Ro Khanna’s “Dignity in a Digital Age” Looks to Spread Tech Wealth Beyond the Valley

This is 10 Questions, in which we ask tech authors to pull back the covers on their recently released books. Interviews have been edited and condensed for clarity.

Ro Khanna is best known as a three-term congressman from Silicon Valley, a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, and a vocal critic of the Big Tech companies headquartered in his own backyard. But before all that, he was a first-generation immigrant kid from the economically diverse town of Holland, Penn., where he saw blue-collar families struggle with lost jobs and the crippling devaluation of their skills. Stuck at home during the pandemic, Khanna began to think about those families, and about other people he’d met in rural America, who he believes are waiting for tech companies to distribute opportunity more evenly across the country. Here, he talks about the resulting book, “Dignity in a Digital Age: Making Tech Work for All of Us,” which offers political remedies and philosophical responses to the changing nature of work.