“Go to Another State”: Rust Belts, Microchip Futures, and Innovation's Others in Upstate New York

Innovation is regularly depicted as the answer to regional socioeconomic decline and deindustrialization. Yet, the results of regional innovation strategies are frequently underwhelming and contested, leading citizens to question the promises of innovation and policymakers to doubt constituents’ willingness to embrace change. This paper investigates how innovation-centered revitalization policies land in “Rust Belt” regions—the supposed lost hinterlands of innovation—in uneven, fragmented, and occasionally crude ways. We analyze Upstate New York as a site where the US CHIPS and Science Act (CHIPS Act) was envisioned to counter chronic decline and irrelevance with investments in innovation and high-tech jobs. Drawing on scholarship on regional innovation cultures and postindustrial futures, we show how the CHIPS Act—couched in a desideratum of innovation—casts a penumbra of “others” in the form of undesirable regions, histories, and ways of life that clash with locally grounded understandings of resilience, worth, and hope. Postindustrial communities associate the CHIPS Act with previously broken policy promises of revival, and resist having their social value tethered to innovation productivity. We argue innovation policies for Rust Belt regions should invoke elements of regional worth and identity beyond jobs and competitiveness, and be legible as social and economic policy.