Book Review | Silicon Valley Imperialism: Techno Fantasies and Frictions in Postsocialist Times, by Erin McElroy (Duke University Press, 2024)
University of California, Los Angeles
kheitz@geog.ucla.edu
Erin McElroy’s book Silicon Valley Imperialism critically attends to how racist imaginaries embedded in European liberal humanism and capitalism mobilize the technologies of state socialism and Western empire. Seated squarely within Black, Indigenous, queer, and Romani solidarity, the text illuminates the stakes of overlooking race in debates about STS, global politics, and capitalist relations.
Part I, Silicon Valley Spatiotemporality, attends to geographies of racial dispossession foundational to both technocapitalism in Romania and the San Francisco Bay Area. In Chapter 1, using the trope of the “digital nomad,” McElroy traces the racialized and dispossessive property logics of technocapitalism. The White Westerner, they argue, is able to inhabit the problematic trope of the exoticized Gypsy while the companies these “nomads” work for are responsible for privatizing housing and evicting the very populations these stereotypes are based upon. Meanwhile, the Romanian state creates incentives to attract high-income workers to “build the country’s ‘brand’” (49). This, McElroy says, is Siliconization, a key political, economic, and aesthetic analytic. Siliconization utilizes narratives of capitalist modernity to erase housing and labor justice movements under the auspices of “freeing” Romanian people from communism. Simultaneously, it transforms histories of Roma racialization and centuries of chattel slavery into a circulating, deracinated stereotype of the nomadic Romani lifestyle. Chapter 2 explains the Cold War history of Silicon Valley and its expansion through anti-communist militarism. Just as the figure of the Roma nomad has been stripped of its racist origins and recast as a fantasy of capitalist free markets, tech has expropriated the idea of a sharing economy from the communist and socialist ethics it systematically uproots. These imaginaries of collectivity and nomadic freedom advance myths of a post-racial utopia while exploiting a transnational labor force and participating in racial banishment in places like the Bay Area. In Chapter 3, McElroy uses these tragic ironies to unpack the concept of technofascism, or “the mechanisms and technological fantasies through which fascist conditions of possibility materialize” (100). They point to the way that liberalism is the vector through which fascism proliferates by specifically sublimating anti-capitalist movements for housing and environmental justice. During the “Light Revolution,” for example, proponents of a liberal free market economy protested the corruption of state socialism, while ignoring the link between corruption schemes and global capitalist firms. They draw on several startling examples to make this point, including IKEA’s ecological extraction and embeddedness in Nazi fascism.
Part II, Techno Frictions and Fantasies, looks more closely at the sleights of hand of capitalist empire, and the frictions introduced by alternate imaginaries for an anti-capitalist future. The figure of the Eastern European hacker, for instance, represents a transfiguration of the Orientalist Transylvanian vampire, and draws on Western fears of the communist East draining the lifeblood of global capital. But it is capital liberalism’s parasitic exploitation of the images and labor of the East that enabled its metastasis. The technological vampire represents what McElroy defines in Chapter 4 as Silicon Valley imperialism, “the modes through which Silicon Valley extends its material and imaginative scope” (134). The hacker is demonized by Silicon Valley liberalism, yet these skills have been drawn upon by those very same tech companies. McElroy demonstrates the way that, after the collapse of state housing and factories, hacking became both a method of “postsocialist survival” (144) and a skill exploited by tech companies who praise Romanian English-language skills and technological prowess. Through their ethnographic work with young hackers, McElroy suggests that the racist narrative of the vampire, as well as the material benefits of vampiric empire, might be reclaimed in an act of what Jovan Scott Lewis (2020) calls “reparative seizure” (147). The hacks and scams that Romani youth perpetuate, in other words, are examples of their agency and subversive actions against Siliconization. McElroy further advances this argument in Chapter 5, utilizing the Romanian notion of “smecherie,” or “technological cunning” (167). This counter-motif is deployed as a theory and praxis of everyday resistance enacted through tapping electricity lines or hacking the US porn industry. This sense of restitution is wonderfully encompassed by an interlocutor who states, “The West hacked us after 1989; we just hacked back” (167).
The final two chapters turn these actions and aesthetics of resistance toward radical alternative futurities. Chapter 6 situates Romania within Third World liberation movements, First World co-optation, and Second World imaginaries.While the communists of state socialism were sympathetic to the issues of racialism in other countries fighting to remain non-aligned during the Cold War, McElroy raises the thorny issue of their own contemptuous racism at home in Romania. To explain this, McElroy points to the shared origin stories of state socialism and liberal democracy: Enlightenment humanism. Because it never relinquished itself from these visions of modernity, Romanian society was not only poised for technological progress, but also racial and eugenic projects. Rather than rejecting tech itself as a source of racist liberal humanism, however, McElroy introduces a chimera—one that sutures Third World liberation, radical humanism, and technology. Just as speculative fiction has offered refuge for Afrofuturist visions, the literal and metaphorical transfiguration of terrestrial and outer space makes room for visions of life beyond raced, gendered, propertied, and capitalist exploitation. The Coda, finally, links anti-Roma and anti-Black racisms and technologies, and proposes abolition from property as the key to liberatory futures.
