There were very different histories of land, housing, race and technology in San Francisco and in Romania. I became interested in those very different histories and how they led not just to different types of housing tensions, but to different struggles more generally—different erasures of the past and different ways that the past itself was getting evicted from historical memory. So that is the premise or the context, grounded in ongoing commitments to justice and racial justice in the midst of technological transformation. It is also grounded in really wanting to understand the sort of deeper layered histories that lay the groundwork for the present.
Speaking Out of Place is produced in collaboration with The Creative Process and is made with support from Stanford University.
In this episode of the Speaking Out of Place podcast, Professor David Palumbo-Liu talks with activist and scholar Erin McElroy. She is the author of a remarkable book, Silicon Valley Imperialism: Techno Fantasies in Postsocialist Times. At the center of this rich and provocative study is the Romanian city of Cluj, which has been dubbed the “Silicon Valley of Eastern Europe.” McElroy untangles this notion by going back to the socialist period, whose technological advances made Romania a particularly attractive site for foreign tech investment after the fall of Communism. Erin explains how the arrival of what were called “digital nomads” into Cluj was first made possible by the brutal eviction of its Roma population. As enticing as it is to map these evictions to similar displacements of racial minorities and the poor in the San Francisco Bay Area, Erin explores the fissures and disconnects between the two cases, as well as their eerie convergences. We end by, as McElroy writes, “reflecting on what bringing abolitionist and ant- imperial geographies together in post-socialist contexts can do. Just as global capital connections mapped the Siliconizing moment, other connections scaffold the very possibilities of unbecoming Silicon Valley.”
Erin McElroy is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Washington, where their work focuses upon intersections of gentrification, technology, empire, fascism, and racial capitalism, alongside housing justice organizing and transnational solidarities. McElroy is author of Silicon Valley Imperialism: Techno Fantasies and Frictions in Postsocialist Times (Duke University Press, 2024) and coeditor of Counterpoints: A San Francisco Bay Area Atlas of Displacement and Resistance (PM Press, 2021). 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 and the Anti-Eviction Lab which produce collaborative research and collective knowledge focused on intersections of property, surveillance, technocapitalism, and technolibertarianism.
DAVID PALUMBO-LIU
I have so many questions. It is such an amazing book. Thank you so much for being on, Erin.
ERIN McELROY
Thank you so much for having me. I am very excited for the conversation.
DAVID PALUMBO-LIU
It is such a rich and provocative case history that taps into so many issues. Let's start with the basics and then work out. You began working in Romania in terms of housing rights and displacement. Talk about how you started with that and then got led into this topic in a really interesting way.
ERIN McELROY
Absolutely. The book really spans over a decade's worth of research, but also immersion in housing justice organizing spaces in San Francisco and in Romania—specifically in Bucharest and Cluj, two of the biggest cities in Romania. My immersion in both of those spaces began in the aftermath of the 2008 foreclosure crisis. I was living in San Francisco and became involved in a group called Eviction Free San Francisco, which was a mutual aid direct action group that would work with tenants who were being evicted as this new tech boom took off in the city. This led to a lot of white-collar tech money coming into the city and a lot of people being racially banished and evicted from their homes.
So I was doing that, but I was also going back and forth between San Francisco and Romania where I had been building community and had friends. I have family from Romania. It was not lost on me that in this moment, as San Francisco was receiving new incursions of Silicon Valley tech, this was also when the sharing economy started and Twitter moved downtown. We were calling this a Tech Boom 2.0. San Francisco was experiencing a new wave of what it had gone through during the dot-com boom.
At the same time, Cluj, Romania, which is the capital of Transylvania, had suddenly been branded the Silicon Valley of Eastern Europe. Sure enough, a wave of evictions followed, mostly impacting Romanian Roma communities who were suddenly being pushed out of their homes and racially banished from the city. I became involved in a group called Căși sociale ACUM! (Social Housing Now!) in Cluj, and there is a sibling collective in Bucharest called the Common Front for Housing Rights. I became very interested in how these processes were happening at the same time, having to do with very uneven distributions of Silicon Valley capital but also aspirations of becoming siliconized.
