April 3, 2024 • 26 mins
How has the Silicon Valley form of technocapitalism shaped geographies around the world?
In episode 159 of Imagine Otherwise, host Cathy Hannabach interviews Ideas on Fire author, University of Washington geography professor, and housing justice activist Erin McElroy about the global reach of technocapitalism.
Erin is the author of the new Duke University Press book Silicon Valley Imperialism: Techno Fantasies and Frictions in Postsocialist Times, which is a fascinating multi-sited ethnography of the dispossessions wrought by Silicon Valley on both sides of the Iron Curtain.
In their conversation, Erin shares the complex process of studying technocapitalism across borders, specifically how the research trajectories of doing a multi-sited ethnography intersect with local activist and scholarly commitments on the ground.
They also discuss the media figure of the Romanian hacker and how romanticization of the digital nomad lifestyle intensified gentrification and displacement in both the San Francisco Bay Area and cities across Romania and Eastern Europe.
They close out the episode with Erin’s vision for a future of technological and housing justice, where the imperialism of Silicon Valley is replaced by translocal and international solidarities.
Transcript and show notes: https://ideasonfire.net/159-erin-mcelroy
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Episode Transcript
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(00:05):
Welcome to Imagine Otherwise, thepodcast about bridging art, activism,
and academia to build more just futures.
I'm your host, Cathy Hannabach, andtoday I'm talking with University of
Washington geography professor andhousing justice activist Erin McElroy.
I met Erin when the Ideas on Fire teamworked with them on their book, Silicon
(00:27):
Valley Imperialism, Techno Fantasies andFrictions in Postsocialist Times, which
is a fascinating multi-sited ethnographyof the dispossessions wrought by Silicon
Valley on both sides of the Iron Curtain.
In our conversation, Erin sharesthe complex process of studying
technocapitalism across borders,specifically how the research
(00:48):
trajectories of doing a multi-sitedethnography intersect in complex
ways with local activist andscholarly commitments on the ground.
We also discuss the media figureof the Romanian hacker and how
romanticization of the digital nomadlifestyle intensified gentrification and
displacement in both the San FranciscoBay Area in California as well as cities
(01:11):
across Romania and Eastern Europe.
We close out the episode with Erin'svision for a future of technological and
housing justice, where the imperialismof Silicon Valley is replaced by
translocal and international solidarities.
Thanks so much for beingwith us today, Erin.
Yeah, thanks so much for having me.
I'm really excited to be ableto talk more about my book.
(01:35):
So speaking of this book, youintroduce what you call Silicon Valley
imperialism and trace how it emergedin the postsocialist moment not just
in California but also in Romaniaand several other locations as well.
What exactly is Silicon Valley imperialismand how has it shaped the various
(01:55):
geographies that you examine in the book?
Yeah, that's the perfectkind first to start with.
So by Silicon Valley imperialism, I'mmostly looking at a global condition in
which Silicon Valley, which, of course,we often think of as rooted in California,
but I'm looking at how its existenceis necessitated by unending growth both
(02:19):
locally in California but also beyond.
And I look at how it penetrates anddevours people's intimate lives, local
ways of knowing, and even people'spersonal data while also consuming
and informing global and even outerspace imaginaries in novel ways.
So of course there's a lot tothink about in terms of everything
(02:41):
happening with people like ElonMusk and Jeff Bezos in terms of
ultimate Silicon Valley expansion.
But I'm looking at its formation duringthe Cold War and what took place
both in California but, in this case,also in Romania during the Cold War and
post–Cold War, postsocialist aftermaths.
(03:04):
I'm looking at how Silicon Valley isemboldened by and even co-constitutive
of US empire in a lot of cases.
I'm not saying that it's synonymouswith it, and I'm not saying that it's
replaced it, but rather the two informeach other, particularly during the
Cold War and post–Cold War moment.
(03:26):
So my book takes place mostlyin Romania, but a little bit in
Moldova and one of my chapters isentirely based on the Bay Area.
So there's a lot going on, lotsof different locations to look at:
Cluj-Napoca, Romania, has been brandedas the Silicon Valley of Eastern Europe.
(03:48):
And then, of course, so much ofthe Bay Area is often thought about
synonymous with Silicon Valley.
Part of my project is tolook at the material but also
imaginative implications of that.
Part of my argument is thatSilicon Valley is a fiction.
A lot of people living in places thatmight be considered little Silicon
(04:09):
Valleys or even the big Silicon Valleydon't necessarily consider themselves
from Silicon Valley or don't use SiliconValley to describe their daily lives.
So I'm looking at how it functions as asort of fiction, but then how also the
imposition of that fiction does manifestracial dispossession and exploitation
(04:30):
in very different and uneven ways,depending on where we're talking about.
And of course, there are many ofthese so-called little Silicon Valleys
that have popped up around the globe.
I could recite them all,but it's a very long list.
And so I'm really just looking at ifyou want to think about big Silicon
Valley in California and then what'sbeen called the Silicon Valley of
(04:52):
Eastern Europe, in Cluj, Romania.