Silicon Valley Imperialism is a needed anchor in the proliferating debates about Cedric Robinson’s (1983) use of the term “racial capitalism.” Scholars who have attempted to concretize or contextualize the term rightly situate it within the Black radical tradition and its material articulations in South Africa and analogous movements for Black life (Al-Bulushi 2022; Hudson 2018; Levenson and Paret 2023). As a term relevant for considering power relations beyond the category of Blackness, scholars often use religion and colonial status as a corollary for understanding racialized exploitation in global capitalist relations (Matlon 2024). This text retraces Robinson’s original argument regarding the European racialism that preceded the development of capitalism, and extends his text in three ways. First, by demonstrating how anti-Roma imaginaries and economic oppression has been operationalized in Romania, McElroy demonstrates how racism is at work in a situation that might, by US racial standards, be considered a racially homogenous geography. Second, their conjunctural analysis of US racial empire in both Romania and the Bay Area makes a clear link between Western racial regimes and their counterparts in Europe. Third, by attending to how racism has informed both state socialist and capitalist power, McElroy refuses a Marxist communist telos that disregards the way that racism continually recreates oppressive material conditions. In so doing, McElroy takes seriously the imaginaries of the Black radical tradition to protest racialized dehumanization, and to insist on life otherwise alongside comrades in anti-colonial transnational solidarity.
By focusing on Europe, McElroy creates space for the provincialization of Europe (Chakrabarty 2008) to “unbecome” in internal colonial capitalist contexts. Each chapter turns toward anti-colonial, anti-capitalist futurities that are being lived and imagined through Indigeneity, queerness, and Blackness. The modern figure of the human advanced and accelerated by technocapitalism is unmade by those producing knowledge of “imaginative worlds” that “directly inform the construction of what becomes material” (9). For instance, the liberal-capitalist logic of progress that requires dispossession is countered by Indigenous visions of a post-capitalist society in which technologies of communal living are revived and valued. Artist collectives envisioning past-futures of postsocialist Romania “queerly pave the way for new anticapitalist futures” (157) by desiring a future beyond privatization. McElroy’s work as a co-founder of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project that tracks racial banishment frames the activist scholarship of their book and broader work. Finally, Blackness is evoked as an analogous ontological and fungible framework through which to consider the dehumanization and dispossessability that marks endogenous anti-Romani racism. More importantly, McElroy draws on Black theory and Black geographic literature, concluding with abolition to gesture toward the imaginative and material power of Blackness as a speculative site of liberation. This chimera of unbecoming that McElroy forms between such ontologies of alterity is, perhaps, best imagined through the figure of the vampire and the practice of smecherie—a demonized and invisibilized caricature that is reappropriated to undermine and recreate the liberal-humanist, capitalist political body.
Such technologies and imaginaries of unbecoming are particularly important in this political moment of fascist revanchism. Amidst ongoing protests against Israel’s genocidal attacks in Palestine, and the dawning reality of another Trump regime, it is essential that scholars and activists attend to the way racism and colonialism have facilitated these conditions of violence, censure, and the jarring convergence between Nazism, the Russian socialist state, and US neoliberalism. This represents a moment of profound and compounded crisis; what collective response doesn’t re-articulate the “disaster capitalism” of postsocialist Romania? Instead of falling back on a technology as a “fix” or escape, how might we participate in the witchcraft of collective care as practiced through Black, Indigenous, and queer worldbuilding? Silicon Valley Imperialism invites us into a state of unbecoming, to “hack back,” and reorient technologies of dispossession into technologies of care.
References
Al-Bulushi, Yousuf. 2022. “Thinking Racial Capitalism and Black Radicalism from Africa: An Intellectual Geography of Cedric Robinson’s World-System.” Geoforum, no. 132: 252–62. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2020.01.018.
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2008. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton University Press.
Hudson, Peter James. 2018. “Racial Capitalism and the Dark Proletariat.” Boston Review, February 20. https://www.bostonreview.net/forum/walter-johnson-to-remake-the-world peter-james-hudson-racial-capitalism-and/.
Levenson, Zachary, and Marcel Paret. 2023. “The Three Dialectics of Racial Capitalism: From South Africa to the U.S. and Back Again.” Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race 20(2): 333–51. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1742058X22000212.
Lewis, Jovan Scott. 2020. Scammer’s Yard: The Crime of Black Repair in Jamaica. Duke University Press.
Matlon, Jordanna. 2024. “Ten Theses of Racial Capitalism.” Critical Sociology 50 (7–8): 1151–66. https://doi.org/10.1177/08969205241267135.
Robinson, Cedric J. 1983. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. University of North Carolina Press.
Author Bio
Kaily Heitz is an Assistant Professor of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles. As a critical human geographer and Black geographies scholar, her work focuses on cultural and community responses to racialized dispossession in California.