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Most work conducted in ­these firms is far from glamorous, and involves monotonous and repetitive tasks. Less technical work is increasingly sourced not from tech schools, but from liberal arts programs. But even this work is considered desirable. Per Mateescu, “Slaving away on the night shift at t…

Romania’s portrayal as both safe and exotic, as freed from its aberrant past and yet not fully Western, continues to appeal to nomadic fantasy. During the winter of 2018, I sat down in a fancy coffee shop with a German digital nomad, Fabian, who founded a geospatial data firm in 2007 in Cluj, which…

Yet nonetheless, just as Orientalist tales emerged from the heart of Western empires, so too do digital nomad fantasies of ­today. In digital nomad Daniel Kay’s self-­reflection, “Digital nomads are unintentional pawns in a new wave of economic imperialism.”34 This fantasy embodies Silicon Valley i…

While Nokia did manage to establish a short-­lived factory building in the outskirts of Cluj in Jucu—­a former state farmland and industrial zone—it never completed its downtown office building. Yet the assembly plant, “Nokia Village,” provided temporary employment for hundreds of Romanians hungry …

[...] Though the term “Silicon Valley” did not appear ­until 1971 in reference to semiconductor success by known eugenicist William Shockley,63 such events had every­thing to do with Stanford University, which had established a research park in 1951 that became home to many of the Valley’s earliest…