Part of my book also takes placein Bucharest and Râmnicu Vâlcea and
some other cities in Romania as well.
I suppose what I could say is that thepart that takes place in California,
is historical but also contemporary.
(05:15):
I look at the evolution of US empirein California and the Bay Area and
the different technologies thatmade that possible and how much they
also then informed what we thinkof as the birth of Silicon Valley
during the Cold War in Palo Alto.
People like Malcolm Harris and othershave done even more work around
(05:38):
this, but I'm looking at how itamassed a ton of government funding
that made the Cold War possible.
Then with the dot-com boom, well, theend of the Cold War, with the dot-com
boom, and then this moment now thatwe consider the tech boom 2.0, how
public spaces and public imaginarieshave been privatized in new ways.
(06:01):
I look at how, despite that, Indigenousland rematriation projects, for instance,
work by groups like the Sogorea Te' LandTrust are actively trying to undo not just
the dominance of Silicon Valley but thedifferent dispossession that US empire
and now Silicon Valley imperialism havebrought over time and into the present.
(06:25):
And in Romania it's aninteresting history.
During state socialism, Romania actuallyexcelled in technological development,
particularly hardware development.
And socialism was also a timein which about 30 percent of
property became nationalized.
So there was this big moveto produce social housing.
(06:47):
And despite some of the horrorsthat we often think of associated
with Ceaușescu and the authoritarianregime during socialism, it
was also a really emancipatorytime when it comes to housing.
So with the end of the Cold Warand reprivatization, one one
hand, housing became reprivatized.
(07:08):
A lot of people in Cold War aftermathshave lost their homes, but also Western
tech has rushed in and really absorbed alot of socialist-era infrastructure and
computing infrastructure in particular.
This shifted the landscape dramatically,and so my book really looks at that
moment in which dispossession isoften very racialized in Romania.
(07:33):
Because of long histories of racism andanti-Roma racism in particular, many
Roma residents didn't have housing,stable housing, before socialism and
then many people were able to gainstable housing during socialism.
So in this moment of reprivatization,very much driven by these Western techno
(07:54):
fantasies, it's disproportionatelyRoma residents losing their housing
and being pushed to urban outskirts.
I look at that and I also look atthe organizing work, housing justice
organizing work, that's taking placeon the ground and even racial and
(08:15):
technological justice organizingwork that's taking place to refute
the imposition of Silicon Valleyimperialism and privatization.
Those are the big trends, I suppose,of the book and how I'm thinking
about Silicon Valley both as somethingvery material and as something
(08:38):
that drives a sort of aspirationalpolitic to become a Western, which
is a longstanding post-Enlightenmentfantasy amongst the middle class in
Romania and has been for a long time
One of the things that I found reallyfascinating about this book, and you
talk about it early on, in earlierchapters, is this relationship, as
(09:03):
you were saying, between racializeddisplacement and gentrification
and digital nomads, which is botha discourse and an actual practice,
in some kind of complicated ways.
How exactly does that relationship workbetween digital nomads and racialized
displacement in these contexts?
And what got you interestedin studying that nexus?
(09:26):
I think the interest in digital nomadshas really picked up during the pandemic
with the turn to remote work, particularlyfor white collar tech workers.
A lot of these tech companies celebratedthe possibility that their workers could
(09:47):
travel the world and work remotely anddidn't need to be living and working
in tech epicenters like the Bay Area.
That's had all sorts ofimplications on the Bay Area.
But before the COVID-19 moment, I gotreally interested in the concept of
digital nomadism for a couple of reasons.
(10:09):
For one, I've been a housing organizerin the Bay Area off and on for years.
I was, in 2013, 2014, doing alot of direct action organizing
against tech gentrification.
In San Francisco, I was part of a groupcalled Eviction Free San Francisco.
(10:31):
That was also when I co-founded acollective called the Anti-Eviction
Mapping Project, which I stillam actively a part of today.
We produce a lot of data and maps andstories and visualizations about racial
dispossession and gentrification,often looking at correlations between
(10:53):
technocapitalism and real estatecapitalism and racial capitalism.
At that moment in 2013 and 2014,there was a huge eviction crisis.
I mean, there still is in SanFrancisco and throughout the Bay Area.
A lot of people were moving to theBay to work in some of the big tech
(11:15):
companies but also an array of startups.
Airbnb and Uber, Lyft, all thesestartup economies or startup companies
had formed a couple of years ago.
Earlier, Twitter moved to SanFrancisco around 2012, and this Twitter
tax break zone was established tobasically allow tech to move into
(11:37):
the city and not pay local taxes.
And so all sorts of organizingand many dispossessions were
taking place left and right.
That was a very much, that was abig part of my world and impacted
my friends and community andneighbors in all sorts of ways.
So I had been quite criticalof the dispossessions induced
(12:02):
by investment in tech.
At the same time, I was going back andforth between the Bay and Romania, where
I also had friends and community members.
I had gotten involved in somehousing organizing there.
There's a group Căși sociale acum!, SocialHousing NOW!, that's been fighting against
(12:27):
evictions that are disproportionatelyimpacting Roma communities in Cluj's
city center in this postsocialistmoment of housing reprivatization.
