“Atlanta isn’t just a research site — it’s a critical node in the historical and technological networks that have shaped, and continue to shape, America’s legacy of racialized labor,” writes Labor Future Researcher Anuli Akanegbu.

There’s a widespread saying in the South: “When you die, whether you go to heaven or hell, you have to change planes in Atlanta.” The expression refers to the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, a major connecting hub that has consistently been ranked the busiest airport in the world. As a sociotechnical researcher based in the Atlanta metropolitan area, I know that Atlanta is a hub city in more ways than one. For me, Atlanta isn’t just a research site — it’s a critical node in the historical and technological networks that have shaped, and continue to shape, America’s legacy of racialized labor. 

Atlanta has always had to sell itself. Landlocked, hilly, and built upon thick red clay rather than fertile ground, its geography offers none of the natural advantages that typically give rise to major cities. Atlanta emerged because it learned to market its people. From the start, the city’s boosters pitched Atlanta to northern industrialists not on its land, but on its labor: an increasingly diverse workforce willing and able to build something new in the South. The early promise that the city could be made and remade through labor still underpins its identity today. Atlanta is a city that thrives on reinvention. A self-styled “Black Mecca” and a cradle of the civil rights movement, the city is now a rising tech and logistics hub in the global economy. Atlanta markets itself as a model of racial progress and economic opportunity, but it remains shaped by deep inequalities. This tension is what makes the city so compelling as a site of sociotechnical inquiry.  David Sjoquist’s notion of the “Atlanta paradox” — a place lauded for racial progress yet marked by stark segregation and inner-city poverty — echoes through decades of policy decisions. These contradictions are not just social but spatial and technological, as seen in the city’s transformation from being the first US city to build public housing, in 1936, to being the first to eliminate all of it by 2011, replacing it with mixed-income developments that often marginalize low-income residents. Atlanta’s role in swinging Georgia blue in 2020 also makes it a political and technological powerhouse in voter mobilization, data-driven campaigning, and grassroots labor organizing. More than a regional hub city, it is a microcosm of national struggles and aspirations.

Atlanta operates under a governing logic rooted in what former mayor Andrew Young once called “public-purpose capitalism.” In this model, the public defines a goal — whether it’s building an airport, a sewer system, or a global tech hub — and then recruits private capital to make it happen. “We let them not only fund it,” Young said in a 2012 speech to the National Conference of Black Mayors, “we let private contractors build it and manage it — but we set it up.” This ethos has evolved into a marriage of techno-optimism and public-private partnerships (P3s) that blurs the lines between governance and enterprise. While P3s are now a centerpiece of national infrastructure policy under the second Trump administration (such as Stargate, the $500 billion AI development corridor in Texas) they’ve been Georgia’s default mode of governance for decades. Governor Brian Kemp has made P3s and tech-centric economic development central to his administration’s priorities, second only to promoting small business. The Atlanta suburb of Peachtree Corners, for example, serves as a living laboratory where private companies test technologies like autonomous vehicles and smart grid infrastructure on publicly funded roads. This is not Silicon Valley’s world of VC-backed disruption; this is public infrastructure as a sandbox designed to accommodate and accelerate private innovation. Similarly, the embrace of a hybrid governance model in the suburb of Sandy Spring, where nearly all non-public safety services are contracted out, demonstrates a belief that the business of governance is best done as a business. 

Governor Kemp’s techno-optimism doubles down on this logic. In speech after speech, he links economic resilience with private-sector innovation, touting Georgia’s status as the #1 state for business, and its booming fintech sector, which processes 70 percent of all US transactions. The state’s investments in data centers, cybersecurity (via the Georgia Cyber Center), and “innovation culture” have helped Atlanta become one of the fastest-growing tech markets in the country — soon to rival Northern Virginia in data center capacity. Governor Kemp carries forward an ideological legacy of techno-optimism that Atlanta has arguably upheld since the postbellum period, when newspaper editor Henry W. Grady, one of the founding fathers of Atlanta boosterism, championed his visions of the “Atlanta spirit” and the “New South.” His place-marketing campaigns situated Atlanta at the center of an industrialized South that embraced the adoption of emerging technologies, such as mechanized agriculture, as necessary for growth. Grady’s techno-optimism stood in stark contrast to the more techno-skeptical stance of W.E.B. DuBois, who in The Souls of Black Folk (1903) cautioned Atlanta against leading the South to dream of material prosperity as the touchstone of all success, likening the city to the fabled Atalanta of Greek mythology. While DuBois recognized the role that technology and industry could play in the progress of African-Americans through education and workforce development, he was largely critical of how industrial advancements within the capitalist framework reinforced racial divides and social stratification. Although racial progressivism was tied to the economic growth of the region, Grady’s New South emphasized cooperation, but not necessarily equality, between races.

