UC Santa Cruz Electronic Theses and Dissertations
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UC Santa Cruz UC Santa Cruz Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Unbecoming Silicon Valley: Techno Imaginaries and Materialities in Postsocialist Romania Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0vt9c4bq Author McElroy, Erin Mariel Brownstein Publication Date 2019 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SANTA CRUZ UNBECOMING SILICON VALLEY: TECHNO IMAGINARIES AND MATERIALITIES IN POSTSOCIALIST ROMANIA A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in FEMINIST STUDIES by Erin Mariel Brownstein McElroy June 2019 The Dissertation of Erin McElroy is approved: ________________________________ Professor Neda Atanasoski, Chair ________________________________ Professor Karen Barad ________________________________ Professor Lisa Rofel ________________________________ Professor Megan Moodie ________________________________ Professor Liviu Chelcea ________________________________ Lori Kletzer Vice Provost and Dean of Graduate Studies Copyright © by Erin McElroy 2019 Table of Contents Abstract, iv-v Acknowledgements, vi-xi Introduction: Unbecoming Silicon Valley: Techno Imaginaries and Materialities in Postsocialist Romania, 1-44 Chapter 1: Digital Nomads in Siliconizing Cluj: Material and Allegorical Double Dispossession, 45-90 Chapter 2: Corrupting Techno-normativity in Postsocialist Romania: Queering Code and Computers, 91-127 Chapter 3: The Light Revolution, Blood Gold, and the New Times of IKEA: Impossible Spaces of Dissent in the Dawn of Techno- fascism, 126-188 Chapter 4: Postsocialism, Technofascism, and the Tech Boom 2.0: From Technologies of Racial/spatial Dispossession to the Dark Enlightenment, 189-252 Chapter 5: Hacking the Inimical of Post-Cold War Time: Mr. Robot, the Dark Army, and the Doomsday Machine, 253-301 Chapter 6. Non-Alignment in Outer Space: From the Ruins of Postsocialist Astrofuturism, 302-336 Epilogue: Blackface on the Nightshift, Proptech AI, and the Posthuman Landlord, 337-344 Bibliography, 345-402 Endnotes, 403-404 iii Abstract Unbecoming Silicon Valley: Techno Imaginaries and Materialities in Postsocialist Romania by Erin McElroy Unbecoming Silicon Valley: Techno Imaginaries and Materialities in Postsocialist Romania traces the racial and technocultural worlds tethering postsocialist Romania and post-Cold War Silicon Valley. Geographically, it traverses the Romanian cities of Bucharest, Cluj, and Râmnicu Vâlcea, the Molovan city of Chișinău, as well as the San Francisco Bay Area. Questioning what it means for postsocialist Romania to desire “becoming” Silicon Valley, it also asks how imaginaries of illiberal, corrupt postsocialist Eastern Europe informs the post-Cold War West. Methodologically, I engage ethnography, as well as reading and at times coproducing technology, maps, speculative fiction, media, infrastructure, and archival work. While deeply invested in the politics of displacement, I focus upon how socialist and pre-socialist techno-urban histories are updated, hacked, and rearranged in postsocialist times. Analytically, I engage the concept of Silicon Valley imperialism, or the global condition in which Silicon Valley’s existence is necessitated by its unending growth, and in which it devours people’s intimate lives and personal data while also consuming global and even outer space imaginaries in novel ways. Silicon Valley imperialism deploys what I describe as racial technocapitalism, a concept that I use to map racial dispossession amidst technocapitalism. Engaging these twin concepts allows for a decentralized analysis of race, space, politics, and technocultural reproduction. By tracking their geographic entwinement, I theorize a postsocialist iv moment. In this way, I read postsocialism as a post-1989 condition that endures on both sides of the former Iron Curtain, and that recodes configurations of race and empire today. In this way, I position the current “Tech Boom 2.0” in Silicon Valley as a postsocialist phenomenon. I also analyze how, as socialist-era techno-culture is pathologized on both sides of the former Iron Curtain, pre-socialist fascist technological imaginaries are reinterpreted in the name of anticommunism. And yet, socialist-era technologies and their aftermaths endure, entwined in wires and infrastructure, while also coded into hardware and speculative fiction. As I question, how, by reading technological futures past, might we dream of new technological futures yet-to-come, futures illegible to Silicon Valley imperialism and racial technocapitalism alike. v Acknowledgements First and foremost, this dissertation is dedicated to all of the housing justice organizers with whom I have had the pleasure of working with in