Farooq and Zubaida Mazhar got their first taste of America in 1978. It was the poor, tiny town of Ahoskie in eastern North Carolina, where Farooq’s brother Iqbal had started practicing as an eye doctor not long before. Their American odyssey included a cross-country road trip with the extended family that took them from the Carolinas to California and ended with an RV that burst into flames in Salinas, Kansas. (Thankfully, everyone survived.)
Farooq and Zubaida hailed from Karachi, the vast Pakistani metropolis on the shores of the Arabian Sea. The couple brought their growing family to Chicago in 1985, where Farooq’s other brother, Masood, lived, and started a business selling women’s handbags, jewelry, and various tchotckes from South Asia. But the bitter cold of Chicago winters turned out to be too much for the family, who were accustomed to the practically sliceable heat and humidity of Karachi, and so they returned home.
Life brought them back to North Carolina again and again, though, in the 1980s—yearly, in fact. More than anything, the Mazhars wanted to find a better life for their three children that was far from the political turmoil and violence of their home city. A safe, quiet home, education in American universities—these were the hopes that led the couple to leave a relatively comfortable life and a successful business in Pakistan for the leafy suburbs around Research Triangle Park (RTP), the high-tech mecca near Durham, North Carolina. There, companies such as IBM and Nortel employed thousands amid scrawny pine trees and masses of ungovernable kudzu.
They left it all to wake up at 3:00 a.m. and make doughnuts in a small shop—aptly dubbed RTP Donuts—at the intersection of Highways 54 and 55, a stone’s throw from the research park. The store supplied sugary goods for the in-house cafeterias of companies such as pharmaceutical giant Glaxo, and their walk-in traffic came mostly from workers in RTP, which had no dining or retail establishments of its own thanks to strict zoning. For several years the Mazhars split their time between Durham and Karachi, doing arduous, low-wage labor so they could be with their children, who were studying at nearby Duke University and North Carolina State University.
But the Mazhars soon soured on the doughnut trade. The hours were long and the profits nonexistent, and they had to rely on others for doughnut-making expertise—primarily, an Eritrean immigrant named Danny, who sometimes left them in the lurch. (“It’s not easy making doughnuts,” Farooq later recalled. “I basically thought you put something in the machine at one end and at the other end the doughnut comes out. It wasn’t anything like that.”)1
The schools and universities of the Research Triangle—the greater metropolitan area that encompasses Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill—brought the Mazhars to North Carolina. RTP itself brought them to the doughnut shop. One of their daughters, Saira, attended the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, where we met and later married.
This story is not of merely personal or sentimental significance, I hope. Rather, it is the tale of one family swept up in the centripetal forces that brought scientists and engineers, academics and artists, immigrants and hayseeds to the Triangle in the late twentieth century. The emergence of a high-tech economy in Raleigh-Durham changed the face of North Carolina, in terms of plain dollars and cents. Software engineers employed in RTP made far more money than workers in furniture or tobacco or textiles, the state’s traditional industries, generating greater tax revenue, lifting property values, and spawning other jobs and enterprises (such as the doughnut shop). It also brought people from the hinterland of North Carolina, from across the United States and, indeed, the world to a place that was once among the nation’s poorest, sleepiest backwaters.
I remember visiting the Research Triangle as a child, when my grandfather needed medical treatment at Duke because of exposure to toxic chemicals at the plastics plant in Charlotte, where he worked. I was struck by the relative ethnic diversity on display as white, black, Latino, and Asian customers idled in line at a McDonald’s. It was not exactly Queens, but it was still a far cry from the small textile town where I grew up. The Triangle was the land of hospitals, universities, technology—an Emerald City of sorts, or a “City of Medicine,” in Durham’s canny self-description.
I always wondered why this place had better jobs and opportunities than other stretches of America, whether in rural North Carolina or Indiana or West Virginia, where people scraped by in factories, grocery stores, and gas stations. The central question of history as a discipline, of course, is “when”: why did things change when they did? The central question of geography is “where”: why did this happen here, and not there? This book attempts to answer both, by putting the familiar image of the information or knowledge economy in a different relief.
A NEW GENEALOGY OF THE FUTURE
This book seeks to interrogate the idea of the knowledge economy itself—a phrase so shopworn and mundane that it hardly seems to merit a first thought, let alone a second. Barely a day goes by when someone on National Public Radio (NPR) does not refer to “today’s knowledge-based economy.” That the United States and the rest of the world’s most advanced nations have moved on to economies driven by information, not manufacturing, is broadly taken for granted. Thanks to new technologies—whether automation or the Internet or other telecommunications—the basic structure of American capitalism changed in the late twentieth century, placing knowledge and the workers who have it at the forefront of economic change. The transition feels natural, inevitable, inexorable.