There were very different histories of land, housing, race and technology in San Francisco and in Romania. I became interested in those very different histories and how they led not just to different types of housing tensions, but to different struggles more generally—different erasures of the past and different ways that the past itself was getting evicted from historical memory. So that is the premise or the context, grounded in ongoing commitments to justice and racial justice in the midst of technological transformation. It is also grounded in really wanting to understand the sort of deeper layered histories that lay the groundwork for the present.
DAVID PALUMBO-LIU
Absolutely. In your explorations, you do such a marvelous job of taking these big blocky terms like postsocialist or even socialist and really teasing them out. You pose a question: “What does it mean that liberal and fascist glorifications of presocialism align amid today's anti-communist conjunctures?” There are a number of moving parts that you put into tension together and tease out.
A few episodes ago, I had Greta Uehling on to talk about the Crimean Tatars, and they represent a very similar situation. They do not map on exactly, but it is similar being caught between the USSR, then Russia and then these new NATO formations. The Tatars in 1944 were basically ethnically cleansed from Crimea. Then with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, both Ukraine and Russia are glomming onto the Tatars. The Tatars are incredibly resourceful, and they keep resisting the notion that recognition from either of these bodies would give them their rights back because they have essentially been stripped of those.
They are leaning toward Ukraine for obvious reasons. But nonetheless, talk about the Roma because this is such an important population. Maybe in the course of your discussion, you can also plug in this weird notion of digital nomads. You could not make this stuff up. It is the appropriation of everything you have in a sense degraded and retooling it into this weird... Anyway, I will let you take care of this.
ERIN McELROY
I will try. How do I even begin this story? Even if we look at the evolution of capital in Europe as Cedric Robinson did—as many people have done with attention to race and racialism—Roma people have been historically subjugated and enslaved. They have been part and parcel of processes of labor abstraction, particularly in Eastern Europe for centuries where, in the case of Romania, they were enslaved. Slavery operated differently than it did in the context of chattel slavery in the United States.
But nevertheless, labor was exploited. Many Roma people were forced to basically be the property of the church or to boyars, which are essentially the big landlords. After much struggle and obligation, there was emancipation in the mid-19th century, similar in timeline to what we saw in the US or in England. Similarly, there were promises of reparations that were failed, unfulfilled promises. There is a really long history here spanning hundreds of years in contexts in which Roma people were systematically denied the ability to own property and to enact different forms of sovereignty.
Fast-forward to the late 19th century and early 20th century, and the rise of fascism in Romania was extreme. At the height of the fascist movement in Romania, some people said General Antonescu was even more brutal than Hitler. It was not just Nazi Germany doing its thing in Romania; this was also homegrown. Roma people were targeted for subjugation, elimination and genocide. Many people were shipped to camps in a narrow region bordering Moldova called Transnistria. Others were shipped to the sort of concentration camps we are more familiar with in Europe.
Nevertheless, after the fascist period ended due to anti-fascist organizers—many of whom were socialist and helped implement the state socialist project in Romania, which was anti-fascist in its origins—there was a process of housing nationalization. This basically turned private property that had been owned by landlords into what we might consider public housing or social housing in the US. If there was a landlord that owned 15 properties, they might have to give some of those up to the state, and the state would then create housing for people who needed it or who were moved around by the state. There were lots of problems with this project, but it was much better than what had come before in terms of the ability to have secure housing for Roma people in particular.
Starting in about the 1950s, people moved into homes and were able to live in those homes for generations. State socialism ended in 1989. The 1990s were a period of extreme austerity, disaster capitalist injunctions and desires within Romania to gain recognition into Western Europe. This has been a longstanding post-Enlightenment desire among many in Romania to be recognized as Western. That has to do with this interstitial Eastern Euro subjectivity where it is not the West and it is not the South; it is in between. And so to join the EU, to join NATO, all that…
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...Romania needed to prove that it was going to abide by Western conceptions of private property and capital.
One of the more extreme measures that it took was to institute the reprivatization of property that had been made public or national during state socialism. This meant restituting properties back to the descendants of presocialist owners or the heirs of presocialist owners because many of them were no longer alive.
You have this wave of property being redistributed into the private sector, and the people mostly being dispossessed in this moment happened to be Roma people who had been finally able to live in secure housing for generations. So evictions in Romania in the postsocialist moment are highly racialized and very much rooted in a much longer history of anti-Roma racism. This is one of the main points that housing justice groups in Romania continue to make, and why it has been really important that those groups be led by Roma activists and politics.
