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Erin McElroy with Manissa Maharawal and Daniela Rosner
How Silicon Valley's Tactics Spread to Postsocialist Romania
Note: Town Hall events are approximately 75 minutes long.
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Silicon Valley Imperialism: Techno Fantasies and Frictions in Postsocialist Times
The Elliott Bay Book Company
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In Silicon Valley Imperialism, Erin McElroy examines the gentrification, racial dispossession, and economic exploitation that fueled Silicon Valley’s development in the San Francisco Bay Area, and how this approach has spread to postsocialist Romania. Through ethnographic fieldwork and archival research in both Romania and the United States, McElroy uncovers how Silicon Valley’s technocapitalism consumes spaces and societies, displacing residents and creating severe income inequality to extend its influence.
In Romania, the desire for privatization has reawakened fascist and anti-Roma sentiments, as well as practices from the socialist-era underground computing scene. Yet, McElroy also highlights Romanian resistance to Silicon Valley’s capitalist agenda, where anticapitalist and anti-imperialist activists draw on socialist-era perspectives—not to revert to state socialism, but to foster more equitable social structures. By focusing on the violence inherent in Silicon Valley’s expansion, McElroy exposes technocapitalism as an unsustainable model of relentless economic and spatial growth.
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Erin McElroy is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Washington, where their work focuses upon intersections of gentrification, technology, empire, and racial capitalism, alongside housing justice organizing and transnational solidarities. McElroy is author of Silicon Valley Imperialism and co-editor of Counterpoints: A San Francisco Bay Area Atlas of Displacement and Resistance. Additionally, McElroy is cofounder of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project—a data visualization, counter-cartography, and digital media collective that produces tools, maps, reports, murals, zines, oral histories, and more to further the work of housing justice. At UW, McElroy runs Landlord Tech Watch which produces collaborative research and collective knowledge regarding the dispossessive technologies of landlordism. Such commitments inform their work coediting the Radical Housing Journal—an open access publication that foregrounds housing justice research transnationally.
Manissa M. Maharawal is an assistant professor of anthropology at American University in Washington DC. Her work is at the intersection of anthropology and critical geography and looks at dynamics of eviction, race, displacement and contemporary urban social movements, Her book Anti-Eviction: Contesting Tech- Led Gentrification in San Francisco is currently under review at UC Press.
Daniela Rosner is a Professor in the Department of Human Centered Design and Engineering (HCDE) at the University of Washington, co-director of the Tactile and Tactical Design Lab, and co-director of the HCDE Masters Program. She holds adjunct appointments in the Department of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies (GWSS), the Department of Digital Arts and Experimental Media (DXArts), and the Allen School for Computer Science and Engineering (CSE). She also serves as an associate member of the Einstein Center for Digital Futures in Berlin, Germany.
Presented by Town Hall Seattle.
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