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

Manissa M. Maharawal

Anthropological Quarterly, Volume 95, Number 4, Fall 2022, pp. 785-813 (Article)

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ARTICLE

Tech-Colonialism: Gentrification, Resistance, and Belonging in San Francisco’s Colonial Present Manissa M. Maharawal, American University

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 grap- ples 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 activ- ists 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laws, in- vest surplus capital in speculative urban racialized property regimes, and treat governments themselves as outdated and archaic institutions to be “disrupted.”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 colo- nial present. [Keywords: racialized dispossession, eviction, social move- ments, activism, technology]

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Introduction: “Conquistador Transportation” On a windy afternoon in late January 2014, a florescent-lit hearing room in San Francisco’s City Hall was packed. Inside, the San Francisco Municipal Transit Authority was holding a hearing on their proposed pilot program to regulate tech shuttles in the city (colloquially referred to as “Google buses”). After a brief presentation, the floor was opened for public com- ment, during which many in attendance criticized the pilot program as an example of the city government’s collusion in the processes of gentrifica- tion and displacement taking place (Maharawal 2021). It was near the end of the meeting that this point was articulated most powerfully by Ricardo Mendez,1 a community organizer from the Mission, a neighborhood which he called the “ground zero” for the “train wreck” of the “dot com industry.” A middle-aged Latino man wearing a bowler hat and a t-shirt that read “Basta YA!” Mendez’s voice reverberated through the room as he spoke into the microphone about the impacts of the buses on the “working class from the Mission”:

…your maids, your janitors, your gardeners—you know they are be- ing affected. They are showing up to work late because of MUNI and the delays of these tech buses. These new residents, they are com- ing in while our people are being evicted to the East Bay and have to commute from the East Bay to San Francisco with no luxury buses!

At this point Mendez’s allotted time was finished and his microphone was cut off. However, he continued to speak, pointing his finger and talking over the beeping timer: “You can arrest me right now…but you know what this is? Conquistador transportation!” Mendez’s comments prompted cheers and clapping from the crowd and although he was cut short, his point had been heard clearly: the buses were a colonizing force, an image powerfully captured through the metaphor of “conquistador transportation.”

Throughout my time conducting fieldwork2 in the Bay Area, I heard similar invocations of “colonialism” to describe gentrification. In this article, I take these invocations of the colonial as a starting point from which to understand the connections between tech-led gentrification and the colonial present in San Francisco. I examine practices of resistance which used the concept of “colonialism” as a framework for understand- ing (and struggling against) gentrification and the technology industry. In

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doing so I argue that “colonialism” became an important referent for resi- dents, shaping the terrain of struggle from the intimate level of people’s sense of belonging and identity, to cohering larger solidarities within the movements against gentrification and eviction. On the other hand, beyond a merely discursive analysis how the term “colonialism” was used, I take seriously the material connections between historical logics of colonialism and present-day practices of technology companies as they articulate in urban space. In doing so, I trace the enduring logics of colonialism, which are being reproduced through tech-led gentrification, racialized exclusion, displacement, eviction, and enclosure. In San Francisco’s colonial pres- ent, I argue that the technology industry’s practices can be understood as a form of “tech-colonialism.”

The Tech Boom and the Eviction Epidemic

San Francisco is one of the most unequal cities in the United States and home to one of the fastest growing wealth gaps between the rich and poor (Del Giudice and Lu 2017). Bay Area housing and rental prices have sky- rocketed in the past decade, making it one of the most expensive housing markets in the world (Walker 2018), which in turn has led to an “eviction

Figure 1. Anti-eviction protest in Mission Dolores Park, San Francisco, April 2014.

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epidemic”3 as poor and work class residents get displaced across the region (Bogachik 2017, McElroy 2019). According to a 2015 report by the San Francisco Anti-Displacement Coalition (SFADC), evictions increased steadily over the past decade (SFADC 2015) and the San Francisco Rent Board has tracked the eviction of 35,000 households in 20 years (Walker 2018).4 Moreover, these statistics are likely three to four times lower than the actual number of evictions (SFADC 2015), as many tenants are pushed out through harassment or buyouts before formal eviction notices are ever filed. During my time in the Bay Area, it seemed that everyone knew some- one who had been evicted or, in fact, had been displaced themselves. The housing crisis has also led to a crisis of homelessness that is “solved” by the state primarily through tent removals and “complaint-oriented po- licing” (Herring 2019), which—as Engels (1935) once observed—simply shifts the problem elsewhere.

It is hard to overstate the importance and influence of the technology sector on the Bay Area. The technology industry5 has long been based in the region due to generous military contracts from the federal government (O’Mara 2019), and San Francisco is still considered the “most important place in the world” (McNeill 2016:493) for new technology startup firms. As tech has “become urban,” (Zukin 2020) San Francisco’s political economy has been profoundly impacted by technology investment capital (McNeill 2016). While many of the major firms, such as Apple, Google, Facebook, and Palantir are located in the suburban South Bay, many of their em- ployees live in San Francisco due to the anti-growth housing policies of the suburban cities of the South Bay (Schafran 2018, Maharawal 2021). Several other major technology firms, such as Twitter, Uber, AirBnB, and Dropbox as well as Salesforce (whose tower dominates the San Francisco skyline) are located in the city. Many of these firms took advantage of a controversial re-zoning of the mid-Market area—dubbed the “Twitter tax break”—that waived the payroll tax for all new jobs created for six years. In 2019, after the tax break expired, numerous city officials called it a terrible idea and noted that the homeless population of the area grew by 1,600 people between 2011 and 2017 while the median monthly rent increased by 44 percent (Thadani 2019). The tax break, which garnered protests as well as a revalorization of property in the area (McNeill 2016), is one ex- ample of how the tech-industry, in combination with the city government’s tech-friendly policies, has become drivers of gentrification.