This was also the moment thatCluj was branded as the Silicon
Valley of Eastern Europe.
What I started to notice was that someof the same, not the same people but
(12:47):
the same kind of imaginaries that I sawtaking place amongst tech workers in the
Bay Area I saw amongst tech workers fromWestern countries who were spending time
in Romania, in part because you can findall these digital nomad blogs and websites
(13:07):
where they're always ranking what are thebest cities or towns for digital nomads.
Digital nomads are basically techworkers who can enjoy the freedom
of travel and don't need to befixed in one particular place.
Many of them work for smaller startups,sometimes maybe just for six months, and
then they go back to their home country.
(13:27):
They're able to maintain these SiliconValley salaries while living in countries
that are often less expensive to live in.
And you'll see people say that Romaniais a great place to be because it has
extremely fast internet, in part due todifferent tech infrastructural legacies.
(13:49):
It also has a cheap cost of living,high English language proficiency, which
has its own really interesting history.
It has like a high safety index, allsorts of things that tech workers
claim to find attractive, I mean,as do a number of cities, it's not
like Romania has the top, top city.
(14:10):
You can see there are a handful ofcities that are always vying to be the
top city for digital nomads includingCluj, but also Bucharest, Timișoara,
and different cities in Romania popup on the list quite frequently.
So there was this moment in whichI was very painfully aware of
different dispossessions takingplace both in Romania and in the
(14:34):
Bay Area as tech workers weremoving to both areas sometimes
permanently, sometimes temporarily.
What I noticed was this identity ofa digital nomad that a lot of tech
workers espoused, even in the Bay Area.
Many tech workers working in MountainView or Palo Alto might live in San
(14:59):
Francisco and were able to reverse commutethrough different infrastructure that
Google and Facebook and Apple provided.
So there was this kind of transienceand this idea that I trace back
to the nineteenth-century romanticOrientalist notion of a sort of free
and wandering lifestyle, very much inthe nineteenth century synonymous with
(15:21):
empire and the transits of empire.
At that time, a lot of gypsynovellas were written, like Carmen
or Pushkin's Gypsies in Russia,John Clare's poems in England.
And they often were written by whitemen writing from the heart of various
empires, kind of fantasizing this freedomof the free and wandering gypsy trope.
(15:47):
Interestingly, at the time, a lot ofRoma people who these authors were
encountering had actually left EasternEurope after slavery was abolished
in the mid-nineteenth century andwere seeking better conditions.
And so a lot of these writers writingin the heart of empires that were
trying to expand encountered Romapeople who were not necessarily living
(16:08):
this fanciful free life but werejust seeking better living conditions.
And there was this very Orientalist,often sexualized way that
they would be written about.
Lots of people have studied this interms of the literary tropes that
were employed then, but I found thosetropes to be very much alive and the
onto-epistemologies of digital nomads.
(16:31):
I mean, some people even callthemselves digital gypsies.
The infuriating part was not only didpeople deracinate an understanding of
Roma identity by claiming to be a digitalgypsy, but also in the case of Romania,
it was primarily Roma people being pushedout of their homes to make way for the
higher rents and new infrastructurethat was being created to support
(16:55):
Westerners, tourists, digital nomads, etc.
moving to and visiting the city.
I found digital nomadism an interestingobject to study to understand the
updating of particular and historicracial fantasies from the nineteenth
century into the postsocialist,post–Cold War present, and this
(17:20):
entanglement between, Silicon Valley andpostsocialist contexts of reprivatization.
One of the other racialized tropes thatyou talk about quite a lot in the book
comes up in one of my favorite chapters,which has the rather tantalizing title
of "The Most Dangerous Town on theInternet," which I think is just a
great title for a chapter because itdefinitely hooks people and draws them in.
(17:43):
You talk about the figure of theRomanian hacker in that chapter.
And this is certainly a trope thatwe see across all kinds of US popular
culture. What did you actuallydiscover about hacking cultures in that
particular context beyond the trope?
I got that title from a very short,bizarre film that the Silicon Valley
tech firm Norton made called The MostDangerous Town on the Internet profiling
(18:07):
Râmnicu Vâlcea, which was also profiledin a magazine piece by Wired magazine
about, I think, 15 years ago now.
They, employ these stereotypes, theones that you mentioned, to suggest
that it's these dangerous Romaniansthat are going to take down democracy
in the free world as we know it in theirlittle hacking enclaves or something.
(18:28):
But I mean, I know hackers in Romania.
Some of them have been friends of mine.
I also have been privy to learna lot through other people who
study hacking culture in Romania,including Andrada Fiscutean and
David Schwartz, who's a playwright.
He made this wonderful playabout hackers in Râmnicu Vâlcea.
From my own experience doing ethnographicresearch and from those of my peers, most
(18:51):
hackers in Romania have just been youthnot just having fun but also finding
ways to survive in austerity contexts.
Again, there was so muchhardware and technological
development during socialism.
