Unbecoming Silicon Valley

Abstract

The coda explores frictions engendered on both sides of the former Iron Curtain through practices of outsourcing landlordism. Since the 2008 foreclosure crisis, there has been a trend among US corporate landlords to use digital “proptech” platforms to facilitate scalable property management. While companies promulgate fantasies of frictionless automation, many deploy outsourced labor in non-Western locales, including Cluj. On one hand, by deploying Romanian workers behind the magical curtain of automation, novel circulations of race, labor, tenancy, and capital are animated. On the other, propertied frictions bear potentiality for new transnational geographies of resistance connected by housing and labor movements. Such resistance is part of the project of unbecoming Silicon Valley, as it weakens the Silicon grip on technology, property, and futurity. As the stories throughout this book evoke, anti-imperial worldmaking projects necessitate new transnational solidarities and connections, ones grounded in the ongoing work of racial, spatial, and technological justice.