That is happening. And then—I do not know what the word is; I want to say the irony, but it is not irony. It is far more insidious. As places like Cluj become siliconized, there have been many people moving to Romania who identify as digital nomads, and some of them even identify as digital gypsies, which has historically been a derogatory way to describe Roma people.
The fact that you have these people temporarily moving to Romania because it has fast internet, it is in Europe, but it is cheap—there is a lot of romantic Orientalist fetishization of Romania, which also has a very long history. You see these people, mostly from Silicon Valley, moving to Romania, identifying as digital nomads or digital gypsies, and then very much being part and parcel of the process of gentrification and expensification. This leads to Roma people also being priced out and evicted, and puts pressure on properties to become privatized if they were not already.
One of the points that I make in my book is that there is a long history of non-Roma people romanticizing and fetishizing, even at times attempting to, quote-unquote, “become Roma.” If you just look at Orientalist literature of the 19th century, you see countless plays, novellas and poems written mostly by white men who live at the heart of different European imperial metropoles like Paris, writing these stories that were very much fetishizing, mostly sexualizing Roma women.
Carmen is a good example, or Pushkin's The Gypsies, or George Borrow in the UK, or John Clare. These are some of the writers very much writing in this trope. Often they will fall in love with some Roma woman, attempt to join her people or fetishize the nomadic itinerant way of Roma people, which often at the time was actually just Roma people leaving Eastern Europe trying to find more stable housing in Western Europe.
But through these Orientalist tropes, they became very much fetishized as free and wandering gypsies. You see these people attempting to become Roma in these texts, ultimately deciding that Roma futurity is non-reproductive, and you always see these protagonists end up murdering the women that they are with.
Of course. They cannot have miscegenation.
Exactly.
That is a hybrid that we do not want.
You cannot actually do that. It was hot for a second, and then they go back to their lives in industrializing Paris or what have you.
I was very much thinking about how there is this ongoing history of romantic Orientalism informing the ontology of the digital nomad. You can see how in the 19th century, in many ways, the desire and lust that these men would display towards Roma women very much indexed Western European imperialism.
The fact that the metropole has shifted to Silicon Valley, where many of these people are from, where they are getting their salaries from and where they are returning to after they give up on being digital nomads—to me, helped index not the displacement of Western Europe as an imperial center, but how there is this new conjuncture in which Silicon Valley has also become the imperial center. They are very much tethered to US empire, but also building upon a moment of Western European imperialism.
It is so rich, and it is much more insidious in some ways because it is layered over. I had a bunch of questions. One is, in terms of the restitution of property, are Romanians in the diaspora entitled to come back? In other words, are they restored housing even though they left the country?
Basically, it is really only people who owned property prior to World War II, more or less. There are actually also very bizarre tales of non-Roma people who are not even Romanians claiming property through forged paperwork—property that they did not own. The most nefarious player in the game was actually Harvard University, who decided to work with some local Romanians to basically claim that they owned, not housing, but a huge chunk of Romania's forests.
Romania actually has two-thirds of Europe's virgin forests. There is a lot of capital to be made in terms of the lumber industry in Romania. So Harvard claimed to have owned these forests presocialism, kind of through these intermediaries.Then some amazing journalists did a bunch of investigative work and found out that this was all forged paperwork.Harvard was going to be held responsible, and then they sold the forest off to IKEA.
I did not see that coming. I should have.
IKEA owns the majority of private forests in Romania, where they are clear-cutting lands to build fast furniture for the West. But clearly, neither IKEA nor Harvard owned those forests presocialism. So there are those sorts of problems as well.
One thing to insert here is that my family in China owned some property pre-1949, and after the revolution... I have a huge family in Hawaii. I am one of 32 cousins. And so the communist Chinese government dutifully sent out 32 deeds to us in really cheesily produced green plastic binding.
We look at it as an artifact. It is like Confederate money. Here is your deed, but it is not worth anything, but have it. Our gift to you is this piece of green plastic.
You mentioned in your book that it is precisely during socialism that a lot of this technology is laid down to make Romania attractive. Can you talk about the ways in which you found people thinking about socialism in a very mixed way? Of course, there was a dictatorship, it was brutal, it was horrible, but a lot of them said, “I love my socialist house.”Talk about this mixed history.
