Digital nomads in siliconising Cluj: Material and allegorical double dispossession

Introduction

In 2018, Cluj-Napoca’s mayor Emil Boc announced the introduction of a public robot named Antonia as part of Cluj, Romania’s newfound status as ‘the Silicon Valley of Europe’. Although Antonia proved only to be a computer algorithm, lacking the robotic stock image body displayed in the press, she, as the first ‘public robot mayoral servant’, was nevertheless conjured as part of a widespread techno-futurist vision reflected in Romanian infrastructure and imaginaries alike. One only has to momentarily walk through Cluj’s Mărăşti neighbourhood to breathe in new construction particles and observe fibre optic cabling sticking out of buildings like alien tentacles, waiting to be connected. Coworking spaces for local tech workers and foreign ‘digital nomads’ alike manifest, while former industrial socialist factories are transformed into information technology (IT) plants for Western firms such as Bosch and iQuest. Sometimes they become fancier residential housing unaffordable to those being evicted, many of whom are Roma. Today, Roma evictees often end up in the maidane – wastelands squeezed between the rural and urban. Stranded in postsocialist space, Romania’s most racially subjugated minority are pushed into toxic sinkholes as tech speculation takes hold. There, in postsocialist times, the rhythm of modernity’s drumbeat only registers as progress to some. In the temporality of postsocialism, Roma matters are spatial matters. ¹

As I question, what happens when digital nomads and Western tech firms transit to Romania, home of Europe’s largest Roma population ² – a people now bearing the brunt of tech-induced gentrification? Digital nomads, to more problematically described ‘digital Gypsies’, ³ constitute a genre of ‘lifestyle migrants’, what the authors of this special issue describe as middle-class Western travellers who capitalise upon incomes earned at high rungs of uneven global labour divisions. Why is it that digital nomads/Gypsies allegorise technocapitalist fantasies by appropriating Roma identity, while Roma evictees are subjected to forced nomadism to make way for their arrivals? While few in Romania would self-ascribe as ‘Gypsy’ if not Roma, and while it is unlikely that anyone evicted would celebrate forced ‘nomadism’, global technoculture draws more upon ‘free and wandering Gypsy’ imaginaries than real people to characterise technocapitalist lifestyle mobilities.

This paper looks at the spatialisation of inherited yet global dispossessions in postsocialist Cluj. It focuses upon how digital nomads and global IT capital use material advantages to unwittingly (and sometimes wittingly) appropriate the spaces and identities of Roma, whose lives are made more precarious as a result of gentrification. While Roma are materially dispossessed to make way for new IT office buildings and residential complexes, they are doubly dispossessed by the conjuration of the deracinated digital nomad/Gypsy. As I suggest, this figure discursively drags with it onto-epistemological residues of 19th-century Orientalism – a literary genre that emerged within the heart of Western European empires. Orientalist texts frequently appropriated ‘Gypsy’ freedom to allegorise the sexuality and raciality of Western imperialism (Lemon, 2000; Trumpener, 1992). ⁴ Today, digital nomad allegories displace Roma in appropriative invocations, much as Gypsy fetishisation once did. The figure being updated today, I argue, points to the imperiality of technocapitalism, or techno-imperialism. As in the past, this nomadic fantasy hinges upon a Western imperial hub, one that has expanded from Western Europe to now also include California’s Silicon Valley.

One might venture that racial dispossession in the Silicon Valley of Europe mimics that of other siliconising spaces, most obviously the gentrifying San Francisco Bay Area, where tech speculation incites the rampant displacement of tenants of colour (Maharawal and McElroy, 2018). Understanding evictions in Cluj through this lens might invoke universalising methods and analytics (e.g., Eviction Lab, 2019; Slater, 2017), as well as urban studies literature on comparative urbanism, planetary gentrification and global cities (e.g., Robinson, 2011; Shin et al., 2016). Aligned with exciting work being done, critical of Anglo-American theoretical dominance and universalising approaches in these domains (Ghertner, 2015; Roy, 2017), the phenomenon of double dispossession in Cluj also calls for an interdisciplinary approach attentive to complex interplays of imperialism, globalisation and race.

In assessing these entanglements in postsocialist, siliconising Cluj, it becomes clear that prior histories bolster the present. Postcolonial and postsocialist studies offer important perspectives in understanding this history. Their analytics are useful in theorising racial dispossession locally and globally, but also materially, allegorically, and historically. Spivak, in writing of the siliconisation of Bangalore and the historic dislocations it recodes, suggests, ‘Every rupture is also repetition’ (Spivak, 2000: 5). Building upon this, I suggest that the siliconisation of Cluj is only possible through the accumulation of material and allegorical dispossessions, put in friction with new global flows. By allegorical dispossession, I refer to the erasure of Roma life-worlds in stories told about them by others. Attentive to this narrative violence, here I advocate for a connected rather than comparative approach in understanding double dispossession in times of techno-imperialism, one that, while rooted in place (Bhan, 2019), analyses tethered displacements across time, space and genre. While this approach may well connect with contexts of double dispossession elsewhere, here I think from the space of Cluj.

In what follows, I explore double dispossession by thinking from the maidane of allegory and eviction, and by thinking from the time and space of globalisation. After a methods section and literature review to pose questions of comparativity between Silicon Valley and Cluj, I introduce the concept of digital nomadism and the Orientalism upon which it rests. I then piece together three empirical sections. First, I look to property and labour histories as they racialised Roma and residents before, during and after socialism. I then study the racial dispossession that Roma residents experience amidst siliconisation. In these sections, I draw upon narrative data collected with Căşi Sociale ACUM (Social Housing NOW), a housing justice collective with whom I collaborate. Căşi works with displaced tenants, many of whom are Roma, conducting research that directly empowers on-the-ground struggles. In the final section, I turn to the landing of digital nomads in Cluj as they constitute, and are co-constituted by, techno-imperialism.

