[...] That said, ­there are plenty of ­others who are paid far less to engage in more menial tasks “­behind the curtain” of automation. Nevertheless, the dream of entrepreneurialism is strong. As Oana Mateescu writes, “With the professionalization of the hipster into the upster (which, in Cluj, signals involvement in the start-up ecosystem), l­abor becomes a form of social and urban belonging framed in the terms of a technomoral governance that can refashion the entire city into a laboratory.”13 Yet these fantasies are only accessible to some. Very few upsters are Roma, and many aspire to move to higher corporate echelons to eventually land gigs at Google or Oracle. Yet for the most part, technocapitalist logics reduce ­these workers to surrogate cogs in a machine that accumulates wealth in California’s San Francisco Bay Area region—­a space that first “became” Silicon Valley during the Cold War.

[...] as Brenna Bhandar puts it, colonial encounters have long relied on the logics of private property in order to create cap­i­tal­ist markets, in turn producing racial regimes of owner­ship that haunt the pre­sent. Such confrontations have manifested “a conceptual apparatus in which justifications for private property owner­ship remain bound to a concept of the h uman that is thoroughly racial in its makeup.” As she notes, while racial capitalism was indeed a core tenet of feudal ­Europe prior to the colonization of the Ameri­cas, it became globalized in the era of modern colonialism, which relied on new technologies of economic, racial, and spatial m easurement, codification, and abstraction. Such techniques ­were used to render colonized ­peoples “outside of history, lacking the requisite cultural practices, habits of thought, and economic ­organization to be considered as sovereign, rational economic subjects.”40 Prior imperial vio­lence is thus not simply stuck in the past but is rather an ongoing condition of possibility that very much informs cap­i­tal­ist logics and their racial technologies.

Most of the tech companies scattered about Cluj, but also Bucharest and other Romanian cities, are not from Silicon Valley per se (although plenty are); many are in fact based in the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Japan, and beyond. That said, they cumulatively serve as an alibi for Silicon Valley imperial visions, while also being hooked into Silicon Valley venture capital cir­cuits, software, servers, data centers, and code. ­Today, not only does California’s Silicon Valley contain more billionaires, venture cap­i­tal­ists, and patents per square foot than anywhere ­else on earth, but also, the region hosts fifty of the top one hundred most expensive zip codes in the United States and most of the firms that power much of networked life globally. As scholars such as Margaret O’Mara and Linda Weiss have each observed, Silicon Valley economics have every­thing to do with the United States’ Cold War pursuit of technological supremacy and defense. This has continued in Cold War aftermaths, with Google’s former ceo, Eric Schmitt, leading a Pentagon advisory board while Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg embraces Cold War 2.0 logics which suggest that breaking up Facebook’s monopolies would empower Chinese tech. [...]

US empire helped engineer and then capitalize on the collapse of communism (though of course this had to do with a range of ­factors notwithstanding increased authoritarian rule, nationalism, and a shift away from the antifascist ideals that originally contoured the socialist proj­ect). Silicon Valley imperialism in par­tic­ular orchestrated the co-­optation of socialist-­era infrastructure, knowledge, and technofuturity. This then adds a new layer of empire into the mix, one that embraced technoliberal grammars. ­Here, by technoliberalism, I invoke what Atanasoski and Vora describe as a “­political alibi of present-­day racial capitalism that posits humanity as an aspirational figuration in relation to technological transformation, obscuring the uneven racial and gendered relations of ­labor, power, and social relations that underlie the con­temporary conditions of cap­i­tal­ist production.”46 Technoliberalism then unevenly powers the appropriation of space, race, l­abor, and futurity to embolden racial technocapitalism. Not only does it transit Western understandings of race and technology into the East, but it also galvanizes the coloniality undergirding California’s so-­called Silicon Valley. In this way, racial technocapitalism in Romania is a stratified constellation marked by variegated imperial histories, each of which transits dif­fer­ent relational understandings of race, ethnicity, and class.

Yet even the South Bay, San Jose, and San Francisco—­cities collectively recognized as Silicon Valley—­bear imperial toponymies, referencing lands vio- lently stolen from Ohlone and Miwok peoples

[...] 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 companies. Yet Stanford University would not have come into being in the first place if it ­weren’t for capital from ­founder Leland Stanford’s prior frontier ventures in gold and railroads. In this sense, the bedrock of Cold War Silicon Valley has always been stained by the ravages of empire.