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The region’s wealth gap and its eviction crisis are both racialized. The gap between median household incomes in majority white vs major- ity Black neighborhoods is one of the starkest in the country (Sharkey, Yamattha-Taylor, and Serkez 2020), meanwhile Black and Latinx tenants as well as female-headed households have some of the highest rates of displacement (Maharawal 2021). The city’s Black population, which was decimated by urban “redevelopment” and slum clearance programs in the 1960s, has further decreased by half since 1970 (AEMP n.d.). The recent demographic changes in the Bay Area show how the region is being re- segregated (Schafran 2018, Maharawal 2017, AEMP n.d.) through recur- rent displacement that is “more about moving too often than not being able to move at all” (Schafran 2018:7). This regional demographic picture shows the continued whitening of San Francisco; in fact, the city—with its white majority and the shrinking Latinx, Asian, and Black population—is projected to be the only county in the Bay Area with decreasing ethnic and racial diversity (Policylink and PERE 2015). Of course, the regional dynam- ics are complex, and while San Francisco’s poorer communities of color are not completely displaced, the numbers overall are clear: Latinx, Black, and Southeast Asian communities are overrepresented in areas struggling with eviction, foreclosure, and bankruptcy due to the combined tech and property boom (Schafran 2018). In turn the technology industry itself is overwhelmingly white; notably, Latinx and Black employees are underrepre- sented at all levels in the tech-industry (Tomaskovic-Devey and Han 2018).

The Mission District of San Francisco where much of the activism I dis- cuss in this article was based, is considered the cultural heart of the city’s Latinx population and has been profoundly impacted by these trends. In the 1960’s the neighborhood was predominantly Mexican American with a large population of Central Americans (particularly from Nicaragua and El Salvador). This Central American population increased in the 1980s, lead- ing to the neighborhood’s pan-Latinx identity (Cordova 2017). The first tech boom of the 1990s and early 2000’s saw thousands of Latinx families displaced as dot com companies and their employees moved in, caus- ing a wave of cultural erasure in the neighborhood (Mirabal 2009). In the most recent tech boom, the transit-accessible and “hip” Mission District has again become central in the city’s eviction and displacement crisis: between 2009 and 2013 there was a 27 percent decrease in the neighbor- hood’s Latinx population (Budget and Legislative Analyst’s Office 2015).

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Gentrification and the analytic of colonialism This racialized urban political economy of displacement is what under- girded Mendez’s comment about “conquistador transportation.” It also formed the backdrop for the protests ricocheting around the region. In taking seriously the analytic of colonialism, mobilized by Mission residents and anti-gentrification protestors, I build on work that looks at how myr- iad experiences of colonialism are formative of our present moment (De Genova 2007, Goldstein 2014, Maskovsky and Susser 2009, Stoler 2016) and literature that uses the analytic of settler colonial dispossession to in- form our understanding of North America (Cattelino 2011, Coulthard 2014, Goeman 2008, Simpson 2014, Wolfe 1999). For Indigenous scholar— Glen Sean Coulthard, for instance—colonial dispossession is an “ongo- ing practice” that “never ceases to structure capitalist and colonial social relations in the present,” especially through continuing forms of primitive accumulation (2014:152).

In gentrifying urban spaces, such enduring colonial relations of dispos- session take particular forms. Recent literature on urban settler colonialism in North America (Dorries, Hugill, and Tomiak 2019; Hugill 2017; Tomiak 2017; Toews 2018) and globally (Sugimoto 2019) is useful for theorizing how colonial logics articulates in cities like San Francisco. In contrast to classic literature on the production of colonial cities, which stresses their importance as linkage points within broader imperial networks (Abu- Lughod 1965, King 1990), the urban settler colonialism framework argues that the accumulation strategies of the settler colonial city differ from the colonial city because they are “primarily oriented around the enrichment of settler constituencies, rather than far-flung metropolitan sponsors” (Hugill 2017:6). Here settler colonial urbanism draws particular attention to how settler colonial dispossession and violence appears in urban life (Dorries, Hugill, and Tomiak 2019). It is important to note that North American co- lonialism was not one coherent process but is characterized by heterog- enous histories (Goldstein 2014) particularly on the Western coast of the United States (Saldaña-Portillo 2016).

The focus of the critical Americanist tradition in urban anthropology on the reproduction of relations of power in urban space and how dynam- ics of power, class, and capital have shaped cities (Dávilla 2004, Gregory 1998, Low 2003, Zavella 1996) also contributes to our understandings of urban space as materially produced. While many anthropologists of

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Native North America have examined the complicated dynamics of in- digenous groups asserting their sovereignty (Cattelino 2010, Pasternak 2017, Simpson 2014), I am interested in how groups that do not claim indigeneity (nor indigenous sovereignty) deploy understandings of colo- nialism to make sense of the condition of rapid gentrification. Here, I am acutely aware of Tuck and Yang’s (2012) reminder that the language of decolonization is not a metaphor but is fundamentally about the repatria- tion of indigenous land. With this critique in mind, I argue that resistance to gentrification makes visible the ways in which colonial structures shape contemporary urban space. These persistent structures of dispossession deeply influence the present; in San Francisco they have provided activ- ists with a material and discursive context in which to situate their experi- ences as they contest processes of gentrification.

It is not just recently, nor only in San Francisco, that gentrification has been described “metaphorically as a form of colonization” (Jackson 2017:44), nor is it just those who are contesting these processes who understand it as such. Neil Smith’s classic work on gentrification in the Lower East Side showed how, in the 1980s, a colonial framework was used by capitalists and investors who understood the neighborhood as “frontiers” with all the metaphorical trappings of the “wild west” (Smith 1996). Representations of urban space were couched in the language of colonialism as both a metaphorical imaginary of urban space as well as a material ideology. This language legitimated gentrification by likening urban spaces slated for “renewal” to the so-called “empty spaces” of the 19th century American West in which everything was considered “a com- modity or a resource” (Slotkin 1973:411). On the Lower East Side, the “frontier” was an economic line that real estate investors used to divide areas of disinvestment from reinvestment (Smith 1996). A colonial logic that justifies the appropriation of so-called empty land arguably always underlies processes of gentrification, something acknowledged by both real estate investors and those resisting the process.