But what if the information economy was not the result of a natural progression, one that pursued its own internal economic and technological logic? What if it was contrived, created intentionally by planners, politicians, and public policy?
My first book, Democracy of Sound, explored the shift toward a postindustrial economy through changing ideas about intellectual property law—specifically the legal status of recorded sound, which was not protected by copyright in the United States until 1972 (much later than in most developed nations). The story of music piracy revealed how Americans first thought of copyright as a monopoly power, necessary but limited, in the time of the Progressive Era and New Deal; yet businesspeople, jurists, and legislators increasingly saw stronger and more expansive intellectual property rights as vital to the nation’s economic health from the 1970s forward, as deindustrialization reshaped the economic landscape. Thinkers such as Peter Drucker and Daniel Bell sketched out the intellectual framework of a postindustrial economy, and lawmakers responded by tailoring policy to the needs of industries such as biotechnology, entertainment, fashion, and software—fields that were about ideas and creativity, not “making stuff.”2
Brain Magnet examines this same transition from a different angle of vision—looking not at intellectual property per se but at the places where it is made. It is a story of local economic development, particularly the creation of a high-tech enclave in what was once one of the poorest and least educated states in the Jim Crow South. Rather than focusing on law and music, this book considers how local leaders in academia, business, and politics set out to imagine a new and different kind of economy beginning in the 1950s. Yes, it is a story of elites—bankers, professors, governors—but even these high-flying figures were ultimately small in the grand scheme of American capitalism’s transformation in the late twentieth century. It is about the unlikely efforts of local leaders to solve the thorny problem of development: delivering jobs, better wages, and more opportunities for communities that desperately needed them. Every mayor wakes up every day thinking of how she will solve basic, pragmatic problems and make things work. RTP was an unusually ambitious and remarkably coordinated effort to make an economy defined for generations by poverty and underdevelopment “work” in a different way.
In some ways, it did work. RTP is the largest research park in the United States and has attracted numerous marquee employers, such as IBM and Glaxo, that pay many of their employees high-end salaries. Triangle cities such as Raleigh, Durham, and Cary have won a reputation for an excellent quality of life, ranking among “best places” to pursue a career and raise a family in the twenty-first century.3 The region boasted a relatively affordable cost of living—at least compared with other major metro areas in the United States—as well as mostly good schools and enough cultural stimulation, thanks in large part to local universities, to make life bearable, perhaps even pleasant, for an educated, upper-income family. It was a diligently designed outpost of the professional workforce of the future, a group that urbanist Richard Florida would eventually dub the “creative class” more than forty years after RTP’s founding.4
Indeed, RTP was a place expressly designed for knowledge workers before that term was even introduced. It was green, pastoral, sprawling, quiet, clean—everything that a traditional city was not. It was a landscape modeled on a college campus, thought to be the ideal place for thinkers to think. Nothing was accidental or organic in RTP, except perhaps for the kudzu that assembled ominously at its borders. The park’s planners and boosters not only created a template of what an environment for intellectual labor ought to look like; they also pioneered an approach to economic development that leveraged creativity, culture, and especially universities to attract advanced industries and educated workers. In RTP, not Silicon Valley, one finds a conscious and deliberate effort to build an information economy. It is also a striking and early example of urban branding, in which a new metropolitan identity appeared as if from nothing.
BRAINS, CITIES, AND THE PROBLEM OF CLASS
Brain Magnet attempts to bridge the stories of cities and the information economy, of technology and space and place. Scholars have traced the rise of a postindustrial society for more than fifty years, from Peter Drucker and Fritz Machlup’s early writing on knowledge work in the 1960s to Daniel Bell’s influential work in the 1970s, sociologist Manuel Castells’s The Informational City in 1989, and historian Margaret Pugh O’Mara’s Cities of Knowledge in 2004.5 The centrality of Stanford to Silicon Valley’s rise and Harvard and MIT to the emergence of tech in greater Boston is well documented, but scholars such as LaDale Winling and Andrew Simpson have begun to examine the increasingly crucial role of universities in urban development across metropolitan America with the rise of the “eds and meds” economy in the late twentieth century.6
These scholars have worked at the intersection of urban history and the information economy, but without taking a step back to consider that economy as a deliberate cultural project in its own right. This book is, in a way, a meta-narrative of how an information economy was conceived, sketched, planned, and implemented, and the underlying assumptions about class and culture that undergirded the new creative economy. It aims to connect the intellectual and cultural history of the knowledge economy and the literature on postindustrial cities, which have mostly operated on separate, if parallel, tracks.