There's this Romanian word șmecherie,which kind of means like a street-smart
savviness, that I use to talkabout ways that people were able to do
(19:15):
things like clone computers to bypasshaving to pay for really expensive and
unaffordable computers, which was a commonpractice throughout the Eastern Bloc.
Once the internet came around, you'llsee like lots of youth pirating
software and audio files and books.
Romania had a really, still does have, areally high rate of piracy, but that's in
(19:38):
part because if you're living in a countrywhere the average salary is way lower than
the salary of somebody in the US, and youwant to be able to use the same software,
you're going to have to pay way more ofyour monthly income for the same piece
of software that somebody might not haveto think about even in buying in the US.
(19:58):
There was also this practice ofcreating independent internet networks
where people would just wire differentapartment buildings together to bypass
having to pay for expensive internet.
There are all sorts of, I think,really fun and emancipatory
things that people did.
And of course, there were some kindof things that maybe are less exciting
(20:18):
that have been done in terms of hacking,but for the most part, the experiences
of the people I've talked to are mostlyjust experiences of people trying to
get by and also create social networksand different forms of solidarity.
I also look at the role ofIBM historically in Romania.
Thomas Watson, the founder, CEO ofIBM came into Romania during the
(20:41):
1930s and 1940s and was instrumentalin importing IBM's counting machines,
which were used to help orchestratea census, which was used to help make
the Holocaust in Romania possible.
So I look at some of that historyand then how big Western tech came
rushing back in after socialism toco-opt socialist-era infrastructure.
(21:03):
If we're really looking for maliciouscharacters on the internet, it's
more apropos to turn to big tech and,and companies like IBM than youth
just trying to survive in contextof Silicon Valley imperialism.
I would love to turn to methodologybecause this is one of the key things
that the Ideas on Fire team focusedon with you quite a bit in our
(21:24):
editorial work with you on this book.
This is obviously a really ambitiousmulti-sited ethnographic project
stretching across national boundaries,obviously, but even continents.
We're certainly seeing more multi-sitedethnographies these days from our
authors that get at some reallyfascinating questions like yours does.
But they do presentsome unique challenges.
(21:45):
What made you decide to doa multi-sited ethnography?
And what were some of thesurprising things that you
learned about in the process?
Yeah, absolutely.
I'm so grateful to Ideas on Fire for allthe support because I think in being quite
an ambitious project, it was very hardto keep track of, especially as I was
conceptualizing it in its early iteration.
(22:06):
I'm excited that more people aredoing multi-sited ethnographies,
too, because I mean for me, what I'moften trying to track in the book are
connections, the transits of SiliconValley, both in terms of fantasies and
desires but also in terms of materialimpacts and also forms of resistance.
Sometimes resistance, too,is international and requires
(22:28):
alliances across different spaces.
The book really also organically emergedout of commitments that I already
had in the Bay Area to the housingorganizing I'd been doing there and in
Romania where I had already also beenliving off and on and have community.
And I think if I weren't so upset aboutthe ravages of Silicon Valley in the
(22:50):
Bay, maybe I wouldn't have noticedwhat I started to notice in Romania.
For me, there was always asort of dialogue going on.
And it was also always reallyimportant for me that I wasn't
doing a comparative project.
So I wasn't trying to do like this 50/50sort of thing, but more tell a story
that really got at what Silicon Valleyimperialism was doing on different
(23:13):
registers across different borders, butin a way that was nevertheless grounded
in particular communities and commitments.
So in the spirit of imagining otherwise,I'm going to ask you the question that
I love to close out every episode with,which really gets at the heart of why
you do the kind of work that you do.
So what is the world thatyou're working toward?
(23:33):
What kind of world do you want?
I would love to be in a worldwhere Silicon Valley imperialism
is a concept of the past.
I do a lot of housing organizingwork and I'm very critical of private
property both when it comes to the worldof technology but also the world of
housing, spatial, and racial justice.
(23:54):
And so I'm interested in how housingorganizers and people working on
issues of technological justice canform better and stronger alliances
and that work's already being done.
I'm inspired by so much work that'salready being done in that domain,
but there's so much more to be done.
I think it really does requireinternational solidarities and
(24:17):
connections because of thescope and scale of empire.
Some of the anti- and alter-globalizationwork of over 20 years ago now was
trying to do this in a particular way.
And I think there's a turn, again,toward translocal organizing,
toward organizing that's very muchgrounded in particular spaces but
also invested in these connections.
(24:38):
That's sort of where I try toleave off in the book as well.
Well, thank you so much for beingwith us and sharing all of these
ways that you imagine otherwise.
Yeah, thank you so much for havingme and for all of the support
in making this book a reality.
Thanks for joining me for thisepisode of Imagine Otherwise.
(24:59):
A big thanks to Erin aswell for sharing their work.
Our team really loved editing theirbook, Silicon Valley Imperialism:
Techno Fantasies and Frictions inPostsocialist Times, which is out
now from Duke University Press.
You can learn more about SiliconValley Imperialism and Erin's other
projects in the episode show noteson our website at ideasonfire.net.
(25:21):
The show notes include a transcript andteaching guide for this episode with
related books by Ideas on Fire authors,podcast interviews, and resources.