Contemporary contestations over urban space are connected to capi- tal accumulation and historically configured racialized property regimes that continue into the present (Bhandar 2018). Racialized hierarchies have historically shaped property regimes and the parallels with spatial and ra- cial reorganizations at play in present day San Francisco are not coinci- dental. This racialized dispossession is not simply a byproduct of capital

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accumulation but forms its historic core and shapes its present-day ad- aptations to particular places—a process Cedric Robinson refers to as “racial capitalism” (Robinson 2003). In San Francisco, the housing crisis and “eviction epidemic,” with their devastating effects on communities of color and working-class people are lived through the loss of homes, evictions notices, the loss of neighborhood and family businesses, rising rents, and the loss of informal community spaces through implicit privati- zation (Maharawal 2017).

Following Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s work, I understand California’s po- litical economy as one in which the state has managed its various crisis and surpluses (of capital, labor, bureaucratic capacity, etc) through the production of carceral spaces, racialized dispossession, and displace- ment (Gilmore 2007). The surpluses of capital and technological capacity which are created by the tech-boom in the Bay Area are inextricably linked to the dispossession of communities of color and have produced a form of “racial banishment” (Roy 2019) that is part of the “territorial prolifera- tion of prison logics manifested in geographies of forced mobility” (Roy 2019:228). As tech-led gentrification creates a crisis of eviction and ra- cialized displacement in the region, it is important to remember that the production of spatialized racial difference is also “embedded in the legal geographies of settler colonialism and racial separation” (Roy 2019:227). Moreover, as Stephanie Lumsden reminds us, the Catholic Mission sys- tem, which decimated the region’s Indigenous population and lifeways, “was the first carceral regime in California” (Lumsden 2021:84).

By placing present-day contestations over urban space, home, be- longing, and eviction within a broader framework of racial capitalism and the enduring logics of urban settler colonialism, we may view the analytic of colonialism mobilized by protestors as a political claim for common rights. This is particularly visible in contestations where the tech-industry operates as a colonial and gentrifying force in its own right—what I call “tech-colonialism.”

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Theorizing Tech-Colonialism

Soon after Mendez’s comments about “conquistador transportation” the SFMTA board voted to continue with their permitting plan for the bus- es, leaving the activists defeated. Yet, as everyone filed out of the room and into the marble halls of San Francisco City Hall, the conversation was not one of defeat but of continued resistance: ideas for how to keep pro- testing the buses and plans for the next anti-eviction protest were shared while nearby a long-time resident talked to a reporter about how Google was “colonizing” the city. In allowing the private shuttle buses to continue operating, the city government was seen by these activists as worsening the crisis of affordable housing and abetting the city’s “colonization” by the technology industry. Their rage at the buses and at the SFMTA board’s decision was palpable.

In contrast the technology workers who took the buses, were “blindsid- ed by the explosion of outrage” the buses engendered (Chan 2017). For the tech companies, the shuttles were part of a “corporate care” model that incentivizes long work hours through perks like access to free luxury shuttles with on-board WiFi (English-Lueck 2017). And for the techno- cratic SFMTA, the issues of housing and transportation were “separate issues” that were preferably addressed in separate committees. As one SFMTA board member told the assembled crowd in exasperation, “This is not a meeting about housing—it is about transportation!”

Despite these disparate interpretations of the buses, over the next five years Google bus blockades became a ubiquitous protest tactic across the

Figure 2. Anti-eviction protest on Valencia Street, San Francisco, March 2014.

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region (Maharawal 2021).6 At these protests, issues of housing, transpor- tation, tech-led gentrification, and colonialism were tied together repeat- edly through symbolic acts, press-releases, and direct actions, which pe- rennially targeted the “Google buses” as ciphers of the region’s inequality. Such protests articulated a critique of what I’m calling “tech-colonialism.”

In theorizing “tech-colonialism,” I join scholars who examine the par- ticular capitalist formation that is the technology industry. As the bound- aries between our digital and non-digital lives are increasingly blurred (Boellstorff 2016) the particularity of the technology industry stems in part from its strategies of accumulation in which data itself has become capital (Sadowski 2019). This accumulation through data has created “behav- ioral futures markets” that represent new violations of human rights and undermining of democratic practices (Zuboff 2019). Couldry and Mejias (2019) have theorized “data-colonialism” as a practice that combines the “predatory extractive practices of historical colonialism” (2019:337) with computing.

Such technological frontiers can be understood as just one part of a broader formation of tech-colonialism that manifests in spatial and non- digital ways. Erin McElroy engages the concept of “Silicon Valley imperial- ism” or “techno-imperialism” as “the mode in which techno-capitalism ex- pands its power through an array of extractive technologies” in their work on the technology industry in Romania and California (McElroy 2019:3). Here McElroy theorizes Silicon Valley as an imperial hub which accumu- lates wealth globally, creating fantasies of “becoming Silicon Valley” else- where, such as in Romania. The concept of tech-colonialism, by contrast, is less oriented towards the imperialist projects of Silicon Valley abroad and focused more precisely on theorizing the role of tech-industry within the Bay Area’s own enduring colonial present. Particularly, I define tech- colonialism as the social and spatial strategies of the technology industry which operate through colonial logics of racialized dispossession and ma- terially extend and reproduce the colonial present. It is a form of coloniality in which technology companies enclose the “commons,” operate above laws, invest surplus capital in speculative urban racialized property re- gimes, and treat governments themselves as merely outdated and archaic institutions to be “disrupted.”

In theorizing the specificity of San Francisco’s changing urban land- scape through a lens of tech-colonialism, I move beyond analyses of urban transformation that center neoliberalism or theorize gentrification

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within recent capitalist history. Instead, following Harris (2004), I argue that tech-colonialism is grounded in the “actuality and materiality of a specific colonial experience” (Harris 2004:167) and “embedded in a broader econ- omy of racialized violence” (Dorries, Hugill, and Tomiak 2019). Placing the contemporary urban transformations of the San Francisco region within an analytic of tech-colonialism does two things: firstly, it renders visible historical dimensions of gentrification within a longer genealogy of colo- nialism and, secondly, connects this to the spatial strategies of enclosure which characterize both historical colonialism and contemporary tech-co- lonialism. My analysis of tech-colonialism in San Francisco is, thus, both specific to the colonial histories in the region, but also a general examina- tion of the strategies of accumulation that the technology industry em- ploys as they articulate in a particular city. As such, tech-colonialism is a formation in which racialized histories of violence and dispossession are reproduced through social and spatial relations of power.

