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As I walked around downtown Durham, North Carolina these past few days, I kept thinking about what it reminded me of. Ultimately, it occurred to me that the city, in many ways a mini-San Francisco of the South, was Vice President Kamala Harris’ best chance to win in the battleground state.
Outside of the City by the Bay, I’ve never been anywhere where Big Tech’s footprint and cultural attitudes are so evident, and Democrats have an 80% to 20% advantage here in recent elections. What happened next is just one of the signs.
Durham is a veritable millennial playground, with wealthy young tech professionals in childish clothes and sneakers milling between trendy-looking restaurants that are essentially upscale Applebee’s.
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I overheard two people chatting on my way to work this morning.
A sign in Old West Durham Town celebrates “Diversity * Harmony * Community”. (Matt Leach/Fox Digital)
“What are you doing this afternoon?” he asked. “I’m taking a gardening class,” she answered. “I signed up for a hike,” he retorted. I thought, are these people going to actual jobs or are they going to summer camp?
Later that evening, a tired but professional-looking South Asian man in his 30s came running up to the outdoor table where I was talking with a local news reporter. He placed a printed page in front of us and insisted, “Are you local? Do you know where these things are?”
I told him that I had just seen a red penguin statue across the street. “Thank you, thank you,” he stammered, running off into the darkness.
“That’s an adult on a treasure hunt,” I said to my companion, shaking my head.
The first time I went to the streets of Durham lined with shared scooters, I didn’t see any kids. The next day I saw exactly two and, frankly, they were oddly off-putting.
The whole place feels vaguely like a facade, the earth tones and glass of bland modern architecture swallowing up old stone art deco buildings, and this is a place where paying in cash is always something of an issue.
On a darker note, like San Francisco, Durham has some of the most aggressive homeless beggars I’ve ever seen in a small American city.
When they are not asking for money, you can see them sleeping on benches or in parks. Not overwhelming, but still not dangerous, but the seeds are there.
A statue of school founder James E. Shepard pictured in front of the campus of North Carolina Central University in Durham, North Carolina. (North Carolina Central University)
All of this is to say that in Durham I found what I thought were the archetypes of the typical Kamala Harris voter.
In this little bubble of privilege that reminds me of the village in the 1960s TV show “The Prisoner,” it looks like a nice place but somehow feels so fake that the Democratic Party’s vision of turning the entire country into San Francisco doesn’t work. It seems like it is.
Why doesn’t a 34-year-old who makes $50 in a cheap state and doesn’t support Harris and the Democrats support Harris and the Democratic Party, especially when companies like Google, which sign big salaries, censor “dangerous” conservative speech? Especially if it’s the same company you’re working with day in and day out?
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While Durham is a great success story by normal economic metrics, there are some problems with Big Tech’s version of urban development, which turns American cities into Silicon Valley campuses. For one thing, there isn’t much room left for locals to prosper.
No one here graduates from community college and takes a non-service job at Epic Games. As in San Francisco, the gulf between the haves and have-nots is clear and vast. But that seems fine to the complacent cogs in the machine that promotes Durham’s growth and Harris’s electability.
Here in Durham, your company will take care of you, just as Mamara Harris says they will if elected. It’s an eerie feeling where individualism only exists in the choice of high-end shoes or handbags. This city is all about the soul of artificial intelligence.
San Francisco and Durham are places where Harris and the Democratic Party thrive, where top-down social organizations of corporations and states plan for a comfortable life while honing their code and treating themselves to avocado toast. I’ll give it to you.
Why doesn’t a 34-year-old who makes $50 in a cheap state and doesn’t support Harris and the Democrats support Harris and the Democratic Party, especially when companies like Google, which sign big salaries, censor “dangerous” conservative speech? Especially if it’s the same company you’re working with day in and day out?
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But for many Democratic voters, particularly millennials, this isn’t such a bad deal. They think this is the future, a childless, arrested development of corporate hikes and treasure hunts and neglect of the homeless.
If enough candidates emerge for Harris in early November, it could be the future of big tech for all of us.
Click here to read more about David Marcus