Imagine Otherwise episodes make for greatsyllabus additions, and our teaching
guides are designed to help students andresearchers explore the vibrant worlds of
progressive interdisciplinary scholarship.
(25:42):
This episode of ImagineOtherwise was produced and
edited by me, Cathy Hannabach.
You can find Ideas on Fire andImagine Otherwise on Instagram at
@ideasonfirephd, as well as on Mastodon,Bluesky, Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok.
You can also subscribe to the show onour website at ideasonfire.net as well
(26:03):
as on all of your favorite podcast apps.
Welcome to Imagine Otherwise, thepodcast about bridging art, activism,
and academia to build more just futures.
I'm your host, Cathy Hannabach, andtoday I'm talking with University of
Washington geography professor andhousing justice activist Erin McElroy.
I met Erin when the Ideas on Fire teamworked with them on their book, Silicon
(00:27):
Valley Imperialism, Techno Fantasies andFrictions in Postsocialist Times, which
is a fascinating multi-sited ethnographyof the dispossessions wrought by Silicon
Valley on both sides of the Iron Curtain.
In our conversation, Erin sharesthe complex process of studying
technocapitalism across borders,specifically how the research
(00:48):
trajectories of doing a multi-sitedethnography intersect in complex
ways with local activist andscholarly commitments on the ground.
We also discuss the media figureof the Romanian hacker and how
romanticization of the digital nomadlifestyle intensified gentrification and
displacement in both the San FranciscoBay Area in California as well as cities
(01:11):
across Romania and Eastern Europe.
We close out the episode with Erin'svision for a future of technological and
housing justice, where the imperialismof Silicon Valley is replaced by
translocal and international solidarities.
Thanks so much for beingwith us today, Erin.
Yeah, thanks so much for having me.
I'm really excited to be ableto talk more about my book.
(01:35):
So speaking of this book, youintroduce what you call Silicon Valley
imperialism and trace how it emergedin the postsocialist moment not just
in California but also in Romaniaand several other locations as well.
What exactly is Silicon Valley imperialismand how has it shaped the various
(01:55):
geographies that you examine in the book?
Yeah, that's the perfectkind first to start with.
So by Silicon Valley imperialism, I'mmostly looking at a global condition in
which Silicon Valley, which, of course,we often think of as rooted in California,
but I'm looking at how its existenceis necessitated by unending growth both
(02:19):
locally in California but also beyond.
And I look at how it penetrates anddevours people's intimate lives, local
ways of knowing, and even people'spersonal data while also consuming
and informing global and even outerspace imaginaries in novel ways.
So of course there's a lot tothink about in terms of everything
(02:41):
happening with people like ElonMusk and Jeff Bezos in terms of
ultimate Silicon Valley expansion.
But I'm looking at its formation duringthe Cold War and what took place
both in California but, in this case,also in Romania during the Cold War and
post–Cold War, postsocialist aftermaths.
(03:04):
I'm looking at how Silicon Valley isemboldened by and even co-constitutive
of US empire in a lot of cases.
I'm not saying that it's synonymouswith it, and I'm not saying that it's
replaced it, but rather the two informeach other, particularly during the
Cold War and post–Cold War moment.
(03:26):
So my book takes place mostlyin Romania, but a little bit in
Moldova and one of my chapters isentirely based on the Bay Area.
So there's a lot going on, lotsof different locations to look at:
Cluj-Napoca, Romania, has been brandedas the Silicon Valley of Eastern Europe.
(03:48):
And then, of course, so much ofthe Bay Area is often thought about
synonymous with Silicon Valley.
Part of my project is tolook at the material but also
imaginative implications of that.
Part of my argument is thatSilicon Valley is a fiction.
A lot of people living in places thatmight be considered little Silicon
(04:09):
Valleys or even the big Silicon Valleydon't necessarily consider themselves
from Silicon Valley or don't use SiliconValley to describe their daily lives.
So I'm looking at how it functions as asort of fiction, but then how also the
imposition of that fiction does manifestracial dispossession and exploitation
(04:30):
in very different and uneven ways,depending on where we're talking about.
And of course, there are many ofthese so-called little Silicon Valleys
that have popped up around the globe.
I could recite them all,but it's a very long list.
And so I'm really just looking at ifyou want to think about big Silicon
Valley in California and then what'sbeen called the Silicon Valley of
(04:52):
Eastern Europe, in Cluj, Romania.
Part of my book also takes placein Bucharest and Râmnicu Vâlcea and
some other cities in Romania as well.
I suppose what I could say is that thepart that takes place in California,
is historical but also contemporary.
(05:15):
I look at the evolution of US empirein California and the Bay Area and
the different technologies thatmade that possible and how much they
also then informed what we thinkof as the birth of Silicon Valley
during the Cold War in Palo Alto.
People like Malcolm Harris and othershave done even more work around
(05:38):
this, but I'm looking at how itamassed a ton of government funding
that made the Cold War possible.
