[Event] Silicon Valley Imperialism: Techno Fantasies and Frictions in Postsocialist Times
Time: May 22nd | 5:15 pm (CEST)
Location: Zoom
Registration: Link
In this talk, modeled upon themes from their book Silicon Valley Imperialism: Techno Fantasies and Frictions in Postsocialist Times, 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 reproduces imperial materialities. This talk brings a critical and intersectional perspective to the tech industry's impact on the worlds in which we inhabit, including in the technofascist present. McElroy confront difficult questions about the alignment of liberal and fascist ideologies in today's anti-communist climate, offering an original examination of how techno-imperial expansion operates. At the same time, McElroy accounts for the ways that organizers and artists resist Silicon Valley capitalist logics to establish more just social formations—helping materialize the unbecoming of Silicon Valley.
Erin McElroy is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Washington, where their work focuses on gentrification, technology, empire, and racial capitalism, alongside housing justice organizing and transnational solidarities. Erin is cofounder of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, directs Landlord Tech Watch, and is coeditor of Counterpoints: A San Francisco Bay Area Atlas of Displacement and Resistance.
The event is part of the workshop "Silicon Landscapes. Imaginations, Materialities, and (Geo-)Politics of a Raw Material" that explores diverse 'silicon landscapes'—from the Californian valleys and Eastern Europe to Eastern Germany and the Austrian Alps.
Hosted and introduced by Moritz Altenried, Alexander Harder and Mira Wallis (Institute for European Ethnology, IfEE, Humboldt University of Berlin), organized in cooperation with the research lab "Culture, Society and the Digital" (IfEE), the project “SoLiXG: The Social Life of XG. Digital infrastructures and the reconfiguration of sovereignty and imagined communities”, and the Berlin Institute for Migration Research (BIM).