“In this strikingly original and important book, Erin McElroy forges a new field: postsocialist technology studies. Decentering the United States as the primary locale through which to apprehend the racial workings of technocapitalism, McElroy maps unexpected yet urgent connections between Silicon Valley and Romania. Alongside lucid accounts of the differential yet entangled operations of racial technocapitalism and racial banishment across these vastly different histories and locales, McElroy highlights the hopeful possibilities for anti-imperialist solidarities that can emerge against the odds.” - Neda Atanasoski, coauthor of Surrogate Humanity: Race, Robots, and the Politics of Technological Futures
“Brimming with compelling historical insights, Silicon Valley Imperialism is a conceptually engaging, empirically grounded, and essential contribution to postsocialist and decolonial studies, the contemporary history of Romania, and an understanding of techno-capitalism’s transatlantic ambitions.” - Michele Lancione, author of For a Liberatory Politics of Home
"Silicon Valley Imperialism stands as an indispensable read for anyone interested in the disruptive unfolding of tech-driven urbanism."
- Emanuele Sciuva, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research
"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." - Kaily Heitz, Catalyst
"Silicon Valley Imperialism can speak to multiple debates that those of us interested in tech, the city and housing are currently engaged in. . . . Importantly, it calls out the harm that processes of siliconisation and dispossession enact but it also highlights the way that these are and always have been resisted. This is not an essentialising reading of the impacts of tech capital but rather one that brings to light the experiences of those at the margins, something made possible by its depth of ethnographic insight." - Sophia Maalsen, Dialogues in Urban Research
"McElroy's theoretical framework makes her book relevant to students and academics beyond just those interested in the history of Eastern Europe. As a theoretically rich book, it would work well in a third-year undergraduate or postgraduate course. McElroy's book is a must-read for students and researchers interested in the debate on the emergence and impact of Silicon Valley, the politics of housing and infrastructure, socialism and racial capitalism, and historical anthropology. It is also an important book for those activists, policy makers and other societal actors concerned with the effects of Siliconization." - Tessa Pijnaker, Social Anthropology
"McElroy’s work highlights the power of postsocialism, not as a confined regional or temporal marker, but as a medium for more global analysis that allows us to centre the Cold War as a crucial and on-going site of Silicon Valley’s power, that is itself embedded in larger histories of racial capitalism, settler colonialism and empire. In the siliconizing present, the divisions between the ‘first’, the ‘second’ and the ‘third’ world are more elusive than might first appear, as ‘Silicon Valley imperialism’ recycles racialized violence globally." - Antti Tarvainen, Dialogues in Urban Research
"Erin McElroy’s insightful and incisive book sketches the connections between California’s so-called Silicon Valley and Eastern Europe, drawing from their ethnographic engagement and involvement in collaborative mapping projects and anti-imperialist organising in and across these contexts. Silicon Valley Imperialism combines this grounded engagement with admirably wide-ranging interdisciplinary reading to centre housing, racial and technological in/justice in a conceptual framework that ties together Silicon Valley imperialism, racial techno-capitalism and post-socialism." - Maedhbh Nic Lochlainn, Dialogues in Urban Research
"Silicon Valley Imperialism is a must-read book for all researchers and practitioners interested in technology imperialism and racial dispossession. The novelty of the book rests not only in presenting a simple case of ‘Siliconisation’ in a former Eastern European communist country, but stands as an example of how Silicon Valley techno-capitalism challenges societies and spaces, evicts residents and generates income inequality in order to satisfy the consumerism of the rich." - Remus Cretan, Dialogues in Urban Research
"What is remarkable about this book is the scale of object, maintaining Silicon Valley Imperialism both as an empirical and theoretical concept through each chapter. . . . Through a detailed analysis, the book finds its way into the stream of ethnographic approaches to tech labor that question Siliconization, following the author’s language. The emphasis on how this process permeates, if not preys, societies outside of technological hegemony through mechanisms like innovation is equally enlightening." - Natalia Orrego, Reviews in Anthropology
"Silicon Valley Imperialism is a must read for anyone engaged in postsocialist, decolonial, Eastern European or technological studies, as well as geography and sociology. . . . McElroy’s highly original focus and analyses decentres the USA, exposes technofascism’s workings, and opens up new conceptual and empirical questions for scholars of multiple disciplines and geographies." - Ryan Powell, Housing Studies
"[I]ncredibly timely. What McElroy offers us in this book, and what I focus on in this commentary, is a method for attending to how Silicon Valley reproduces its power globally." - Desiree Fields, AAG Review of Books
"[A] very timely book. Academic work is not exactly breaking news, but the analysis of the current technopolitical and historic cycle is as current as academic work can get up to the moment it goes into print. Some archival findings in the book should make news. . . . The entanglement of such themes in one volume is not a result of chasing relevance and sensationalism; rather, it reflects the sedimentation of themes and data."
- Liviu Chelcea, AAG Review of Books
"The digital nomad has become a cultural figure of the current moment, a figure both desired and reviled on an international scale. McElroy weaves an insightful analysis of the digital nomad figure and their desires to work abroad, connecting said desires to that of the gypsy." - Margaret Marietta RamÃrez, AAG Review of Books
"In uncovering the scattered and yet connected geographies that constitute Silicon Valley, McElroy demands that we study formations and processes of 'racial technocapitalism.' . . . McElroy’s scholarship and work, from Silicon Valley Imperialism to the AEMP to Landlord Tech, is a generous gift that orients us to such insurgent ground." - Ananya Roy, AAG Review of Books