Then with the dot-com boom, well, theend of the Cold War, with the dot-com
boom, and then this moment now thatwe consider the tech boom 2.0, how
public spaces and public imaginarieshave been privatized in new ways.
(06:01):
I look at how, despite that, Indigenousland rematriation projects, for instance,
work by groups like the Sogorea Te' LandTrust are actively trying to undo not just
the dominance of Silicon Valley but thedifferent dispossession that US empire
and now Silicon Valley imperialism havebrought over time and into the present.
(06:25):
And in Romania it's aninteresting history.
During state socialism, Romania actuallyexcelled in technological development,
particularly hardware development.
And socialism was also a timein which about 30 percent of
property became nationalized.
So there was this big moveto produce social housing.
(06:47):
And despite some of the horrorsthat we often think of associated
with Ceaușescu and the authoritarianregime during socialism, it
was also a really emancipatorytime when it comes to housing.
So with the end of the Cold Warand reprivatization, one one
hand, housing became reprivatized.
(07:08):
A lot of people in Cold War aftermathshave lost their homes, but also Western
tech has rushed in and really absorbed alot of socialist-era infrastructure and
computing infrastructure in particular.
This shifted the landscape dramatically,and so my book really looks at that
moment in which dispossession isoften very racialized in Romania.
(07:33):
Because of long histories of racism andanti-Roma racism in particular, many
Roma residents didn't have housing,stable housing, before socialism and
then many people were able to gainstable housing during socialism.
So in this moment of reprivatization,very much driven by these Western techno
(07:54):
fantasies, it's disproportionatelyRoma residents losing their housing
and being pushed to urban outskirts.
I look at that and I also look atthe organizing work, housing justice
organizing work, that's taking placeon the ground and even racial and
(08:15):
technological justice organizingwork that's taking place to refute
the imposition of Silicon Valleyimperialism and privatization.
Those are the big trends, I suppose,of the book and how I'm thinking
about Silicon Valley both as somethingvery material and as something
(08:38):
that drives a sort of aspirationalpolitic to become a Western, which
is a longstanding post-Enlightenmentfantasy amongst the middle class in
Romania and has been for a long time
One of the things that I found reallyfascinating about this book, and you
talk about it early on, in earlierchapters, is this relationship, as
(09:03):
you were saying, between racializeddisplacement and gentrification
and digital nomads, which is botha discourse and an actual practice,
in some kind of complicated ways.
How exactly does that relationship workbetween digital nomads and racialized
displacement in these contexts?
And what got you interestedin studying that nexus?
(09:26):
I think the interest in digital nomadshas really picked up during the pandemic
with the turn to remote work, particularlyfor white collar tech workers.
A lot of these tech companies celebratedthe possibility that their workers could
(09:47):
travel the world and work remotely anddidn't need to be living and working
in tech epicenters like the Bay Area.
That's had all sorts ofimplications on the Bay Area.
But before the COVID-19 moment, I gotreally interested in the concept of
digital nomadism for a couple of reasons.
(10:09):
For one, I've been a housing organizerin the Bay Area off and on for years.
I was, in 2013, 2014, doing alot of direct action organizing
against tech gentrification.
In San Francisco, I was part of a groupcalled Eviction Free San Francisco.
(10:31):
That was also when I co-founded acollective called the Anti-Eviction
Mapping Project, which I stillam actively a part of today.
We produce a lot of data and maps andstories and visualizations about racial
dispossession and gentrification,often looking at correlations between
(10:53):
technocapitalism and real estatecapitalism and racial capitalism.
At that moment in 2013 and 2014,there was a huge eviction crisis.
I mean, there still is in SanFrancisco and throughout the Bay Area.
A lot of people were moving to theBay to work in some of the big tech
(11:15):
companies but also an array of startups.
Airbnb and Uber, Lyft, all thesestartup economies or startup companies
had formed a couple of years ago.
Earlier, Twitter moved to SanFrancisco around 2012, and this Twitter
tax break zone was established tobasically allow tech to move into
(11:37):
the city and not pay local taxes.
And so all sorts of organizingand many dispossessions were
taking place left and right.
That was a very much, that was abig part of my world and impacted
my friends and community andneighbors in all sorts of ways.
So I had been quite criticalof the dispossessions induced
(12:02):
by investment in tech.
At the same time, I was going back andforth between the Bay and Romania, where
I also had friends and community members.
I had gotten involved in somehousing organizing there.
There's a group Căși sociale acum!, SocialHousing NOW!, that's been fighting against
(12:27):
evictions that are disproportionatelyimpacting Roma communities in Cluj's
city center in this postsocialistmoment of housing reprivatization.
This was also the moment thatCluj was branded as the Silicon
Valley of Eastern Europe.
What I started to notice was that someof the same, not the same people but
(12:47):
the same kind of imaginaries that I sawtaking place amongst tech workers in the
Bay Area I saw amongst tech workers fromWestern countries who were spending time
in Romania, in part because you can findall these digital nomad blogs and websites
(13:07):
where they're always ranking what are thebest cities or towns for digital nomads.
Digital nomads are basically techworkers who can enjoy the freedom
of travel and don't need to befixed in one particular place.