At its broadest level, “tech-colonialism” can be understood as a con- temporary social formation in which the technology industry revives and reassembles the colonial present through a variety of means, the broad contours of which are: (1) culture: the cultural erasure of displaced com- munities, the rise of tech-cultures and social media which are colonizing global culture, the quasi-civilizing missions of tech-companies; (2) law: flouting and re-writing local laws as needed, employing armies of lobby- ists to change policy, exploiting uneven legal geographies globally; (3) pol- itics: the class alliances through which tech-companies secure projects, gain military funding, circumvent local resistance; (4) economy: the specu- lative valuations of tech-companies, the enclosure of digital and material “commons,” the transformation of regional economies; (5) class: exploita- tion of highly stratified and global labor force, precaritization through the gig economy; (6) gender: the domination of the tech-industry by men, the gendered impacts of technological reorganizations of economy; (7) race: re-encoding race through digital technologies, the production of racialized geographies through economic reorganization, (8) and space: space-time compression, spatial strategies of enclosure, investment of surplus capital in urban real estate markets, pitting cities against one another in bids for company headquarters, etc.

A contemporary strategy of capital accumulation for tech startups has been commodifying and enclosing that which was previously free and publicly accessible. Often new private and proprietary technologies, such

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as mobile apps, are used to capture or gain access to what were previ- ously free services, public infrastructures, or social practices. Examples of this include the unregulated use of delivery robots, self-driving cars, and bicycles and other forms of transportation, such as taxis that use apps for access.7 It is through such strategies that tech-capital in San Francisco transformed previously public spaces into implicitly privatized spaces (Maharawal 2017). Here tech-companies experiment with push- ing the limits of city regulation and public tolerance for “disruption” and “innovation” in various sectors of urban life, from housing to transporta- tion. These companies are often openly antagonistic to regulation by the government and, in turn, government regulation has to play “catch-up,” scrambling to legislate or write policy that accounts for the practices of these companies.

Moreover, technology companies often rely on unrestricted access to urban space, in order to test out and subsequently profit from their use as well as state sponsored development practices. In San Francisco, the tech friendly administration of Mayor Ed Lee was instrumental in creating what John Stehlin (2015:476) refers to as the post-industrial “shop floor” in which public and semi-public amenities in the urban spatial milieu were explicitly designed to transform urban public space into a workplace of the technology industry. Stehlin points to the development of “knowledge corridors” that combine high-tech employment with amenity rich housing and a vibrant public sphere as a “form of gentrification that in part func- tions to create the ‘shop floor’ of the ‘innovation economy’” (2015:479). Here the technology industry directly exploits and encloses urban space, drawing value from it in ways that are engrained with racialized and gen- dered displacements from public life (Parker 2008).

Those protesting against the technology industry often made similar connections between the technology industry and various forms of dis- placement. For example, in 2021 there was another Google bus blockade in the Mission neighborhood of San Francisco. In this blockade, on the corner of 24th and Mission, protestors wearing white hazmat suits piled e-scooters into a five-foot-high barricade and set them on fire in front of a Google bus, in order to protest their incursion onto city streets. The un- regulated scooters, owned by venture capital-backed tech startups such as Bird and Lime, had been placed on city streets using a common tactic in the technology industry: bypassing municipal regulations to attract cus- tomers quickly (Seabrook 2021).8 At the blockade protestors held signs

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that read: “techsploitation is toxic” and “destroy the tech-savior indus- trial complex” in order to draw connections between the scooters and the city’s homeless crisis, excoriating the recent police sweeps of homeless encampments. As one participant explained, “What you’re seeing here is that scooters have more rights than people… We’re tired of being seen as an experimental playground for the tech-industry.”

In making connections between the e-scooters and police sweeps of homeless encampments the protest drew attention to the violent con- tradictions of public space in San Francisco: while the city government worked to legalize e-scooters on the streets (after being illicitly placed there by tech startups), unhoused people using the same sidewalks were criminalized. The critique articulated here is of the technology industry’s urban spatial strategy, one in which urban public space is appropriated for private “productive” uses. Such practices can be understood as mir- roring colonial strategies of enclosing the commons and indigenous lands for private gains, a process in which the “Anglo settler world” was coeval with the “emergence of a modern legal governmental apparatus” (Nichols 2010:35).

Tech-colonialism shares important continuities with historical practic- es of colonization and primitive accumulation in which the enclosure of land and its transformation into private property was predicated on logics that privileged “productive” labor and uses of land (Locke 2003[1689]). Historically, this spatial strategy created private property out of indigenous land that, as John Locke famously claimed, was “uncultivated waste…left to nature without any improvement” with “needy and wretched inhabit- ants” (2003:16). Enclosure and appropriation of native land was legitimat- ed through Locke’s theory of labor and property, setting up a comparison between “the wild Indian” and the farming communities of England (Hall 2003). This was an explicitly racist spatial strategy that continued though the judicial construction of territory that excluded those who were not white from owning property. Whiteness and property are inextricably en- tangled in the history of the United States through a legal regime that con- verted Black people into property as well as a system of property rights “in which the ‘race’ of the Native Americans rendered their first possession rights invisible and justified conquest,” (Harris 1993:1721). More broadly colonial practices globally experimented in creating spaces of racial con- trol (Fanon 1963).

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By pointing to the city government’s role in facilitating e-scooters, while criminalizing homeless people, protestors deftly connected legal systems, tech’s “disruption” strategies, and tech-friendly state policy with racialized and classed processes of dispossession, displacement, and eviction. By calling this a “tech-savior industrial complex,” the protest also hit upon an important critique of technology companies’ claims to providing an “environmentally friendly” transportation alternative (Maharawal 2021). The concept of a “tech-savior industrial complex,” was a reference to the term “white savior industrial complex” coined by the novelist Teju Cole, as a way to describe “a big emotional experience that validates privilege” (Cole 2012). Through this concept, protesters criticized the broader sav- ior narrative at work in the technology industry: one in which companies view their practices as a kind of latter-day civilizing mission which shares important terrain with colonial and neo-colonial savior narratives critiqued by many (Mamdani 2009, for example).

