­These sharing economy imaginaries, alongside social media discourses of public forums owned by private companies, highlight a novel aspect of Silicon Valley imperialism in which racial cap­i­tal­ist pro­cesses are cloaked by technoliberalism. By technoliberalism, I invoke Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora’s critique of a postracial and postgendered version of universal humanity enabled by technology, one in which fantasies of pro­gress for the liberal rights-­bearing subject mask colonial mechanisms of seizure, exploitation, appropriation, and degradation that technologies reproduce.9 Technoliberalism also gets at how, amid the fourth industrial revolution and second machine age, not only have racialized and gendered differentiations been accelerated, but also sharing economy grammars have appropriated socialist understandings of communalism in order to advance cap­i­tal­ist expropriation. Postsocialist analytics rooted in an understanding of multiply existing social and communal proj­ects that exceed confinement by state socialist spatiotemporality help elucidate the mechanics of this predation.

But police vio­lence ­wasn’t the only source of strife in Hunters Point—toxicity due to contaminants from the nearby shipyard began wreaking havoc. Upon relocation, Marie first obtained a job in the neighborhood’s shipyard, unaware that the “­little white stuff ” from ship sandblasting drums scattered on her clothes, hair, and community was carcinogenic asbestos. As she describes, “A lot of ­people, upon the hill, have died from one ­thing or another. From asthma, cancers, you name it. Our asthma rates, our cancer rates, our heart disease rates, the premature babies—­there’s something ­going on that’s not right. . . . ​On my block alone, on Quesada . . . ​before my husband died, ­there had been eight men who died from two types of cancer.”62 Marie soon after became one of Bayview-­Hunters Point’s fiercest environmental justice advocates, ­organizing with groups like Greenaction against environmental racism before passing away due to the carcinogenic particles she began breathing at the age of seventeen.

In what is often portrayed as one of the most progressive, technologically advanced, and environmentally friendly US cities, health is only afforded to ­those who can purchase or rent from some of the country’s most expensive properties. This is in part why Savannah Shange describes San Francisco as a “progressive dystopia” or “a city where industry and state development schemes collided to produce a racialized, uneven distribution of life and death.”63 Cold War visions of pro­gress and renewal posit technology as a remedy for spatial improvement, but only for ­those already privileged through the ongoing proj­ect of enclosing the commons for ­those worthy of private “non-nuisance” space.

There w ere also antiwar movements that specifically mobilized against Silicon Valley nuclear technologies. Student movements across the country mean- while found targets in military-­industrial labs on their college campuses, such as the Applied Electronics Laboratory at Stanford.64 ­There was also Computer ­People for Peace (cpp), whose “Proj­ect ibm” protested the police use of ibm computers to track Black ­people in Apartheid South Africa (not so dissimilar from ibm’s punch card proj­ect used in the racializing of Roma and Jewish ­people in presocialist Romania, as I describe in chapter 4). Proj­ect ibm also grew out of cpp’s attempts to raise bail funds for bpp member Sundiata Acoli, who had been a computer programmer with nasa for twelve years prior to becoming politicized by the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. In 1969, ­after having become finance minister for the bpp, he was arrested as part of the Panther 21 case, in which bpp members ­were framed for acts l­ater revealed to be linked to undercover agents.65 As cCPP cofounder Joan Greenbaum recounts of bail-­raising tactics, “We talked about racism wherever we went, including computer conferences, demonstrations and discussions inside the companies we worked for.”66 She notes that much like ­today, tech companies of the time ­were feudalistic, with ­women and ­people of color often relegated to menial tasks such as keypunch operation. Part of the cpp goal, then, was to build feminist, antiracist, and anti-­imperial power within the companies themselves in order to transform technoculture. Such tactics continued to inspire ­organizing efforts against racial technocapitalism in Cold War aftermaths.

The dot-­com boom busted shortly ­after it began due to overconfidence and failed investment strategies (perhaps something akin to the mass tech layoffs transpiring at the time of this writing in 2023). While the crash led to a decrease in rental and home prices in the Bay Area, it also impelled the restructuring of surviving companies into more robust cap­i­tal­ist machines led by Apple, Cisco, and Intel. Google and Facebook became rising stars, and then—in the aftermath of the foreclosure crisis which wrecked the slow gains made by ­people of color to build equity and secure stable housing across the region—­Airbnb, Uber, Lyft, and sharing economy start-­ups headquartered in San Francisco blossomed overnight. Twitter/X also launched in San Francisco, nestled into what soon became known as the Twitter Tax Break Zone, where tech companies avoid paying city taxes. As Wendy Liu offers of Tech 2.0 dreams:

Silicon Valley is more than a region in northern California that has become synonymous with the high-­tech industry. It is a dream. It is the dream of a world with new rules and new rulers, based on the princi­ples of meritocracy and efficiency and hacking your way to the top. It is the dream of the win-­win: innovation that generates profit through frictionless experiences and synergistic efficiencies, not exploitation. It is the dream that a hacker playground with unimaginable wealth and minimal outside supervision is indisputably making the world a better place. But what may be a dream for a select few is steadily becoming a nightmare for every­one ­else.

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.

Strategically, ­these dystopic ai conversations also obviate that it continues to be corporations rather than magical machines amassing technocapitalist power and reanimating decades-­old computing techniques. In the words of Meredith Whittaker and Lucy Suchman, “The term ‘artificial intelligence’ is widely recognized by researchers as less a technically precise descriptor than an aspirational proj­ect that comprises a growing collection of data-­centric technologies.”107 In this sense, conversations about the ai boom fictionalize that something new is at play rather than acknowledge that companies such as Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook are continuing to amass computation power even if masqueraded in openness.