the San Francisco Bay Area and in Romania. This list of dedicated people is far too great to fully list here. That said, in the San Francisco Bay Area, I am grateful for the ongoing collaboration with members of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project and the San Francisco Tenants Union, and the former projects of Eviction Free San Francisco and the “Oakland School” of Urban Studies. My thinking and political organizing in the Bay Area has developed with long lists of collaborators from these groups and more, including Marko Muir, Mary Shi, Terra Graziani, Andrea Miller, Ariel Appel, Andrew Szeto, Florian Opillard, Carla Leshne, Carla Wojczuk, Adrienne Hall, Manon Vergerio, Magie Ramírez, Savannah Kilner, Trisha Barua, Divya Sundar, Eli Merienthal, Claire Urbanski, Maria Acosta, Maureen Rees, Deland Chan, Karyn Smoot, Alex Schafran, Finley Coyl, Isa Knafo, John Stehlin, Austin Ehrhardt, Tony Samara, Dawn Phillips, Chris Henrick, Bianca Ceralvo, Stefano Funk, Alexandra Lacey, Benito Santiago, Jennifer Fieber, Deepa Varma, Aimee Inglis, Dean Preston, Fred Sherman Zimmer, Rebecca Gourevitch, and Jennifer Cust. In particular my collaborative writing projects with Manissa M. Maharawal, Andrew Szeto, and Alex Werth have been especially generative in my troubling of Bay Area racial dispossession, and I look forward to continued writing projects to come. So many thanks too to Ted Gullicksen, whose generosity and mentorship lives on in the space of this work. I have been spending time learning about contexts of eviction, race, socialist- vi era and postsocialist technology, and Silicon Valley imperialism in Romania since2011, all of which has been made possible through the guidance, support, and friendship of so many amazing people. I am particularly grateful for members of the Frontul Comun pentru Dreptul la Locuire, Căși Sociale Acum, Blocul pentru Locuire, Macaz Bar Coop (and before that, Clacă and the Biblioteca Alternativă), A-casă, and Ceata—all groups organizing for futures of housing and technological justice-to- come. Enikő Vincze has been a steady mentor throughout this process, as have a number of housing justice organizers, political artists, cyber deviants, and brilliant thinkers, including Ioana Florea, Mișa Dumitriu, Maria Sgarcitu, Ioana Bălănescu, Nicoleta Visan, Michele Lancione, Manuel Mireanu, Simona Ciotlăuș, Loránd Szakács, Robi Blaga, Alex Ghiț, Adina Marincea, Beti Pataki, Alex Rațiu, Domnul Vlad, Silvana Rapeanu, Lavinia Ionescu, Norbert Petrovici, Lolo Maxim, Mădălina Branduse, Elana Airim, George Zamfir, Paula Duncă, Alex Horghida, Alice Monica Marinescu, Roland Ibold, Noemi Magyari, Carolina Voizian, David Schwartz, Alexandru Potocean, Alice Venir, Andrei Șerban, Mihaela Drăgan, Mihai Lucács, Florentin Dimitriu, Bogdan Tirziu, Mircea Nicolea, RaJ-Alexandru Udrea, Iulia Mocanu, Victor Voizian, Ioana Vlad, Marian Cirpaci, Zsofi Gagyi, and of course, Ziggy-revoluționară-pisică. But in particular, I am indebted to the collaborative organizing, comradery, political theorizing, and insight of Veda Popovici, who has informed this dissertation project in far too many ways to count. This project would have never amounted to anything without the guidance and mentorship of my dissertation committee, to whom I will always be grateful. I could not imagine a more supportive advisor than Neda Atanasoski, whose brilliant vii scholarship on postsocialism, technology, and race has influenced my thinking through each chapter of this dissertation. Karen Barad’s invitation to think temporal entanglement and Cold War histories has been extremely influential as well, and I am indebted to her scholarship and thinking throughout this project. This dissertation has become what is through the generous insight and feedback of Lisa Rofel, whose close reading of my work, particularly around postsocialism, queerness, and neoliberalism, has helped me in framing and reframing my interventions and observations. Megan Moodie has supported this project’s many iterations since the beginning, from our early readings of Romanian history and to our later more nuanced conversations on socialist-era informatics. I am also indebted to her pointing me to towards thinking connectivity and connection as a methodological intervention. Liviu Chelcea has supported my research in Romania for years now, and his own work on restitution, gentrification, and zombie socialism in Romania has served as ongoing inspiration. This project was made possible with funding support from the Fulbright Institute of International Education, the Social Science Research Council’s International Dissertation Research Fellowship, the Univeristy of California Humanities Research Insitute, the Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz, a UC Santa