Bookmarker is a personal project by @dellsystem to help with retaining reading material. Source on GitHub.

As in prior eras, technocapitalist appropriation of socialist space has not been met without dissent. In 2014, for instance, what became known as the “Dropbox Dudes” video went viral. Titled “Mission Playground Is Not For Sale,” the homemade YouTube clip features a group of white Airbnb and Dropbox employees mostly new to the city attempting to kick out Black and Latinx youth from the public Mission Playground to hold an informal corporate match.88 At the time, Dropbox was in the process of expanding to a space large enough to hold an indoor soccer field, while Airbnb, also headquartered nearby, was facilitating the transformation of long-­term affordable housing into short-term profitable vacation rentals under the veneer of “Fair to Share” marketing. In the viral video, the corporate employees pressure youth of color, most of whom had been playing pickup soccer in the playground for years, to abdicate the field. One of the youth, Kai (who has been evicted multiple times in the city), attempts to negotiate with the white men. One man, donning a Dropbox ­T-shirt, claims that the tech employees have the right to the field ­because his friend, Conor, reserved it through a new app. ­After some suspense, Conor enters the scene and waves a printed permit obtained through the app in the air as if it ­were a colonial flag. Generously, one of Kai’s friends attempts to educate Conor that ­people have played soccer on that field without a permit for years. It makes no sense that they are now being asked to vacate the park because of an unheard-of app. As it turns out, the app had been created through a public/private partnership between the Recreation and Park Department and the City Fields Foundation run by the Fishers from the Gap com­pany and the global capital firm, Charles Schwab. The app hadn’t been made public yet, but it was available for tech companies such as Dropbox and Airbnb to test. Their access to the app—as privileged users effectively able to displace those foreclosed from being able to download it—­highlights the contradictions of technoliberalism whereby technologies wedded to liberal conceptions of universality and freedom are applied only to those already benefiting from racial technocapitalist innovations.

interesting backstory

—p.87 Postsocialist Silicon Valley (69) by Erin McElroy 10 months ago