Red Emma’s

In The Cybernetic Border, Iván Chaar López argues that the settler US nation requires the production and targeting of a racialized enemy that threatens the empire. The cybernetic border is organized through practices of data capture, storage, processing, circulation, and communication that police bodies and constitute the nation as a bounded, territorial space. Chaar López historicizes the US government’s use of border enforcement technologies on Mexicans, Arabs, and Muslims from the mid-twentieth century to the present, showing how data systems are presented as solutions to unauthorized border crossing. Contrary to enduring fantasies of the purported neutrality of drones, smart walls, artificial intelligence, and biometric technologies, the cybernetic border represents the consolidation of calculation and automation in the exercise of racialized violence. Chaar López draws on corporate, military, and government records, promotional documents and films, technical reports, news reporting, surveillance footage, and activist and artist practices. These materials reveal how logics of enmity are embedded into information infrastructures that shape border control and modern sovereignty.

In Silicon Valley Imperialism, Erin McElroy maps the processes of gentrification, racial dispossession, and economic predation that drove the development of Silicon Valley in the San Francisco Bay Area and how that logic has become manifest in postsocialist Romania. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and archival research in Romania and the United States, McElroy exposes the mechanisms through which the appeal of Silicon Valley technocapitalism devours space and societies, displaces residents, and generates extreme income inequality in order to expand its reach. In Romania, dreams of privatization updated fascist and anti-Roma pasts and socialist-era underground computing practices. At the same time, McElroy accounts for the ways Romanians are resisting Silicon Valley capitalist logics, where anticapitalist and anti-imperialist activists and protesters build on socialist-era worldviews not to restore state socialism but rather to establish more just social formations. Attending to the violence of Silicon Valley imperialism, McElroy reveals technocapitalism as an ultimately unsustainable model of rapacious economic and geographic growth.

Iván Chaar López is an assistant professor in Digital Studies in the Department of American Studies at the University of Texas (UT) at Austin. His research and teaching examine the history and politics of computing and information infrastructures, and their relation to racial formation. He is especially interested in the place of Latina/o/es as targets, users, and developers of digital lifeworlds. His first single-authored book, The Cybernetic Border: Drones, Technology, and Intrusion (Duke University Press, 2024), shows how US borders are more than instruments of blockage like walls or fences; since the mid-twentieth century they are recursive regimes of datafication and racialization. He is currently pursuing a second book project that examines the history and technopolitics of semiconductor assembly along the US-México borderlands since the 1960s.

Erin McElroy is an Assistant Professor of Geography at the University of Washington, where they run the Anti-Eviction Lab and work on issues surrounding gentrification, technology, race, and empire. McElroy is also cofounder of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project and is an editor with the Radical Housing Journal. Erin McElroy’s work focuses upon intersections of gentrification, technology, digitality, empire, and racial capitalism in the US and in Romania, alongside housing justice organizing and transnational solidarities. This informs the focus of their recently published manuscript, Silicon Valley Imperialism: Techno Fantasies and Frictions in Postsocialist Times, with Duke University Press (2024).