These protests can be understood as struggles against particular fac- ets of tech-colonialism: from the flouting of local laws and the cooptation of city government to the use of spatial strategies of enclosure and the re-inscription of class and race into urban space. Here the appropriations of urban space enacted by tech-colonialism operated through enclosure, homeless removal, and ideologies of “productive” land use embedded in classed and racialized regimes of property. The sweeps of homeless encampments by the city government and the enclosure of urban com- mons are particular articulations of tech-colonialism in present-day San Francisco.

The Urban Commons In early October 2014, I walked into the San Francisco Tenant Union to meet members of the activist collective, the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project. Inside, everyone was watching a video posted to YouTube titled “Mission Playground is Not for Sale.” The grainy cell phone video of an altercation at the Mission Playground, just a few blocks away, was going viral in the city. In it, a group of mostly Latinx youth are playing soccer when a group of tech employees in their mid-20s (mostly from the company Dropbox) arrive and tell the youth to leave, brandishing a permit they obtained. The youth refuse to leave, and instead argue that the field has “always” been used for seven-on-seven pick-up games. In the Tenant Union office

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people audibly sighed and shook their heads while watching the video and I quickly learned that the field had been the site of disagreement ever since the city introduced the pay-to-play permits (Maharawal 2014). The refusal of the Latinx youth to leave the field when confronted by tech-employees, provided a powerful visual metaphor for the dynamics of displacement in the neighborhood. These connections were made most salient when one of the teenagers in the video explains to a young white tech-employee: “you don’t understand, this field has never been booked” then asking, “how long have you been in the neighborhood, bro?” In response we hear the tech-employee respond: “who gives a shit...who cares about the neighborhood?”

At the core of the altercation was the question of who can use public space and how it should be accessed. In contrast to the youth practice of sharing access to the field, the permitting system used a pay-to-play model that charged fees. Fee-based systems and their attendant rules are often more transparent and accessible to those who have power and can diminish systems of belonging and custom (Adiv 2015). They also turn public spaces into commodities through a capitalist and colonial logic of enclosure and cultural erasure. As Erin McElroy (2014) wrote at the time: “Instead of getting to know the existing culture of the seven-on-seven pickup games in the park and slowly integrating, these newly arrived settlers seek to bypass existing culture altogether, claiming sovereignty through access to government—and an app.”9 By referencing settlers and “existing culture,” McElroy likens the situation to a kind of colonial- ization. If we understand these as struggles over the urban commons, where space is governed by customs which are constantly renegotiated in everyday practices embedded in custom and local history (Susser and Tonnelat 2013), what becomes visible is how such micro struggles are in fact articulations of the broader processes of enclosure that characterize tech-colonialism.

A week later, after the video had circulated widely, the San Francisco Latino Democratic Club organized a protest outside City Hall. There a few hundred people gathered holding signs that read, “Mission Playground Not for Sale,” and the teenagers involved in the incident spoke before the assembled crowd. Their testimonies recounted how the field provided them with a place to be after school and gave them a sense of belonging in the rapidly gentrifying neighborhood, a sentiment summed up when the president of the Latino Democratic Club gave a speech, in which he stated:

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“we were outraged that our youth were being pushed off their ancestral playground where they grew up.” By drawing upon ideas of ancestral land, the speech made connections between current conflicts over space in the city and longer histories of colonialism. The reference to an “ances- tral playground” shared a discursive terrain with Mendez’s “conquistador transportation.” Both identified the technology industry as displacing and excluding residents from spaces in which they felt a deep sense of belong- ing. Both indexed how residents interpreted such displacements as “colo- nial.” Threading through such struggles were narratives of belonging that explicitly viewed gentrification as “one of the latest iterations of colonial- capitalist dispossession” (Kilner and Ramírez 2021:68). Here, protestors not only demanded legal redress or government intervention, but rather their struggles embodied a different vision of the city altogether: one of public space as an urban commons, produced and maintained by existing communities. They also articulated clear critiques of the forms of life and rights valued by tech-led urban redevelopment and its enclosures.

To understand colonialism as an ongoing and historically present phe- nomena, is to understand contemporary forms of urban dispossession as structures through which settler colonialism reproduces and extends itself. While in popular discourse, conversations about displacement often “omit the presence of Indigenous peoples and are disconnected from colonial histories of Indigenous dispossession and genocide” (Kilner and Ramírez 2021:67), many of the protests organized against the tech-industry (from Google Bus blockades to anti-eviction protests) sought to explicitly ac- knowledge indigenous dispossession. Frequently this took the form of an opening statement: many protests and activist meetings started by saying “we are on Ohlone land,”10 in a recognition of the fact that San Francisco is located on the unceded territories of the Ohlone people. Even though the protests against gentrification I write about here often acknowledged indigenous land, the struggles and lived experiences of the Ohlone people were not in practice connected. This is notable, given that contemporary Ohlone struggles articulated similar critiques of gentrification and the housing crisis, alongside liberatory visions of the urban commons.

Contemporary Ohlone geographies of the Bay Area include the 425 shell mounds that are “all under cement, asphalt, and railroad tracks and bars and schools” (Gould 2021:74) as well as the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust, “an urban Indigenous women-led community organization that facilitates the return of Chochenyo and Karkin Ohlone lands in the San Francisco Bay

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Area to Indigenous stewardship” and “creates opportunities for all people living in Ohlone territory to work together to re-envision…what it means to live on Ohlone land” (LaRose and Raders 2021:106). The Sogorea Te’ Land Trust, based in the East Bay, offers an example of what it means not just to own land but to “take responsibility for the land and move from ownership to something greater that serves us all,” (LaRose and Raders 2021:108). This vision includes space to farm, pray, and practice traditional lifeways based on the recognition that “all land is sacred; that all land in the United States is stolen” (LaRose and Raders 2021:108).