For sure. One of the big projects of capitalist transition postsocialism has been to denigrate the socialist period. At the same time, there are a lot of people who embrace a socialist nostalgia. I am not trying to situate my project in either of those, but to really think through how there were problems, obviously, especially towards the latter half of state socialism.
When Ceaușescu came to power, he was very much a dictator. But there are a lot of emancipatory histories from the state socialist period as well that I think we need to remember, and that can help us think through different futures. It is not about going back to state socialism, but thinking about what kind of inheritances we need for other sorts of anti-capitalist futures we might want to build.
Of course, housing is a big component in that there was housing created for the majority of people. There was not the same kind of issue with houselessness that we might see today. Education and healthcare—the things that we associate with state socialism—existed. One of the things that I was really interested in the book was how there was a flourishing of technology and technological production as well during state socialism in Romania. Engineering and industrialization were part of the state project to lift Romania up in this shifting global economy.
There was all of that happening above ground. Interestingly, though, even a lot of the projects happening above ground, especially in the realm of computing, involved kind of these strange relationships with the West. At the national computer factory, the Felix Computer Factory, they were cloning computer licenses that they had been able to get from France.There was a lot of this sort of relationship between France and Romania also in terms of automobile production.
I became really interested in this rich underground that was fermenting at the same time. This is starting in the 1980s or even late 1970s, with people actually producing their own computers in computer labs at universities, underground, but also in their flats or apartments. In part because nobody could afford to buy them—this was the beginning of personal computers—so they were just making their own from random parts that people would peddle into town.
I think a lot of that knowledge and prowess then continued to develop into the 1990s. Even during the 1980s, there was generally one, sometimes two television stations that were available to people through the national television. But people were finding ways to bend their antennas and import stations from other countries. There was a lot of this sort of cunning. Some people would call it this Romanian word, șmecherie, which means street-smart, deviant cunningness.
You would see a lot of that happening even in the 1980s, and then in the 1990s it began to flourish into the 2000s. People were creating their own internet networks to connect their blocks because they could not afford to buy internet from the West. Piracy was at an all-time high in Romania in terms of sharing software and music, as people could not afford what you would buy from the West.
People continued to create their own computers and develop all of this knowledge that they would use also in internet cafes. You started to see these narratives cast about Romania as this sort of dangerous, illiberal place seething with hackers that were going to take down Western democracy. But it was mostly people just having fun and developing friendships with people in other countries or just within their own cities.
That is part of what I looked at in the book as well. There is this one town in Romania called Râmnicu Vâlcea, which in 2011 Wired magazine wrote a piece on and called it “Hackerville” as this dangerous place that was going to take down Western democracy. Then there was a film made some years later also about Hackerville.
There was this Orientalist framing of Romania, this time as more of a dangerous place because of all of this technological knowledge that people were using in nefarious ways. But again, it was mostly just for fun and coming out of contexts of ingenuity, poverty and global inequities in terms of capital and technology.
So it is both positive and negative in the sense that it is positive because it shows this incredible imagination, savvy and creativity. This precisely, again, as you point out, was what made Romania attractive for Western technology.
Actually, that is probably my favorite chapter. The word that I cannot pronounce, but you did it quite well. It was a savvy sort of hacking type of thing. There is a really nice throughline, as you described in your comment recently. As I was reading it, that one instance of people using cassette tapes for external memory brought me back.
I worked my way through graduate school at Berkeley by working two 12-hour shifts on the weekend at a bank in Oakland. They basically leased out their computers over the weekend because there was no banking on the weekend. So there was this other computing group that went in, and there were these gigantic IBM 360 machines. You go in there, and a hard disk was a compilation of six or eight disks stacked.
We were doing medical records. We would call up a hospital in Merced, and they would transmit magnetic tape on a phone line. We would hang up the phone, go out, have a meal, see a movie and come back, and one kilobyte had been transmitted. But this was the new thing, and it is interesting. Xiao Yi talked about this, and we will get to this in that portion of our podcast, about people creating their own community servers and stuff.