Many of them work for smaller startups,sometimes maybe just for six months, and
then they go back to their home country.
(13:27):
They're able to maintain these SiliconValley salaries while living in countries
that are often less expensive to live in.
And you'll see people say that Romaniais a great place to be because it has
extremely fast internet, in part due todifferent tech infrastructural legacies.
(13:49):
It also has a cheap cost of living,high English language proficiency, which
has its own really interesting history.
It has like a high safety index, allsorts of things that tech workers
claim to find attractive, I mean,as do a number of cities, it's not
like Romania has the top, top city.
(14:10):
You can see there are a handful ofcities that are always vying to be the
top city for digital nomads includingCluj, but also Bucharest, Timișoara,
and different cities in Romania popup on the list quite frequently.
So there was this moment in whichI was very painfully aware of
different dispossessions takingplace both in Romania and in the
(14:34):
Bay Area as tech workers weremoving to both areas sometimes
permanently, sometimes temporarily.
What I noticed was this identity ofa digital nomad that a lot of tech
workers espoused, even in the Bay Area.
Many tech workers working in MountainView or Palo Alto might live in San
(14:59):
Francisco and were able to reverse commutethrough different infrastructure that
Google and Facebook and Apple provided.
So there was this kind of transienceand this idea that I trace back
to the nineteenth-century romanticOrientalist notion of a sort of free
and wandering lifestyle, very much inthe nineteenth century synonymous with
(15:21):
empire and the transits of empire.
At that time, a lot of gypsynovellas were written, like Carmen
or Pushkin's Gypsies in Russia,John Clare's poems in England.
And they often were written by whitemen writing from the heart of various
empires, kind of fantasizing this freedomof the free and wandering gypsy trope.
(15:47):
Interestingly, at the time, a lot ofRoma people who these authors were
encountering had actually left EasternEurope after slavery was abolished
in the mid-nineteenth century andwere seeking better conditions.
And so a lot of these writers writingin the heart of empires that were
trying to expand encountered Romapeople who were not necessarily living
(16:08):
this fanciful free life but werejust seeking better living conditions.
And there was this very Orientalist,often sexualized way that
they would be written about.
Lots of people have studied this interms of the literary tropes that
were employed then, but I found thosetropes to be very much alive and the
onto-epistemologies of digital nomads.
(16:31):
I mean, some people even callthemselves digital gypsies.
The infuriating part was not only didpeople deracinate an understanding of
Roma identity by claiming to be a digitalgypsy, but also in the case of Romania,
it was primarily Roma people being pushedout of their homes to make way for the
higher rents and new infrastructurethat was being created to support
(16:55):
Westerners, tourists, digital nomads, etc.
moving to and visiting the city.
I found digital nomadism an interestingobject to study to understand the
updating of particular and historicracial fantasies from the nineteenth
century into the postsocialist,post–Cold War present, and this
(17:20):
entanglement between, Silicon Valley andpostsocialist contexts of reprivatization.
One of the other racialized tropes thatyou talk about quite a lot in the book
comes up in one of my favorite chapters,which has the rather tantalizing title
of "The Most Dangerous Town on theInternet," which I think is just a
great title for a chapter because itdefinitely hooks people and draws them in.
(17:43):
You talk about the figure of theRomanian hacker in that chapter.
And this is certainly a trope thatwe see across all kinds of US popular
culture. What did you actuallydiscover about hacking cultures in that
particular context beyond the trope?
I got that title from a very short,bizarre film that the Silicon Valley
tech firm Norton made called The MostDangerous Town on the Internet profiling
(18:07):
Râmnicu Vâlcea, which was also profiledin a magazine piece by Wired magazine
about, I think, 15 years ago now.
They, employ these stereotypes, theones that you mentioned, to suggest
that it's these dangerous Romaniansthat are going to take down democracy
in the free world as we know it in theirlittle hacking enclaves or something.
(18:28):
But I mean, I know hackers in Romania.
Some of them have been friends of mine.
I also have been privy to learna lot through other people who
study hacking culture in Romania,including Andrada Fiscutean and
David Schwartz, who's a playwright.
He made this wonderful playabout hackers in Râmnicu Vâlcea.
From my own experience doing ethnographicresearch and from those of my peers, most
(18:51):
hackers in Romania have just been youthnot just having fun but also finding
ways to survive in austerity contexts.
Again, there was so muchhardware and technological
development during socialism.
There's this Romanian word șmecherie,which kind of means like a street-smart
savviness, that I use to talkabout ways that people were able to do
(19:15):
things like clone computers to bypasshaving to pay for really expensive and
unaffordable computers, which was a commonpractice throughout the Eastern Bloc.
Once the internet came around, you'llsee like lots of youth pirating
software and audio files and books.
Romania had a really, still does have, areally high rate of piracy, but that's in
(19:38):
part because if you're living in a countrywhere the average salary is way lower than
the salary of somebody in the US, and youwant to be able to use the same software,
you're going to have to pay way more ofyour monthly income for the same piece
of software that somebody might not haveto think about even in buying in the US.
