Sue Halpern

Population density has favored the building of Internet infrastructure in urban areas, but there has been little economic incentive to do so in many rural parts of the country. As a candidate, Joe Biden seemed to understand that appealing to rural voters was a political necessity.

McKee, an Appalachian town of about twelve hundred tucked into the Pigeon Roost Creek valley, is the seat of Jackson County, one of the poorest counties in the country. Subscribers to Peoples Rural Telephone Cooperative (PRTC), which covers all of Jackson County and the adjacent Owsley County, can get speeds of up to one gigabit per second, and the coöperative is planning to upgrade the system to ten gigabits. Keith Gabbard, the CEO of PRTC, had the audacious idea of wiring every home and business in Jackson and Owsley Counties with high-speed fibre-optic cable. For nearly fifteen million A

Republican and Democratic data firms are hard at work on the next generation of digital tools—driven by the idea that political campaigns can identify and influence voters by gathering as much data about them as possible. “To be a technology president used to be a very cool thing,” said Zac Moffatt, who ran Mitt Romney’s 2012 digital campaign. “And now it’s a very dangerous thing.” The manipulation of personal data to advance a political cause undermines a fundamental aspect of American democracy: the idea of a free and fair election.