I really want to get into that at the end. But let's transition to this chapter that you call “Postsocialist Silicon Valley.” You begin with this quote:
“Although the Cold War is well understood as a temporal node for apprehending the siliconized present, postsocialism as an analytic normally reserved for mapping out geopolitical contexts in the post-1989, 1991 former Eastern Bloc rarely makes its way into the framing. In this chapter, I borrow postsocialism for its long calcified spatiotemporal location to better apprehend anti-capitalist visions, organizing work, and abolitionist dreaming informative of Bay Area social life despite the concreteness of Silicon Valley imperialism.”
You begin with this really interesting story about Mission Creek in San Francisco. I am wondering, do you know Chris Carlsson's novel When Shells? We had him on the show a long time ago. So when you mentioned Mission Creek, that automatically popped up in mind as a kind of post-apocalyptic utopian thing. I also was thinking about a very famous case, the International Hotel in the 1970s, because I do Asian American studies. Can you talk about this sort of lost history of Silicon Valley before the horribleness sets in?
Actually, some of the research I did about the Armory building—which maybe people know because it was where Kink.com was headquartered in San Francisco, the big Armory building in the Mission... Mission Creek goes through it, and in that chapter, I begin by thinking through different imaginations and histories of that building involving resistance and racial justice organizing during different moments in time. I did a lot of that research on Chris Carlsson's FoundSF digital archive. He is such a good public historian, and of course, there are great resources about the I-Hotel on that site as well.
In that chapter, one of my pet peeves has been that people really have reserved postsocialist theory to just thinking through economic and political transition in Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, or maybe former Yugoslavia post-1989 and 1991. Whereas if you think about postcolonial theory, which has done so much theoretical heavy lifting to provincialize Europe or to think through the violence of Enlightenment legacies—not just within former colonized space, but as a global project that also informs subjectivities of the West amongst the colonizers.
Not to equate postsocialism and postcolonialism because they are obviously almost antipodally different in different ways. But I was very curious why we cannot do more theoretical work with postsocialism, particularly to provincialize the state, provincialize capital and actually to provincialize anti-communism, which I think is so necessary right now.
That was part of the premise of that chapter. What I wanted to provincialize most in that chapter was Silicon Valley as a project that emerged during the Cold War and that began to subsume space, but also people's very notions of the future.Not just in Palo Alto where it emerged as a space that is also not really a space, because if you look on a map, there is no place called Silicon Valley. It is obviously different cities that have Spanish colonial names mostly that sit on other Indigenous lands that get forgotten when we try to place Silicon Valley.
I wanted to think about how it is a Cold War product, how it is a toponymical fiction, and how even when other places siliconize in post-Cold War contexts, it remains a fictional aspirational project. I think it is one that we really do have to think through, both in terms of the Cold War and in terms of state socialism, which were happening antipodally. So I became interested in the emergence of Silicon Valley as a fiction, but also as a process that did impart material harm given the material-discursive entanglements that we are all very well aware of at this point.
I began looking at different ways it began to seep into San Francisco and co-opt different socialist or communal spaces and public spaces. There are stories of the Google bus stops and struggles around the public bus stops that basically got co-opted by Google and other tech companies that I was part of fighting against back in the early 2010s.
I look at the story of the Mission Playground, where there was the infamous “Dropbox dude” scandal where basically Public Playground, Dropbox and Airbnb tried to take over the playground by being able to reserve it through this app system. It pushed the youth of color off the playground. I even look at the sharing economy as a sort of socialist communalist co-optation by private capital. This idea that Airbnb has anything to do with sharing is of course ludicrous, but there has been this attempted capture of the idea of sharing by the sharing economy.
I am looking at all of these different moments in which we can see a siliconized co-optation of communalist projects in San Francisco in the post-Cold War moment, and then I am trying to root those to the Cold War and the different ways that also built upon other imperial conceptions of space.
I love the way you set up the chapter because it begins prior to that in ways we have been discussing about socialist Romania. I grew up in the Bay Area, so there is so much richness and imagination. Nonconformist does not do it justice.When you impose the tech vision post-Cold War, it becomes almost inevitable because everything is feeding into it. You have the state, you have technology of the universities. The whole educational system becomes enamored of it way back then.
What happened at San Francisco State? The tracking of the decimation of two-year colleges and state schools and the channeling into not just the UC system, but Berkeley and UCLA—screw the rest—and the erosion of autonomy of communities. But the spirit has never left. So many people, not only native, but people coming into the area precisely because there are these pockets of possibility that you and your book and a lot of the people we know in common are keeping alive.
