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 for work in the post­recession economy. ­There, workers pro­cessed keyboards, screens, motherboards, headphones, chargers, and more into packaged products to be shipped to retail stores. At the time, the press heralded Nokia Village as the “factory of the future,” one that would create at least fifteen thousand jobs and make Romania “the seventh power of ­Europe.”8 While ­these aspirational promises set in motion ongoing Silicon fantasies, soon after, Nokia was offered a deal to relocate to China, where new tax breaks awaited. They quickly closed up shop and left the city before completing their downtown office building (though Nokia does maintain offices in Bucharest and Timișoara ­today). A five-­thousand-­square-­meter parcel of the Coastei Street region where the Cluj office was going to be built was instead handed over to the Christian Orthodox Archbishop to build a Faculty of Theology, replete with student dormitories. The church’s leader baldly suggested that the education perks of the proj­ect would “make up” for the eviction of Roma residents.9 ­There ­were even conversations of developing an ikea in the area.

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 imperialism—­a phenomenon in which the Valley materializes new nodes and edges to facilitate surplus capital accumulation at home in California. Yet the nomadic avatar—as an allegory for a highly paid worker or even a roving tech com­pany like Nokia itself—is conditioned by nineteenth-­century colonial fiction. Reliant on location ­independence, they give up spatial rootedness for exotic locales, cheap living costs, and an ability to remain anchored in Western capital flows through remote l­abor and outsourcing. As a form of geographic arbitrage—in which commodities and l­abor are bought and sold in uneven markets to capitalize on better prices35—­digital nomads such as James Taylor mobilize Sil- icon Valley platforms like Upwork to accumulate money while sleeping. As another self-­proclaimed “libertarian nomad” from San Francisco living in Cluj explained, the idea of settling down is not at all appealing. The world is global, and success means being at home in the global world. “­People used to brag about buying and selling real estate developments. I brag about developing my own apps while living in Airbnbs,” he told me. In his analy­sis, apps, data, and the sharing economy hold more value than real estate. While this elides the materialities that digitality both necessitates and produces, from hardware min- ing to outsourced l­abor,36 it also erases the dispossessions that digital nomads impart. As digital nomad Kay self-­critiques: “This is gentrification at its simplest. This is globalization. . . . ​­Every dollar we spend, ­every blog post we write, and ­every coworking space we patronize contributes to this ­inequality. . . . ​We appropriate places and lead trends, we go where life is cheap but hip, and we are a ­little bit in love with our own lives. . . . ​We have the economic potential to destroy communities.”37 As I continue to explore, the landing of digital nomads and nomadic firms reproduces nineteenth-­century imperial desires while also materializing novel contexts of dispossession and exploitation.

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 has since expanded to San Francisco, Detroit, Berlin, and China. As he sipped a green tea latte, he described Cluj’s appeal. ­After college, he began dabbling in Berlin politics but found it boring. He then realized that the one thing that would never bore him was entrepreneurship. Attracted to the “the wild east of ­Europe,” he considered Romania, Bulgaria, and Ukraine. It became a toss-up between Cluj and Sofia, as he wanted to remain in the eu and as Bucharest was “too ­political.” Cluj won ­because of the plethora of cheap flights between the city and Berlin. While his employees d idn’t earn much at first, now they make three times as much as doctors in the region, competing within an international market. His international travels are nonstop, and he even owns an apartment in San Francisco that he rarely visits. It’s a ­great life, but he’s thinking of selling his share and starting something new soon, just for fun.

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 the service desk—on a meager salary but with the i­magined promise of potentially spectacular advancement—is preferable to picking strawberries in Spain, harvesting asparagus in Germany or caring for the Italian el­derly,” common employment sources for poor diasporic Romanians.76 Tech work is also more secure than gig work, which grew more popular throughout the covid-­19 pandemic.77 As couriers for companies such as Uber and Glovo, delivery workers are not digital nomads, but rather pawns of companies themselves fantasizing unrestricted “Gypsy-­like” transit across the pandemic planet. A tech job then means finding a bit more job security, but also, often enough, aligning with Western promises.

­There has been more attention allocated to the strange properties of property itself throughout transition, which admittedly has been, as Katherine Verdery marks, contentious, to say the least. In the mid-1990s, past ­communist leaders known as the nomenklatura became what she describes as “entrepratchicks,” or former party elites who became entrepreneurs overnight. Entrepratchicks, at least at first, didn’t want to sell the country to foreign investors in order to guard their own financial interests. However, when possibilities of Romania joining the eu ­were first considered in 1999, ­things began to change. Many who capitalized on “fuzzy property rights” following transition ended up exploiting popular trust in Western institutions such as the eu and nato. Utilities soon became privatized per an eu mandate in order to “promote the princi­ples of market economy,” resulting in countless ­people losing heat while transnational companies began forming new monopolies.120 Thus as Emanuela Grama suggests, “The pocess of Eu­ro­pe­anization could be viewed as a form of gentrification on a continental scale: the constitution of a union of ­European states aimed to engender flows of capital, ­people, and goods has been accompanied by an intensification of border control and international surveillance meant to identify ­those who do not have the right to move freely and evict them.”

Up to 30 ­percent of the country’s housing stock was nationalized during socialism, but less than 2 ­percent of housing is public ­today.130 This means that the very concept of social housing has been gentrified out of the public imaginary—­but not for all. Upon restitution, many evictees advocate for social housing alternatives. This, they argue, would be better than winding up h ouse­less or in a shelter. While shelters are better than nothing, they often segregate families by gender and sever communities. ­There are also far too few. Irina Zamfirescu and Liviu Chelcea observe that in Bucharest, there ­were 22,000 applications for social housing in 2017, but only twenty apartments available.131 Contexts such as this have animated the p olitical strategies of housing justice collectives such as the Frontul Comun pentru Dreptul la ­Locuire (fcdl/Common Front for the Right to Housing) in Bucharest and Căși Sociale acum! in Cluj,132 both advocating for dignified social housing production and against racist restitution evictions.

Despite the ongoing vio­lence of deracinated dispossession as it compounds Silicon Valley imperialism, Orientalist fantasy, and presocialist property geographies, the fight against racial banishment endures. Over a ­decade after the 2010 Coastei Street eviction, residents are still wastelanded in Pata Rât. In December 2021, amid the covid-­19 pandemic and increased housing precarity, Căși Sociale acum! convened another of what have become annual commemorations of the Coastei Street eviction—­this one specifically highlighting the incongruities of Cluj having been branded a smart city. A banner and light displays ­were hung from Elisabeta Bridge, spelling out, “I miss social housing,” and “Me too.” An “online march” was also convened entitled, “To whom does the smart city belong?” Tenants and activists w ere encouraged to share photos on social media about the smart city’s failure to address housing. Hundreds participated, displaying photos of signs being held with messages questioning: “To whom does the smart city belong, if public interest is only for profit?” “To whom does the smart city belong, if hundreds of people live without electricity and hot ­water in Pata Rât (near the landfills)?” “To whom does the smart city belong, if it is allowed to evict the most vulnerable ones?” “To whom does the smart city belong, if in the last five years ­there have been less than ten social housing units allocated (each year) for several hundred applications?”151 A group of activists gathered next to a new “smart” bus stop on Memorandumului Street, holding a placard questioning, “To whom does the smart city belong, if you need to leave the city, ­because you cannot afford a home?” Indeed, among the hollowed-­out Siliconized city, marked by the tower ing ntt Data tower, new luxury condos, and now even a Wizard of Oz nursery where the Coastei Street home used to be, to whom does the smart city belong?