In the Bay Area, ancestral Indigenous communities were colonized three times: enslaved through the Spanish Mission system, Mexican colo- nization, and then the westward expansion of the United States, which pursued a policy of mass extermination (Gould 2021). In her recounting of this history, Corrina Gould, a Chochenyo Ohlone leader in the Bay Area and the cofounder of the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust, connects these dispos- sessions to contemporary forms of housing dispossession in the Bay Area writing:

today we have so many of our brothers and sisters and relatives liv- ing in tent cities… and they should be afforded dignity in living that way…what happened a little over 200 years ago when the Spanish came was that they believed that was not a sufficient way to live with my ancestors and through gun and sword took us away from that form of living…we haven’t gotten that far from where we were 200 some years ago with the colonization to happen on these lands. (Gould 2021:71-72)

Julian Brave NoiseCat also connects housing struggles of urban Indigenous communities in the Bay Area to long processes of erasure and coloniza- tion. He writes about Joe Waukazoo, who is Lakota and Odawa, as “less visible than his fellow street folk because he is…an urban Indian—a de- mographic who has no place in the public imagination” (NoiseCat 2018). For NoiseCat, the crisis of home is simultaneously one of erasure and belonging, a crisis that is structural and “intergenerational” rather than a momentary inequity (NoiseCat 2018).

Against such enduring histories of Indigenous dispossession, the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust represents a vision and practice of decolonizing urban space that imagines Oakland beyond colonial temporalities and

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racial capitalist logics of property (Ramírez 2020). This stands in stark contrast to tech-colonialism’s parallel and continuing enclosure and dis- possession of contemporary urban space. Moreover, the Sogorea Te’Land Trust extends and expands the idea of what an urban commons can be, with its expansive temporality and project of re-envisioning what it means to live on Ohlone land.

There are other examples of projects which expanded the idea of the urban commons. The Anti-Eviction Mapping Project’s work of counter- mapping and recording narratives of displacement and resistance also ex- plicitly articulated an alternative vision of an urban commons (Maharawal and McElroy 2018). In the Mapping Project’s work, the stories and strug- gles of those experiencing displacement and fighting against eviction were constructed as a collective project of making memory, forging resis- tance, and building community. In the fight against cultural and political erasure at the hands of tech-colonialism, the Mapping Project built an urban commons through stories and political community created in the process of remembering. Here, the Indigenous tradition, recognizing that land is storied and not just “a confined place within rigid boundaries,” points to how we have a shared responsibility to each other and unfixes these places from discourses of colonialism that seek to fix it in a “state of control and power” (Goeman 2008:32). Such practices offered alternative place-based visions for how urban space could be lived differently, while also chronicling cultural, customary, and communal spaces.

Belonging and Erasure Sitting in his Mission home in the late afternoon sun, I asked Ricardo Mendez about his conquistador transportation comment at the SFMTA meeting. He laughed and recounted a “funny story” about the first time he saw the Google buses in the Mission. He began by reminding me that the buses’ signs read “MTV” (indicating the destination is Mountainview, Google’s headquarters). Mendez used to work for MTV (the Music Television station) in its early days. So initially, he thought perhaps the television network (MTV) was filming somewhere in the city. Maybe some- one he knew was on the bus:

But then I started seeing the bus every day, so then I actually followed the bus one day. I jumped on the bus and I was just being sarcastic,

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and I said, “where are we filming today?” And everyone looked at me, and then I noticed that they weren’t rappers, they weren’t musi- cians, they were like these nerdy looking kids. The bus driver was Latino and I said to him: “is this MTV?” And he said, “No, this is the Google bus we’re going to Mountainview” …He was from the barrio, we connected right away. And so, he told me right away all about the buses. For me it really felt like an invasion of these luxury buses coming through the barrio. Meanwhile, having been from the barrio, just looking at these buses, I couldn’t believe the luxury… [it] was like mind-blowing to me. That’s when I felt like it was an invasion coming through the Barrio, and the division of classes. [It was] the haves and the haves not and these [are the] people being catered to. And the worst for me was to watch the buses stop at a bus stop and every- one else having to sit there and wait.

This confusion—thinking that the buses were something he could relate to, only to find out that they are something else entirely—shows the deep sense of alterity that they caused for residents in “the barrio.” For Mendez, the buses were a tangible way of discussing the divisions he was seeing in the city—class and racial divisions between people who work in the technology industry and those who do not. In likening the buses to “an invasion” and the “division of classes,” he pulled together dynamics of colonialism with the racialized and classed spaces produced by the tech- industry in the city.

The language of an “invasion” was commonly used in the Mission. Many of the people I spoke with described feeling “under siege” as they watched their friends and communities being displaced. For many people this is what drove them into the streets to protest. Threading through such stories were questions of belonging, moments like Mendez’s story—when he jumped on the bus, only to find that it was something radically different than he’d imagined, a space of luxury he was clearly excluded from. This sense of no longer belonging in your own neighborhood was a common refrain.

I heard these complicated understandings of belonging differently from Alonzo Gomez who worked with a Mayan cultural organization based in the Mission. I met with Alonzo in his office on the corner of 16th and Mission, the street below bustling with commuters, shoppers, and people just hanging out on the plaza (itself a contested place due to a proposed

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luxury condo building). We talked about the particular difficulties that Maya immigrant families have in the city, the services that his group of- fered and the ways that language and culture formed the core of their work. Eventually, I asked him about the poster above his desk, a screen- print that read “Indian Land”11 and depicted North America in red with no borders and, relatedly, how the people he worked with understood their place in the rapidly gentrifying Mission district. His responses indexed the complexities of feelings of belonging, exclusion, and indigeneity in the changing neighborhood:

I think there is a very strong feeling in some segments of the commu- nity that we were here before. We didn’t come from just anywhere. We’ve been here for a long time. Before this was what it is today, we actually were here. I think there’s also at the same time, an under- standing that we as indigenous people from Central America, from south of Mexico, were not actually here. But that those who are trying to kick us out of here are not those who were here before…So, those who resent our presence here are those who actually took over this place and displaced original people and now they feel entitled some- how to displace us and to reject us and to kick us out altogether.