Let's go to that word I cannot pronounce. How do you pronounce it again?
Șmecheria.
Șmecheria. I would not have guessed that. Because you talk about the importance of rethinking socialism, which requires imagining multiple socialisms, and I really love that. Because it can get co-opted, as you pointed out already.
Tell us about this word and its ability to rethink what politics is through different ways of being together, connected or disconnected. I will just let you run with this because you have been there, you have done this. Tell us about this, like the way you have already set it up by talking about the 1970s and 1980s, but talk about how it is alive today.
I love it as a word. It has Romani roots, but it is a Romanian word. Like I said, it means some sort of cunningness or street-smart kind of knowledge that one might have, not just about technology by any means, but, you know, it could be about other things as well.
When I was talking to people about their sort of DIY hacking histories or present practices in Romania, people would use that word a lot, and so I started to get excited about that as a framework for these sorts of practices that generally exist all over the place. They involve, I would say, some sort of underground sensibility—some sort of idea of when it comes to technology, creating techno-futures that are not beholden to Silicon Valley, that are antithetical to Silicon Valley and that might even work against it, but that also are not beholden to the state.
I think that kind of gets to your question about multiple socialisms. My commitment is not trying to recover a state socialist project or to even recover the state when we think about socialist anti-capitalist futures, but to really think about what are the different ways that we can potentially build technological projects outside of capital.
I mean, there are so many different ways that different groups and people are doing this around the world. This is not a project unique to Romania, but of course, I was trying to look at how this is happening within Romania in the book. Just to zoom out, a colleague, Luis Felipe Murillo, who teaches at the University of Notre Dame in anthropology, and I are working on this project right now to put together an anthology of what we are calling political software projects of different groups globally that are engaging in this sort of politic. We had this convening in Seattle on May Day, actually in the spirit of May Day this last year, and had folks from Brazil, Kenya, India, the Netherlands, Mexico and Germany come out and share these different projects that they are working on.
I would say in Romania, they are kind of all embracing this sort of sense of șmecherie. There is somebody who runs this project called Casa Tainã in a quilombo outside of São Paulo, where they have their own independent internet that they run themselves. They host their own Jitsi meetings on it to not even use Zoom software, and it is part of their own process of territorial spatial sovereignty, but also digital sovereignty.
I think you can see lots of examples of that in different places and different words that people will affix to those projects to describe that politic. So that is me zooming out. But to zoom back into Romania, I think these practices that people developed during state socialism and then in its aftermath continue to inform a lot of really amazing technological work and speculative future-making today.
I know many people who will just go to these flea markets that happen on the weekends in Cluj and get these old computers and come back and reassemble them. One of the ongoing quests that you will see from different folks is seeing how do we create our own hardware to be able to host software that cannot be surveilled by Silicon Valley software.
I am very excited that sort of ethos still exists. Somebody else that I was speaking with a few years ago who runs a retro computing museum in Cluj was talking about this. I think I do write about this in the book briefly, but this conception of this microgeneration that he was calling the Xennials—basically people born late 1970s, early 1980s who in Romania really had to learn how to assemble all of this technology from scratch and got really into the nitty-gritty of creating their own computers and wiring their own internet.
His thesis was that it was actually the prowess, the technological knowledge that these people had that then, because after 1989 it was Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Microsoft running in to basically absorb Romanian workers because there was that technological prowess. He was saying that if we want to look at who actually built the silicon present in Romania, it is actually the people who developed this knowledge on their own, who then got co-opted or there was a predatory move by Silicon Valley.
But many people resisted too. I liked thinking about that particular microgeneration as a really important generation in both the process of siliconization and in fostering grounds for resistance.
Two things. One is, before I forget, I would love to book you and your collaborator to come back after the May event to just report back on it. Or if you wanted it before to publicize it, that could be better. We could do both. Think about it, and talk to your collaborator. I would love that. That is so amazing and wonderful.
I was thinking about how I had Yousef Aljamal on a while ago who edited a book called Displaced in Gaza, and he was talking about how the Israelis are constantly trying to shoot down satellite dishes in Gaza, and then they ask, “How do you all even have electricity? We thought we had taken out the electric grid.”