Certainly few historians have treated the idea of the idea economy itself, the city of knowledge, the creative city, as a subject of critical scrutiny. And few have searched for the agency and intent of the real, historical individuals who set out to build it, only half knowing what they were building. Brain Magnet seeks to do this by employing a distinctive method: refracting the story of broad changes in the nature of capitalism through concepts of space and place. What does the genesis of a knowledge economy look like at the founding, among possum and pine, dirt roads and gleaming, modernist laboratories? What vision did the planners of this place—the academics, bankers, business leaders, managers, politicians, secretaries, and scientists who built it—have in mind when they laid out a space for technological innovation and intellectual labor?
This is the kind of work that would come to be hegemonic—if not numerically predominant within the broader economy—in the age of Silicon Valley and HBO’s Silicon Valley, in the time of what some critics have called “cognitive capitalism.”7 French economist Yann Moulier Boutang defined this new variant of capitalism as one “founded on the accumulation of immaterial capital, the dissemination of knowledge and the driving role of the knowledge economy.”8 More than earlier mercantile and industrial economies, it derives value from “intelligent, inventive and innovative labour, and…mobilises the cooperation of brains in networks,” particularly toward the production of intellectual property such as copyrighted works and patents.9 Within the broader culture, these brainy people command a valorized social and economic position. Consider the nerds in the TV series Silicon Valley, who are feted with riches by venture capitalists because of their idea for a powerful new algorithm, while workers of far lesser status, known as Taskers, scurry around shopping for groceries and picking up dry cleaning for the elite, all coordinated by an app. (The episode was called, fittingly, “Intellectual Property.”)10
Indeed, knowledge work is the kind of labor most valued and prized in an economy driven by brains. Back in the 1970s, sociologist Daniel Bell spelled out the special role a new class of educated experts would assume in a changing economy. More recently, Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray spun the same message in more sinister, if franker, terms in their controversial 1994 book, The Bell Curve: in a postindustrial society, the less educated and less able risked falling far behind a new “cognitive elite.” Later commentators celebrated and teased this new class of tech bros and bobos, and Richard Florida repackaged them as the essential ingredient of urban development: the “creative class.”11
In Raleigh-Durham, we see the hazy, early outlines of this new political economy, with all the contradictions and shortcomings that come with a development strategy explicitly geared toward the interests of the affluent and educated and technologically advanced industries. High-tech, postindustrial capitalism is both more innovative and prosperous and more unequal and uneven, better planned yet more socially fragmented. In a time of the movement of young people “back to the city,” gentrification, and increasing social and economic stratification, the story of the world’s first designed-to-order city of ideas has much to teach us.12
Of course, it was not just hipsters coming back to the city in the late twentieth century and early twenty-first. Since the 1960s, people had been coming from Pakistan and Yugoslavia, Westchester and Harlem and Palo Alto to live and work in the Triangle. They were part of a great social drama that unfolded in the United States, as social and geographical mobility within the nation and new waves of immigration led to the multiethnic metropolitan landscape of the twenty-first-century United States.13 The Triangle is not the largest or most diverse of those places by any means. But in its own Southern context, it represents a distinct version of the American Dream that is irresistible to many—green and sprawling, prosperous and unequal, with laboratories and lofts looming in the background.
RTP was the city of ideas par excellence, a wholly created place, a Field of Dreams for the tech economy—“If you build it, they will come.” For a family like the Mazhars, the Triangle opened pathways to American prosperity, whether that meant a daughter studying film and chemistry at Duke or a weary mother delivering doughnuts at 6:00 a.m. to chemists and secretaries at Glaxo. RTP meant job opportunities that kept many graduates of universities such as the University of North Carolina from departing for greener shores, heading off “brain drain” and becoming a brain magnet instead. It resulted in the creation of many other jobs serving and supporting the knowledge workers, their families, and their employers: doughnut men and bag boys; accountants and realtors; math teachers and custodial staff. Yet a nettlesome question still lingers. Can the city of the ideas also be a city of hope—or is it destined to be only the province of a privileged few, a new cognitive elite?