Kaback: ‘Burgh should embrace new tech initiative

When I was in the first grade, my school caught on to this brand-new thing called the computer…. When I was in the first grade, my school caught on to this brand-new thing called the computer. The faculty gathered the whole class, and the parents ooh-ed and aah-ed at the big box Macintosh with the multicolored apple. For an entire year, I rode the Oregon Trail all day, every day like it was my job. If one of my wagon companions died of dysentery, well, life was rough on the road out West. The school convinced me that I’d be the next Bill Gates if I could just make it to the Pacific.

In an unfortunate reality check, I realized that playing rudimentary video games was not the first step on the yellow brick road leading to Larry Page’s garage. While the dot-com bubble was forming and bursting, technology in America was growing like Don King’s afro. The problem? It wasn’t happening anywhere near Pittsburgh. As of 2008, the three top technology job centers were New York, Washington, D.C., and Silicon Valley, with over 800,000 of America’s jobs in the technical fields, according to MarketWatch.

Look, I’m all about Pittsburgh. If you’re into rusting bridges and minor league baseball teams, you probably love Pittsburgh too.

However, every country has something that it sticks to. China has tiny gymnasts. Germany has inciting world wars. Kenya has marathons. America has innovation, and today that means technology.

But someone forgot to tell Pittsburgh that it doesn’t belong in the tech club. It turns out that our city is full of things other than Andrew Carnegie and infamous quarterbacks.

Now, we certainly aren’t the first people to try and take over something we probably shouldn’t — I’m looking at you Dick Cheney. I know that when manufacturing left Detroit, all that was left were unemployment unions and the Lions, but it’s not like this ex-mill town has resigned itself to remembering the “good old days.” Michigan’s governor, Jennifer Granholm, has instated a new initiative known as “Cool Cities” as a way to keep college graduates in the state and end the brain drain. Honestly, I was just happy to hear that Michigan’s top public officials do something other than just bash gay college students.

In a similar thread, Pittsburgh has been thinking bigger, and the city that once popularized the steel mill is now ensuring that its former self hits the history books quicker than Vanilla Ice. A few years ago, the politicians started to take aim at our reputation across this country. While Eliot Spitzer was busy becoming Client Number 9 and George Bush was distracted by whatever shiny thing caught his attention, our representatives were making a change for the better. Across the cities of Pittsburgh, Youngstown and Cleveland, local leaders started to come together to respond to the economic realities of the former Rust Belt. Other cities have tried revitalization, but at the end of the day this region is trying something new. This isn’t Los Angeles and the film industry or Chicago and smuggling liquor. What we are doing will be an example for all the old Rust Belt towns. I know that asking Pittsburgh to let go of its manufacturing roots is like asking Mel Gibson to be rational, but the steel mills are gone, and the time of The Tech Belt is upon us.

The Tech Belt Initiative was started to push this region further into the post-dirty manufacturing age. While it’s no secret that the region stretching from Pittsburgh to Cleveland was devastated when blue-collar mills became as outdated as MySpace, the reaction to the economic shift that might have started off slow is picking up steam. In fact, just before the G-20 Summit, Obama said that we had transformed ourselves and The Economist noticed the same thing and wrote, “It is also a centre for innovation in robotics, electronics and nanotechnology.”

By partnering and working toward the improvement of the entire area, the Tech Belt has been able to secure a real foothold in the area.

Just take a look at the army of committed organizations that have banded together to aid the Tech Belt. Between the Allegheny Conference on Community Development, the Ben Franklin Technology Partners, Carnegie Mellon, our own University of Pittsburgh, Innovation Works, Pittsburgh Life Sciences Greenhouse and countless other groups that are opening vast resources (i.e., thousands of jobs and millions of dollars), we’ve built an economic alliance that would make Sauron wet his pants. And all of this goes without mentioning the partners in Youngstown and Cleveland that are fattening this region up to take on technology.

Politicians in the region like Jason Altmire and Tim Ryan have dedicated themselves to raising funding and awareness for the burgeoning technical market growing in the ex-Rust Belt. There has already been over $600 million raised, and a brand new Innovation Center in Ohio is set to open next year, according to the Tribune Chronicle.

I don’t mean to say that I’m not proud of our past, but the Tech Belt Initiative is exactly what we need to get back into the game. I have never believed in this area so much. We can still lead the nation in manufacturing — just building new gadgets and more efficient machines instead of billowing smokestacks. Although I might joke that Carnegie Mellon is a school for robots (which it is), maybe that’s not such a bad thing — ­­­unless you’re in a social setting, but CMU kids don’t do that anyway. I understand that trying to take the blue-collar mill worker out of Pittsburgh is like trying to take the witch out of Christine O’Donnell, but we are on the verge of a true economic breakthrough in this region.

Transforming an entire economy is never easy, but our politicians and local leaders are sending us on the path to exponential technological growth.

It’s time for each of us to do our part. Support the Tech Belt Initiative. Write your congressmen, check out the website, become a fan of it on Facebook. It’s time to make the entire country realize we’re going to once again be the backbone of this nation’s economy. We need to fight now so that we can lead the way in robotics, engineering and advanced manufacturing. It’s time for us to recognize that we are not only rich in natural resources such as coal and natural gas, but also in the greatest natural resource of all: our people. In Pittsburgh we like to say that on ice or grass, we’ll kick your ass. Well, we’re going to do it in the lab, too.