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 post-socialist 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 and imaginaries in order to expand its reach.
Silicon Valley Imperialism brings an urgently needed, intersectional perspective to the tech industry's impact on the worlds in which we inhabit, including in the technofascist present. McElroy invites readers to 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.
No registration required.
