normalization of remote work.

The federal government could encourage rural tech jobs with a host of initiatives, including "building 'digital grant colleges' inside the country’s 112 land-grant universities to teach applied technology skills, underwriting apprenticeship programs at tech companies, [and] creating a 'national digital corps' as a kind of Peace Corps for rural America," Hounshell and Askarinam report. "What if the government required, say, software companies that wanted federal contracts to employ at least 10 percent of their workers in rural areas?"

Khanna hopes boosting rural economies through tech jobs would also reduce political polarization, noting that it's often a product of resource inequality. But Silicon Valley can do more than provide jobs, he believes; Khanna criticizes tech companies in his home district, especially Facebook, for algorithms that drive users to false and inflammatory content: "I think Silicon Valley overall is an extraordinary place of innovation, of entrepreneurship, of high achievement. But I don’t think it has lived up yet to its responsibilities in a democratic society."