Caro had recently moved back to Cluj to be closer to her ­family while in the midst of finishing her dissertation on interwar feminist ­labor histories. Struggling to pay her expenses, she had managed to land a night shift job at an Office call center. She thought it was just some regular tech outsourcing firm from the United States. Soon though, she discovered that it was in fact the property technology firm, Yardi. Her job also entailed serving one of Yardi’s major clients, Invitation Homes—­the United States’ largest landlord of single-­family homes. A former subsidiary of the half-­trillion-­dollar multinational com­pany the Blackstone Group, Invitation Homes owns over eighty thousand properties and has been rapidly expanding throughout the covid-19 pandemic ­under the logics of crisis capitalism. It employs unique-­sounding shell companies to purchase its properties, often making it impossible for tenants to even know who or what their landlord is.1 Invitation Homes also mobilizes surrogate ­labor and digital platforms to perform property management, creating new technocultural and technopo­liti­cal abstractions for its tenants. At the same time, ­those working for Invitation Homes through Yardi strug­gle to understand who their employer actually is. “It’s all confusing,” Caro explained while we w ere having lunch one day. “I ­don’t know, do I work for Invitation Homes, or for Yardi, or maybe for their clients? Maybe if Invitation Homes is Yardi’s client, then I work for the clients of the client?” she puzzled.

Yardi first emerged in 1984 in California, yet, like much of the so-­called proptech industry, it ­really blossomed in the aftermaths of the subprime crisis amid the rise of corporate landlordism.2 Yardi is but one of countless proptech companies today reshaping the provision, consumption, and management of rental property. Proptech, or what tenants might better understand as “landlord technologies,” includes every­thing from tenant screening software to bio- metric facial recognition building access systems, from landlord-­and property man­ag­er–­controlled rental payment platforms to automated eviction notifications.3 Desiree Fields nominates this turn the rise of the “automated landlord,” 4 where corporate landlords effectively mobilize data capitalism in order to expand and manage their portfolios.

aro is but one of five thousand Yardi employees working in thirty offices across several countries today, providing platforms and virtual property management systems to abet its clients. “Yardi Romania” is the com­pany’s third largest outsourcing firm, where it employs nearly five hundred workers. ­There, it contracts with Invitation Homes as well as PropertyShark, a real estate database used by speculators across the United States, which it purchased in 2010. The call center opened its doors in 2013 as a laboratory for landlord tech surrogacy. ­Today, it provides 24/7 support in English and in Spanish. “We all know English from tv and school, and then most of us know Spanish from the telenovelas we ­were glued to in the ’90s,” Caro laughed. They are all trained in “Basics of Telephone Etiquette,” and “Hold Procedures—­Putting the Customer on Hold the P.R.E.T.T.Y. Way.” Rolling her eyes, Caro pulled training manuals from her backpack to prove that they are real.

By abolition, ­here I am thinking with the work of Rinaldo Walcott, who suggests that while an abolitionist future is not pos­si­ble without the abolition of police, nor is one feasible without the abolition of property.18 ­After all, it was the formation of private property that helped establish geographies of racial capitalism upon which racialized ­labor exploitation took place. The police ­were then required to concretize racial cap­i­tal­ist borders and logics, punishing ­those who transgressed its authority.19 An abolitionist geography, as Ruth Wilson Gilmore conceptualizes, then “starts from the homely premise that free- dom is a place.”20 This idea of abolition requiring unpropertied ­futures i­sn’t entirely new, and in fact Marx and Engels once suggested that “the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.”21 Yet, and as Fred Moten has critiqued, Marx did not theorize the abolition of slavery when writing this, as he could not imagine “the commodity who shrieked.”22 An abolitionist politic then needs to entail more than decommodification of t­hings rendered as property, but also the abolition of worlds in which p eople can be owned, incarcerated, and exploited. It is one that stands up against racial technocapitalism, freeing land, housing, bodies, and data from dispossessory logics. It would also seek to, as Wendy Liu argues, abolish Silicon Valley, which for her means remaking the world outside of cap­ital­ist logics, “decommodifying essential goods while also radically transforming the way we think about work.”23 Unbecoming Silicon Valley is thus a worldmaking proj­ect committed to remapping Siliconized lands and ­labor through abolitionist and anti-­imperial visions.