The ingeniousness of people under these really oppressive situations is unfathomable. But these are all really important indexes because the very fact that it is becoming more and more global shows that more and more people are understanding the immensity of the problem and responding in a commensurate fashion.
We can gain so much. It will not map on perfectly to different locations, but there is something more than simply the spirit. The other question I had: could you give us your favorite example of this liberatory practice that sort of sticks in your head?
Oof, so many. I would say this is in the last chapter of the book, but there is this Roma feminist playwright who has her own theater company.
She came up with this kind of manifesto, and then a series of plays that followed on the conception of Roma futurism and techno-witchcraft, as she describes it. This is not exactly in the spirit of DIY computer making, but I think it still gets at that sort of sensibility in Romania, the șmecherie sensibility.
It is a speculative project, but she is wondering how Roma futurisms can reappropriate and cast spells against silicon technology. She is very much aware that Roma labor has been exploited to create the very foundations of much of the infrastructure that gets taken for granted in Romania.
It is a speculative project, but I really like the way that she frames it and has conceptualized a techno-future in which Roma witches can cast spells on figures like Elon Musk. I also love the stories of another playwright in Romania, David Schwartz, who is prolific in creating leftist political theater. He also created this play that I got to see called The Virtual Wallet, which is also about Râmnicu Vâlcea, this hacker town, and recounts just a bunch of stories that he collected in his own ethnographic research of kids hanging out in internet cafes. They were basically engaging and building social networks, and then at times getting caught up in becoming pathologized by the West.
I think it is more the stories that I find most compelling and the different imaginaries that people maintain in these different spaces that do not align or map onto the ways that hackers get pathologized by the West, and definitely do not map onto silicon conceptions of techno-futures.
No, I really love that. Again, the dismantling or demystification of these terms. I remember the first story you mentioned because you bring Silvia Federici into that discussion. It was funny. I told you I interviewed Tamara Kneese and Xiaowei Wang, and Tamara has this great article you probably know, “The Cloud Is Dead, The Cloud Is Haunted.”
So I said, “Let's talk about haunting.” And then they both laughed because they said, “We love the question because we are both kind of witchy.” And I took off from there.
I would like to end by saying it was very interesting for me to read the last chapter and then the coda. The last chapter is anti-imperial space-making, which follows a lot of the tone that we have just set about making spaces like the ones you were describing as potential sites of really significant kinds of cultures and reproduction of different kinds of cultures instead of being sucked constantly back into this concentric force of capitalism.
But then you have a coda, which is actually, in my estimation, a long coda. I thought I had to ask you, because it is almost like you were being very positive, and then the coda is positive but also has these really horrifying stories of people that were anti-capitalist activists now having to be in these call centers.
That one that stuck in my mind—I think her name is Caro, maybe it is somebody else—has to tell a woman who is trying to get housing for her dying son that she cannot. Talk about the last chapter, the coda and the interplay between them both in any way you want. I was just very curious about the interplay between them both.
Those are actually, I think, my two favorite parts of the book, too.
And the parts that I wrote last. Not everybody writes chapters sequentially, but those did both emerge last. In the last chapter, there is the part about Roma futurism. I think it is the most speculative of the chapters. Maybe it ends on more of a hopeful note than the coda does.
But it also was an opportunity for me in the last chapter to move past a socialist nostalgia, because I think in a lot of the book up until then, I am looking at these state socialist inheritances and how they are being threatened and sometimes destroyed through capitalist Silicon Valley incursions in the present.
I also did not want to romanticize some of the problems with state socialism, particularly around a sort of deracination process that I think the state socialist project was very much attached to. So while housing was created for people who needed housing, there was also this attempt to create this Homo Sovieticus or basically the socialist man.
I was really interested in how that figure translated into different speculative imaginaries of different futures during state socialism and some of the problems. I guess one of the questions I ask is why did this project of state socialism not end up panning out ultimately? What I am suggesting is that perhaps, as anti-capitalist as it was, it was not attentive to racial justice or to feminism. Even though there was more gender equity in the workplace, there is a lot more that could have been done, particularly around Roma feminism.
The chapter takes me to outer space, where I am looking at these different imaginaries. There were all these tropes during state socialism of going into outer space to inculcate communist futurism and then bringing it back to Earth. There is this story of Yuri Gagarin, who was the first human who went into outer space.
