DSI Lecture Series | Silicon Valley Imperialism: Techno Fantasies and Frictions

In this presentation, Erin McElroy, Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Washington, will discuss Silicon Valley Imperialism: Techno Fantasies and Frictions in Postsocialist Times, just published with Duke University Press. The book maps out processes of gentrification, racial dispossession, and economic predation that drove the development of Silicon Valley in the San Francisco Bay Area and also looks at 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.

The book also explores how in Romania, dreams of privatization have updated fascist pasts, often in the name of anticommunism. At the same time, McElroy accounts for the ways that activists and artists resist Silicon Valley capitalist logics, building upon socialist-era worldviews not to restore state socialism but rather to establish more just social formations—helping materialize the unbecoming of Silicon Valley. The talk will conclude with a discussion of how Silicon Valley imperialism impacts transnational geographies of landlordism, gesturing to some of McElroy’s newer work.