This week we read “Digital Nomads and Settler Desires: Racial Fantasies of Silicon Valley Imperialism” by Erin McElroy. The article introduced a term I had never heard before: Digital Nomads, wealthy individuals who work and live in cities like San Francisco but who fantasize about being “global citizens” or “gypsies” and travel the world all while continuing to hold down homes and jobs in big cities. These fantasies represent a fundamental misunderstanding and romanticization of Roma people and their displacement. As young white men, tech corporations biggest demographic of employees, flood the city and surrounding areas, it is disproportionately working class Black and Latinx residents facing evictions. Notably “over two-thirds of evictions transpire within four blocks of “Google Bus” stops.” This demonstrates how, just as mentioned in “How to Kill a City,” the presence of tech corporations in cities like San Francisco is directly leading to displacement of working-class people of color who have lived there for years. It is even more unjust that these tech employees are gentrifying these neighborhoods only to live there part-time while they see the world and work remotely.
The article also discussed the role of companies like Airbnb which turn “long-term, affordable housing into short-term expensive accommodations.” Long-term residents have been displaced from their homes on a large-scale, only for that home to remain unoccupied for the majority of the time. Airbnb’s users and marketing team circulate “the corporation’s multicultural colonial aspirations through campaigns like #OneLessStranger and their Pineapple periodical. These campaigns aim to ignore criticism about the displacement the company causes and fuel the neoliberal multicultural fantasies of its users.
I found this article very compelling. It uses a mixture of direct quotes from “digital nomads” data from the Anti-eviction Mapping Project to explain this phenomenon. I did notice, however, that this was written before the pandemic. Work from home – a term not even mentioned in this article because it was not widely used yet – is now vastly more common than it was at the time this was written. I would be interested to read updated analysis of this displacement, as I imagine it has become even worse.
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