The myth goes that he brought these acorns with him into outer space, and in outer space, inculcated them with communist futurity, and then came back to Earth and planted these acorns. So now there are these Gagarin trees that are basically these oak trees planted around the former Eastern Bloc that apparently had gone into outer space.
I am looking at all of these imaginaries of agrarian utopian futurism, but how basically everybody is a white dude in these futures. Which then brings me into: why was there not attention to a sort of Roma futurism at the same time, and what might that have done to propel the project of communism or anti-capitalism differently?
So that is that chapter. But then you are at the coda. I did not imagine the coda as I was writing the book, but once I had found it, I thought, “Oh, this is just so strange.” A lot of what I am looking at in the book is how these processes very much rooted in Silicon Valley enact violence in Romania as it becomes siliconized.
This kind of took me back to the US and looked at it almost as a different directional way to what is happening. That is one in which there are a ton of call centers in Romania, many of which are supplying US but also Western European companies. Even one of the big ones in Romania is from Japan, with cheap labor so that these big tech companies can exploit labor as they do all over the Global South.
This is not unique to Romania, but there is a very high English proficiency in Romania, which I get into in the book and why that is. It partly has to do with Silicon Valley and actually with MTV and the Cartoon Network flooding the TV channels after 1989. At any rate, some of the call centers in Romania, one in particular that some friends of mine worked at, was one I call landlord technology.
The industry calls it property technology. Basically in the aftermath of 2008, when these huge Wall Street investment companies bought up properties all over the US but also in Europe—Spain, for instance, was hit really hard by Blackstone—these huge investment companies needed new ways to scale property management.
So this industry fermented, called the property technology industry, which had already existed but was much smaller. It really ballooned after 2008. There are a lot of tenants in the US right now who do not know who their landlords are. This is part of another project that I have been working on for a while to uncover corporate ownership networks.
Not only do they not know who their landlords are because their landlords operate through these obtuse networks of LLCs and limited liability shell companies, but a lot of tenants cannot even communicate with their landlord because their landlord is this big conglomerate that not only uses LLCs but also uses different technological platforms to mediate tenancy.
Most tenants these days pay their rent through these virtual property management portals. If they want to communicate with their landlord, they have to do it on some sort of app. They cannot just call a number and talk to a human. There might be a phone number to call if you are having an issue.
It happens that Invitation Homes, which was one of the biggest landlords in the US at the time that I was doing this research, was using this company called Yardi, which is one of the biggest property management landlord tech companies.It also goes by RentCafe, which people might pay their rent at. That is very common.
Anyway, if a tenant in one of these homes in California owned by Invitation Homes and managed by Yardi wants to call because there is an appliance that is broken, they cannot get into their house, they are having an issue or they cannot pay their rent on time, they might be calling somebody working the night shift in Romania for Yardi, which outsources its labor there.
In that chapter, I got into all of these frictions that result from this outsourcing where people operating the phones themselves grew up under very different contexts of property, tenants and landlord-tenant wars. Which is of course what I explore in the book. The people working in these call centers do not really have agency to do much to help tenants in the US if they are having issues.
I looked at all of these very stressful situations that both workers and tenants are forced to endure just to have a job or to live in one's home. The speculative future that I posit at the end is how do we really think about worker and tenant struggles coming together in transnational ways to fight global capital or to fight slumization?
Which is of course speculative. But I think just after observing that bizarre housing-labor geography, it really dawned on me that this is one of the ways, in addition to imagining other futures, that we materially need to think about creating better and stronger alliances to fight some of this because it gets at housing and it gets at labor transnationally.
Wow. I cannot thank you enough for being on the podcast.
I urge everybody to buy this book and read it carefully. We have basically touched the tip of the iceberg. There are so many interesting details, stories and histories, and again, you do such a wonderful job of disentangling all these keywords that we live by and show that human history is much more interesting and complex. It is both challenging, but also there are opportunities.
We have already booked you for two more shows. I am like your talent agent. One on landlord technology, which I really want to talk about, but also this conference in May. We will be in contact, but until then, thank you so much for being on and for this wonderful book and all the work you are doing.
Thank you so much for the close read of the book and having this conversation. It was really a pleasure, and I am looking forward to having more conversations.