Georgia actively promotes its “skilled, diverse, and inclusive workforce” as a reason why companies should relocate to the state. Among its regional bragging rights: Atlanta has the second-largest labor force in the Southeast and one of the highest concentrations of Black tech workers in the country. One in four tech workers in the Atlanta metro area are Black, an anomaly when compared to places like San Jose or San Francisco, where Black tech employment hovers below seven percent. Atlanta is also one of the fastest-growing technology hubs in the country. Between 2014 and 2022, the city’s high-tech workforce grew by nearly 53 percent, outpaced only by Seattle and Dallas. By 2022, Atlanta had surpassed Boston, San Jose, and Houston to become the eighth-largest tech workforce in the United States. 

But this isn’t the full story.

Atlanta is frequently hailed as a “Black Mecca” for its legacy of Black political leadership, its civil rights history, its cultural capital, and its concentration of historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs). At the same time, it has had the highest levels of income inequality in the country for most of the past decade. White households in Atlanta hold 46 times more wealth than Black households, according to a report from Kindred Futures (formerly known as the Atlanta Wealth Building Initiative). The gap continues to widen, accelerated by some of the fastest rates of gentrification in the nation and status as a right-to-work state, where workers have no comprehensive collective bargaining rights. Last spring, Georgia lawmakers voted and passed Senate Bill 362, barring companies that accept state incentives from recognizing unions.

Atlanta doesn’t fit the usual narrative of the tech economy. The “Silicon Peach” is not Silicon Valley, with its mythology of garage startups and venture capitalists. Here, technology is folded into a much older southern economic model that dates back to the plantation system of the “old South,” which relied on abundant, cheap, and racialized labor. This model fueled the industrialization of the “new South,” and it is deeply embedded in today’s “innovation economy.” Chandra Childers of the Economic Policy Institute explains that the region’s general opposition to unions ensures that employers retain access to large numbers of Black and brown workers at poverty-level wages while generating the illusion of widespread prosperity. Black Atlantans, in particular, have always been considered an essential part of the city’s economic growth — but as laborers, not as beneficiaries. 

How do we reconcile a city marketed as both a tech powerhouse and a “Black Mecca” with its staggering economic disparities? What kinds of futures are being imagined — and for whom — when a city is both a laboratory for innovation and a site of deep social stratification? In Atlanta, the contradictions of our techno-futures are not hypothetical; they’re lived. The city’s success raises urgent questions about what we mean by progress, who gets included in visions of innovation, and how labor — especially Black labor — is structured, valued, and made invisible. Atlanta isn’t supposed to work. And yet it does, because of the people who make it work. Labor is the foundation of Atlanta’s story. That’s why I study labor here. 

July 13 at 3 p.m. in Atlanta: We’re collaborating with the High Museum of Art and the Atlanta Interdisciplinary AI Network to present a live conversation about the evolving relationship between data, design, and human perception — and what happens when technology becomes a medium for unmediated creative expression. D&S researcher Anuli Akanegbu will be in conversation with Lauren Klein, director of Emory University’s Digital Humanities Lab and the Atlanta Interdisciplinary AI Network; STLNDRMS (Chris Wilkes), an Atlanta-based producer, DJ, and cultural curator; and Kristan Woolford, a digital artist, multidimensional arts educator, and chief professorial officer at eurketSTEAMlabs. Their discussion will be moderated by Andrew Westover, the Eleanor McDonald Storza Deputy Director for Learning and Civic Engagement at the High Museum. Register for free Second Sunday museum access to join this on-site Atlanta event.