The tension that he lays out between “we were here before” juxtaposed with “we were not actually here” forms an important framework for un- derstanding the colonial present vis-à-vis gentrification in San Francisco. Indeed, this narrative helps to elucidate how identities are deployed from historical contexts into the political present. In stark terms, “those who are trying to kick us out” today are equated with “those who actually took over this place and displaced the original people.” The historical underpin- ning of this statement is, of course, the continuities of white supremacy and the settler society which undergirds contemporary California. By con- trast, “we were here before” signals a capacious notion that encompasses those who were here in the “before” of gentrification. Though “we were not actually here,” Alonzo says, “this was Indian land,” which can legiti- mately be struggled for against the incursions of tech-colonialism.

The complicated formations of Latinx and Indigenous identity that Alonzo, and others in the Mission, articulate, raise important questions about migration as a consequence of settler colonialism and Indigenous Latinx identity (Blackwell, Boj Lopez, and Urrieta 2017; Saldaña-Portillo

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2017) that are outside of the scope of this paper.12 However, in examin- ing how increasingly gentrified urban space is navigated, I contend that this nuanced invocation of the colonial “moves away from a singular na- tive/settler binary” (Mei-Singh 2021) and instead, points to the types of relationality that such an analytic can produce as a practice of meaning- making and political identity formation.

Invocations of colonialism formed an important practice of social cohe- sion amongst those contesting displacement and eviction. As Savannah Shange writes in her ethnography of a San Francisco high school: “Black folks in San Francisco began to coalesce around the language of ‘Frisco Natives’ and ‘Gentrification is Colonization’ as displacement tightened its grip around The City” (Shange 2019:112). Through such identifications and cultural practices, protestors drew connections between longer his- tories of dispossession and current processes in San Francisco. They de- veloped a political analysis of the shared logics of racialized capitalist dis- possession across historical periods, which, in turn, produced new forms of solidarity among those involved in the political landscape of housing struggles in the region.

This political landscape included housing activists (both those work- ing within and outside of established non-profits), tenants facing eviction (and those who protested in solidarity), union members (who connected the housing crisis to labor issues), and members of the city’s queer com- munity (whose “culture” was also being displaced). Within these different groups there was a shared conversation about what was being “lost” in the city. This conversation drew on the region’s history as a place that was native land, as a place that was the center of the Indian movement in the 1970s, as a place that had a vital and strong queer history, and as a city that has served as a sanctuary for those fleeing other places. During my research, I was often impressed by how these different coalitions of people worked together, tying issues of queer rights, labor issues and Latinx cultural heritage into what, at the time, everyone agreed was the most pressing issue facing the city: the crisis of gentrification, eviction, housing affordability, and displacement.

For those living amidst the city’s rapid gentrification the idea of the tech-industry as a “colonial” force anchored a political analysis of contem- porary struggles as connected to longer histories of violence, resistance, and survival amidst racialized dispossession. For some this analysis was grounded in academic literatures about settler colonialism and Indigeneity,

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while for others their lived experience of gentrification forced this analy- sis. In this context, the analytic of colonialism helped to cohere political identities, forge solidarities and alliances between diverse groups as they struggled against gentrification and the impacts of the tech-industry in the “colonial present.” Put in Cattelino’s (2010) terms, tech-colonialism was re-structuring the conditions in which people understood the category of colonialism through the urban social transformations it has engendered.

Mark Anderson offers a useful conception of “Black indigeneity” as marking a particular cultural status or mode of being rather than blood (2009). Savannah Shange draws on Anderson’s concept to argue that the remaining Black communities of San Francisco produced forms of indigeneity without collapsing the distinctions between the categories of Indianess and Blackness (Shange 2019). How to avoid collapsing these categories is a crucial question, particularly when “playing Indian” (Deloria 1998) continues to be a (contested) part of national identity in the United States. However, I argue that in San Francisco, the analytic of colonialism allowed for nuanced conversations about intersectional belonging amidst wide-scale displacement, rather than simply collapsing distinctions be- tween categories of Indian, Black, Latinx, queer, poor, working-class, se- niors, and others who found themselves struggling with the structures of displacement wrought by gentrification. Referencing colonialism played an important role giving many a political language for describing their current conditions of existence and resistance. Of course, as Indigenous scholars remind us, such connections require us to explore how the “correlation between what is happening right now on our land and what happened to my ancestors then” (Gould 2021:71) can forge solidarities between the rich landscape of Indigenous struggle and anti-eviction and gentrification struggles in the Bay.

Conclusion During my fieldwork, the sentiment that San Francisco was irrevocably changed or “lost” informed numerous media accounts of the city. This discourse was referenced in meetings and interviews with activists, who spoke in exasperation about how “it’s like people think no one lives here anymore.” These sentiments index a narrative of erasure being pro- duced about San Francisco, one in which people, cultures, and spaces under threat of displacement by tech-colonialism are wiped literally and

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figuratively off the map. This erasure also was present in the first dot com boom, when the Mission experienced a large loss of Latinx communi- ties and culture (Mirabal 2009). But as the vibrant activism that I have described here belies, this is not the whole picture. While there is “much to be mourned,” it is vital to remember that the political response to loss has “shaped the cultural-political-geographic landscape of the region” (Brahinksy 2014:46). The narrative of disappearance, portraying a whole- sale annihilation of the city’s pre-tech culture, mirrors colonial narratives that relegate Indigenous histories to the distant past, denying their contin- ued existence in the present as an integral part of colonial ideologies (Byrd 2011). In this light, San Francisco’s tech-colonialism and gentrification re- produced the colonial both in the material processes of displacement and enclosure, as well as in the symbolic erasures and ideologies of loss. By centering lived and living activist critiques, this article offers an approach that valorizes active struggles and resistance.

