Beginning in the 1950s, a group of academics, businesspeople, and
politicians set out on an ambitious project to remake North Carolina's
low-wage economy. They pitched the universities of Raleigh, Durham, and
Chapel Hill as the kernel of a tech hub, Research Triangle Park, which
would lure a new class of highly educated workers. In the process, they
created a blueprint for what would become known as the knowledge
economy: a future built on intellectual labor and the production of
intellectual property.
In Brain Magnet, Alex Sayf Cummings reveals the significance of
Research Triangle Park to the emergence of the high-tech economy in a
postindustrial United States. She analyzes the use of ideas of culture
and creativity to fuel economic development, how workers experienced
life in the Triangle, and the role of the federal government in bringing
the modern technology industry into being. As Raleigh, Durham, and
Chapel Hill were transformed by high-tech development, the old South
gave way to a distinctly new one, which welded the intellectual power of
universities to a vision of the suburban good life. Cummings pinpoints
how the story of the Research Triangle sheds new light on the origins of
today's urban landscape, in which innovation, as exemplified by the tech
industry, is lauded as the engine of economic growth against a backdrop
of gentrification and inequality. Placing the knowledge economy in a
broader cultural and intellectual context, Brain Magnet offers vital
insight into how tech-driven development occurs and the people and
places left in its wake.
