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 technocapitalism devours space and societies, displaces residents, and generates 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 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 technocapitalism as an ultimately unsustainable model of rapacious economic and geographic growth.

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.

Acknowledgments  vii
Introduction  1
Part I. Silicon Valley Spatiotemporality
1. Digital Nomads and Deracinated Dispossession  39
2. Postsocialist Silicon Valley  69
3. The Technofascist Specters of Liberalism  99
Part II. Techno Frictions and Fantasies
4. The Most Dangerous Town on the Internet  133
5. Corruption, Şmecherie, and Clones 155
6. Spells for Outer Space  175
Coda. Unbecoming Silicon Valley  209
Notes  217
Bibliography  237
Index  269