I have argued that tech-led gentrification is an articulation of the colo- nial present in San Francisco which needs to be understood in the context of: (1) the urban political economy of gentrification and the tech-sector as a particular capitalist formation, (2) the technology industry’s colonial relationship to urban space, place, and race as these unfold within the lon- ger genealogy of enclosures in California, (3) longer structures of colonial dispossession and lived experience, and (4) the forms of political identifi- cation at work in the struggle against tech-colonialism.

As cities are reshaped by contemporary racial capitalism, their trans- formations must be understood in the context of their longer racialized histories. Settler colonial forms of racialization and the “making of prop- erty” operate together to produce the city as settler colonial urban space (Dorries, Hugill, and Tomiak 2019). In San Francisco, the tech-industry is the major political, economic, and cultural force driving such transforma- tions. It is possible to see how processes of tech-led gentrification share fundamental attributes with colonialism and thus to better understand how racialized dispossession—through land appropriation, enclosure, and narratives of progress—is integral to both historical colonialism and contemporary tech-colonialism. I am in no way arguing that contemporary gentrification or tech-colonialism are the same as historical colonialism. Rather, I am interested in how colonialism endures and how present-day logics of violence and dispossession are built upon the historical infra- structures and logics of colonial violence. The re-articulation of colonial

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E n d n o t e s : 1All names have been changed throughout this article. 2I conducted fieldwork in the Bay Area between 2012 and 2015, attending meetings, interviewing activists, and helping to organize and attend protests. Most of this research was focused on the Mission District. I worked closely with groups like Eviction Free San Francisco, the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, and the Heart of the City Collective. 3“Eviction epidemic” was a term used by activists to connect the eviction crisis’s health consequences to the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s. 4The Bay Area’s housing crisis is often thought to be a supply problem: San Francisco is small and has low housing stock. However Walker (2018) argues that the crisis is also caused by the region’s rapid growth and an excess of capital and credit. These problems cannot be solved simply by “building more hous- ing” as the Yes In My Backyward (YIMBY) movement claims (Maharawal 2021, McElroy and Szeto 2018). 5I define the technology industry (following Storper et al 2015 and Walker 2018) as including software and programming, electric equipment, computer systems design, computer wholesaler’s data processing and

forms of violence in San Francisco today operate through gentrification, enclosure, data-colonialism, urban restructuring, and the reproduction of racialized geographies. In this sense, tech-colonialism can be viewed as the latest iteration of racial capitalism as it articulates in San Francisco’s urban space.

The diverse movement to contest eviction and displacement in San Francisco connected these processes through practices of resistance. Activist critiques provide an important entry point for understanding tech- colonialism and examining how the colonial present operates in urban space today. Understood this way, the protests I describe were not only localized incidents about particular parks or bus routes, but rather larger struggles over tech-colonialism’s reproduction of racial regimes of exclu- sion, enclosure, eviction, and displacement. However, rather than see the city as lost to the behemoth power of tech capital, by centering lived struggles we can understand such processes as unstable, perennial sites of contestation over the urban colonial present. n

A c k n o w l e d g m e n t s :

Thank you to the ongoing work of the many organizers, activists, and protesters in the San Francisco Bay Area from whom I learned and to whom this analysis is indebted. In particular, I would like to thank the members of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, the San Francisco Tenants Union, Our Mission No Eviction, Eviction Free San Francisco and Asociacion Mayab. I also greatly benefited from ongoing con- versations with Erin McElroy and Zoltán Glück (who also read many versions of this piece). Three anony- mous reviewers gave insightful feedback for which I am grateful. Funding for the research and writing of this work was provided by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research and the American Council of Learned Societies.

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hosting, as well as medical and health technologies. Additionally, I include social media companies and app-based technologies. 6By my counting, between 2013 and 2018 there were over a dozen different iterations of Google bus blockades. 7While taxis have always been private and relatively elite, access to them was free and accessible through calling a number or hailing a cab on a public street. Ride sharing technologies, such as Uber and Lyft have essentially privatized access, costing drivers and taxi unions significantly while also furthering the “digital divide.” 8Under Uber’s former head of international growth, Travis VanderZanden, the company Bird put its scoot- ers on the streets in hundreds of cities globally. Although the company was not profitable it reached a valuation of $2.8 billion in 2020 (Seabrook 2021). 9Many early accounts claimed the field was reserved using an app, however this was not quite true: permits were obtained through the San Francisco Parks Department. The story seems to reference the MeetUp app, which also reserved the field for soccer players. 10The descendants of the Chochenyo Ohlone people are not a federally recognized tribe, so contemporary Ohlone communities have no federally granted reservations or protected land. 11The print is by local Bay Area artist Jesus Barraza. 12Critical Latinx Indigeneity, and its tensions, has been explored by Saldaña-Portillo (2017) and Blackwell, Boj Lopez, and Urrieta (2017), these works call for attention to Indigenous Latinx identity and its mobiliza- tion of particular forms of activism. Historical works including Guillotti-Hernandez’s (2011) history of the violent formation of US, Mexican, and Chicana/o nationalisms in the borderlands and Voss’s (2008) histori- cal archaeology of ethnogenesis in San Francisco’s Presidio are also useful here.

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F o r e i g n L a n g u a g e Tr a n s l a t i o n s :

Tech-Colonialism: Gentrification, Resistance, and Belonging in San Francisco’s Colonial Present [Keywords: racialized dispossession, eviction, social movements, activism, technology]. Tecno-Colonialismo: Gentrificação, Resistência, e Pertença no Presente Colonial de São Francisco [Palavras-chave: espoliação racializada, despejos, movimentos sociais, activismo, tecnologia]. Техколониализм: гентрификация, сопротивление, и чувство принадлежности в колониальном настоящем Сан-Франциско. [Ключевые слова: лишение права собственности по расовому признаку, выселение, социальные движения, активизм, технология]

科技-殖民主义: 旧金山殖民现况下的仕绅化, 反抗与归属 [关键词 : 种族化的剥夺, 驱逐, 社会运动, 行动主义, 科技]

االستعامر التكنولوجي: التحسني واملقاومة واالنتامء يف الحارض االستعامري بسان فرانسيسكو كلامت البحث: نزع امللكية العنرصي، اإلخالء، الحركات االجتامعية، النشاط، التكنولوجيا