Tech-Colonialism: Gentrification, Resistance, and Belonging in San Francisco's Colonial Present

Abstract

This article theorizes tech-led gentrification in San Francisco as a form of what I call, "tech-colonialism." Drawing on my ethnographic work with movements organizing against eviction and displacement, this article grapples with the critique from activists and protestors that gentrification and the tech-industry are "colonizing" the city. Taking this seriously, I argue that the analytic of "colonialism" provided San Francisco residents and activists with an important framework for political organizing, identity-making, solidarity-work, and forging belonging amidst the city's on-going "eviction epidemic." Beyond the discursive deployment by activists of "colonialism" as a concept, I also trace the material continuities between historical forms of colonial dispossession and present-day tech-colonialism, in which technology companies enclose the "commons," operate above laws, invest surplus capital in speculative urban racialized property regimes, and treat governments themselves as outdated and archaic institutions to be "disrupted." Ultimately, I define tech-colonialism as the social and spatial strategies of the technology industry that operate through colonial logics of racialized dispossession and materially extend and reproduce the colonial present.