(19:58):
There was also this practice ofcreating independent internet networks
where people would just wire differentapartment buildings together to bypass
having to pay for expensive internet.
There are all sorts of, I think,really fun and emancipatory
things that people did.
And of course, there were some kindof things that maybe are less exciting
(20:18):
that have been done in terms of hacking,but for the most part, the experiences
of the people I've talked to are mostlyjust experiences of people trying to
get by and also create social networksand different forms of solidarity.
I also look at the role ofIBM historically in Romania.
Thomas Watson, the founder, CEO ofIBM came into Romania during the
(20:41):
1930s and 1940s and was instrumentalin importing IBM's counting machines,
which were used to help orchestratea census, which was used to help make
the Holocaust in Romania possible.
So I look at some of that historyand then how big Western tech came
rushing back in after socialism toco-opt socialist-era infrastructure.
(21:03):
If we're really looking for maliciouscharacters on the internet, it's
more apropos to turn to big tech and,and companies like IBM than youth
just trying to survive in contextof Silicon Valley imperialism.
I would love to turn to methodologybecause this is one of the key things
that the Ideas on Fire team focusedon with you quite a bit in our
(21:24):
editorial work with you on this book.
This is obviously a really ambitiousmulti-sited ethnographic project
stretching across national boundaries,obviously, but even continents.
We're certainly seeing more multi-sitedethnographies these days from our
authors that get at some reallyfascinating questions like yours does.
But they do presentsome unique challenges.
(21:45):
What made you decide to doa multi-sited ethnography?
And what were some of thesurprising things that you
learned about in the process?
Yeah, absolutely.
I'm so grateful to Ideas on Fire for allthe support because I think in being quite
an ambitious project, it was very hardto keep track of, especially as I was
conceptualizing it in its early iteration.
(22:06):
I'm excited that more people aredoing multi-sited ethnographies,
too, because I mean for me, what I'moften trying to track in the book are
connections, the transits of SiliconValley, both in terms of fantasies and
desires but also in terms of materialimpacts and also forms of resistance.
Sometimes resistance, too,is international and requires
(22:28):
alliances across different spaces.
The book really also organically emergedout of commitments that I already
had in the Bay Area to the housingorganizing I'd been doing there and in
Romania where I had already also beenliving off and on and have community.
And I think if I weren't so upset aboutthe ravages of Silicon Valley in the
(22:50):
Bay, maybe I wouldn't have noticedwhat I started to notice in Romania.
For me, there was always asort of dialogue going on.
And it was also always reallyimportant for me that I wasn't
doing a comparative project.
So I wasn't trying to do like this 50/50sort of thing, but more tell a story
that really got at what Silicon Valleyimperialism was doing on different
(23:13):
registers across different borders, butin a way that was nevertheless grounded
in particular communities and commitments.
So in the spirit of imagining otherwise,I'm going to ask you the question that
I love to close out every episode with,which really gets at the heart of why
you do the kind of work that you do.
So what is the world thatyou're working toward?
(23:33):
What kind of world do you want?
I would love to be in a worldwhere Silicon Valley imperialism
is a concept of the past.
I do a lot of housing organizingwork and I'm very critical of private
property both when it comes to the worldof technology but also the world of
housing, spatial, and racial justice.
(23:54):
And so I'm interested in how housingorganizers and people working on
issues of technological justice canform better and stronger alliances
and that work's already being done.
I'm inspired by so much work that'salready being done in that domain,
but there's so much more to be done.
I think it really does requireinternational solidarities and
(24:17):
connections because of thescope and scale of empire.
Some of the anti- and alter-globalizationwork of over 20 years ago now was
trying to do this in a particular way.
And I think there's a turn, again,toward translocal organizing,
toward organizing that's very muchgrounded in particular spaces but
also invested in these connections.
(24:38):
That's sort of where I try toleave off in the book as well.
Well, thank you so much for beingwith us and sharing all of these
ways that you imagine otherwise.
Yeah, thank you so much for havingme and for all of the support
in making this book a reality.
Thanks for joining me for thisepisode of Imagine Otherwise.
(24:59):
A big thanks to Erin aswell for sharing their work.
Our team really loved editing theirbook, Silicon Valley Imperialism:
Techno Fantasies and Frictions inPostsocialist Times, which is out
now from Duke University Press.
You can learn more about SiliconValley Imperialism and Erin's other
projects in the episode show noteson our website at ideasonfire.net.
(25:21):
The show notes include a transcript andteaching guide for this episode with
related books by Ideas on Fire authors,podcast interviews, and resources.
Imagine Otherwise episodes make for greatsyllabus additions, and our teaching
guides are designed to help students andresearchers explore the vibrant worlds of
progressive interdisciplinary scholarship.
(25:42):
This episode of ImagineOtherwise was produced and
edited by me, Cathy Hannabach.
You can find Ideas on Fire andImagine Otherwise on Instagram at
@ideasonfirephd, as well as on Mastodon,Bluesky, Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok.
You can also subscribe to the show onour website at ideasonfire.net as well
(26:03):
as on all of your favorite podcast apps.
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