Overview

In Silicon Valley Imperialism Erin McElroy maps the processes of gentrification, racial dispossession, and economic predation that drove the development of Silicon Valley in the San Francisco Bay Area and how that logic has become manifest in postsocialist Romania. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and archival research in Romania and the United States, McElroy exposes the mechanisms through which the appeal of Silicon Valley techno-capitalism devours space and societies, displaces residents and generating extreme income inequality, in order to expand its reach. In Romania, dreams of privatization updated fascist and anti-Roma pasts and socialist-era underground computing practices. At the same time, McElroy accounts for the ways Romanians are resisting them Silicon Valley capitalist logics, where anticapitalist and anti-imperialist activists and protesters build on socialist-era worldviews not to restore state socialism but rather to establish more just social formations. Attending to the violence of Silicon Valley imperialism, McElroy reveals techno-capitalism as an ultimately unsustainable model of rapacious economic and geographic growth.

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9781478030218

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“In this strikingly original and important book, Erin McElroy forges a new field: postsocialist technology studies. Decentering the United States as the primary locale through which to apprehend the racial workings of technocapitalism, McElroy maps unexpected yet urgent connections between Silicon Valley and Romania. Alongside lucid accounts of the differential yet entangled operations of racial technocapitalism and racial banishment across these vastly different histories and locales, McElroy highlights the hopeful possibilities for anti-imperialist solidarities that can emerge against the odds.” -- Neda Atanasoski, coauthor of * Surrogate Humanity: Race, Robots, and the Politics of Technological Futures * “Brimming with compelling historical insights, Silicon Valley Imperialism is a conceptually engaging, empirically grounded, and essential contribution to postsocialist and decolonial studies, the contemporary history of Romania, and an understanding of techno-capitalism’s trans-Atlantic ambitions.” -- Michele Lancione, author of * For a Liberatory Politics of Home *

“In this strikingly original and important book, Erin McElroy forges a new field: postsocialist technology studies. Decentering the United States as the primary locale through which to apprehend the racial workings of technocapitalism, McElroy maps unexpected yet urgent connections between Silicon Valley and Romania. Alongside lucid accounts of the differential yet entangled operations of racial technocapitalism and racial banishment across these vastly different histories and locales, McElroy highlights the hopeful possibilities for anti-imperialist solidarities that can emerge against the odds.” -- Neda Atanasoski, coauthor of * Surrogate Humanity: Race, Robots, and the Politics of Technological Futures *

Author Information

Erin McElroy is Assistant Professor of Geography at the University of Washington and coeditor of Counterpoints: A San Francisco Bay Area Atlas of Displacement and Resistance.

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