Dignity in a Digital Age

The most tangible part of Khanna's program is economic geography. Rather than ask displaced workers to uproot themselves and chase the jobs to expensive coastal cities, he wants to bring the digital economy to the towns that already exist. He points to pilot efforts he has been involved in — partnerships that place tech training and remote roles in places like Jefferson, Iowa, or Paintsville, Kentucky, coal and farm country a long way from any venture fund. The bet is that a coding job can pay well from anywhere with a good connection.

That connection is the precondition, and here his argument turns practical. Broadband, in his telling, is the electricity of the digital age — infrastructure so basic that leaving it to the market guarantees that rural and poor areas get served last or not at all. He wants public investment to close the gap the way rural electrification did in the 1930s, treating high-speed internet as a utility rather than a luxury. Without it, every other proposal for spreading opportunity collapses, because you cannot join an economy you cannot log into.

Geography is only half of it. The other half is what the digital economy does to people once they are inside it — as workers, as citizens, as the source of the data these companies run on. Khanna treats dignity as the thread connecting all three, and he is willing to be specific about where he thinks it frays. Gig platforms, for instance, promised flexibility and often delivered precarity: no benefits, no bargaining power, an algorithm for a boss. He argues for extending real protections and a voice to workers whose employers insist they aren't employers at all.

Automation is the deeper anxiety, and he refuses both easy answers. He rejects the panic that says the robots will take everything, and he rejects the complacency that says markets always create new jobs to replace the old ones. The honest position, he suggests, is that automation reshapes work unevenly, rewarding some and stranding others, and that public policy exists precisely to soften the landing for the people it strands — through retraining that actually leads somewhere, and a safety net that treats a lost job as a transition rather than a verdict.

Step back from the proposals and the larger argument comes into focus. For Khanna, technology policy is not a specialist debate for lawyers and engineers. It is the central political question of the era, because the decisions being made inside a handful of companies — about who works, what we see, what is known about us — increasingly do the work that laws and legislatures used to do. When a platform sets the terms for millions of workers or shapes what a nation argues about, it is governing, whether or not anyone voted for it.

That is the heart of the book's ambition. Khanna is trying to pull these decisions back into the democratic frame, insisting that a self-governing people should have some say over the machines and markets remaking their lives. His deeper worry is that Americans have come to experience technology the way earlier generations experienced the weather — as something that simply happens to them. A democracy runs on the opposite belief: that the shared future is a thing people decide together, not a forecast they receive.

Khanna wrote from a seat that made him, on paper, the last person to challenge the tech economy — the representative of the firms themselves, the son of immigrants who found their footing in the country's promise, an admirer of the founders he legislates around. He used that position to argue that admiration and reform are not opposites. The digital economy, in his account, does not have to choose between inventing the future and sharing it; the choice was made by policy, and policy can be remade.