Methods

Understanding the layering of racial histories and geographies upon Cluj’s siliconised landscape necessitates a multi-methodological approach. In forging this, I invoke Appadurai’s writing (1990) on technoscapes, or the disjunctures imposed when technological development entwines with global flows of people, cultures and capital. Technoscapes, he suggests, can of course be understood in part by traditional indicators and comparisons such as World Bank reports, but the complexity that underlies their formation ‘are further out of reach of the “queen of the social sciences” than ever before’ (1990: 298). This is because technoscapes are also informed by imaginaries. To understand the layering of these imaginaries in Cluj, I read cultural productions, from contemporary media pieces to 19th-century Orientalist literature, from blogs by digital nomads to anti-racist digital story-maps.

I also utilise ethnography, based upon research conducted between 2016 and 2018 in Cluj. In IT coworking spaces, tech offices and coffee shops, I conducted 16 interviews with digital nomads, and several with urban planners and architects. I additionally attended anti-displacement protests and anti-eviction activist meetings, the latter of which took place in Căşi’s Mărăşti office and in two anarchist social centres currently facing displacement. During this time, I spoke with dozens of evictees and housing organisers. Further, before, during and after this period in Romania, I have been part of a critical cartography and digital humanities project in the San Francisco Bay Area, the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, which also informs my questioning of comparative methods and analytics (McElroy and Werth, 2019).

With Căşi, I collaboratively produced an online interactive story-map, Dislocari, referenced in this article. Dislocari features narratives and eviction routes of seven Roma residents now living in Cluj’s waste site, Pata Rât. Each narrator describes a series of past displacements from the city centre that eventually landed them in the maidane. Their stories shed light on the longue durée of racial dispossession upon which techno-imperialism rests. These narratives disrupt the notion that Roma mobility is romantic.

Questions of comparativity

Chelcea (2017) suggests that to understand gentrification in Eastern European cities, scholarship needs to be more attentive both to issues of displacement and to issues of time and space. Here I attempt to be more attentive to both, as well as to the ‘frictions’ incited when global capital preys upon localised scenarios and histories (Tsing, 2005). Thus, here I diverge from, yet converse with, debates emergent in comparative urbanism and planetary gentrification. These debates question whether or not gentrification has ‘gone global’, and if comparativity imposes Western theories into Global South and East locales (Ouředníček, 2016; Robinson, 2011; Shin et al., 2016). ⁵

While there are good points to be made regarding the problematics of, as Bernt articulates, both universalising and individualising comparisons in these debates (2016: 643), importantly these debates have been ongoing for some time in postcolonial studies (Appadurai, 1990; Roy, 2017; Spivak, 2003). Although it is exciting that these conversations now too in media res in urban studies, with scholars such as Ghertner suggesting that gentrification, as an analytic, may not apply in ‘much of the world’ (2015), there may be much to learn from other fields that long reworked comparativity. As Bernt observes, these debates in the field of urban studies are often stymied by the theoretical foundations of gentrification research; other fields need to come into the fore if such debates are to be advanced (2016: 643).

More specifically, Roy (2017) argues that urban studies too often elide deep histories of racial disposability upon which contemporary neoliberalism rests, and that engagement with other disciplines is requisite in understanding what she describes as ‘racial banishment’, or processes of gentrification in which subaltern people are pushed to the far edges of urban life. Indeed, as work by Petrovici et al. suggests (2019: 3–4), to understand postsocialist anti-Roma racism in Cluj, one must attend to histories of Roma slavery (which lasted until 1856 in Romania), 19th-century practices of serfdom and debt bondage, as well as modernisation, industrialisation and agriculture – all of which fed Western capitalism. Roma laboured and lived in pre-socialist Romania as doubly subjugated, racialised as surplus within a region broadly read as exploitable by the West. The 20th-century project of state socialism in part sought to remedy this, and to combat mid-20th-century fascism. While state socialism is now normatively read as pathologic, its demise led to the anti-communist reinterpretation of racialised pre-socialist land and labour configurations (Atanasoski and McElroy, 2018).

Committed to an interdisciplinary approach, here I ask, how can postcolonial and postsocialist frameworks offer new insight into questions of globalisation and gentrification? For instance, in his work on comparativity, Subrahmạnyam (1997: 745) observes that comparative approaches to traditional area studies might force false reductions, and that a connected approach might be more useful in understanding spatial tethering and transactions. ⁶ Lowe’s methodological approach (2015: 6) of ‘reading across archives’ to understand the ‘intimacies and contemporaneities that traverse distinct and separately studied “areas”’ is also helpful. This connected and interdisciplinary approach unsettles ‘the discretely bounded objects, methods, and temporal frameworks canonized by a national history invested in isolated origins and in dependent progressive development’ (2015: 6). Methodologically, this is especially useful in understanding the ontological roots/routes of digital nomadism.

Here I suggest that a connected rather than comparative approach can help theorise what Hayes and Zaban in this special issue describe as transnational gentrification – or the gentrifying impacts of lifestyle migrations. While the gentrifying impacts of digital nomadism in Cluj are real, they are discrepant within specific geographies, informed by inimitable contexts. Put otherwise, local contexts matter in scenarios of transnational gentrification. These are far from arbitrary, having to do with prior property regimes, dispossessions and technoscapes. Such historical contexts are connected to, yet distinct from, those of the West. Thus, this paper is aligned with work that studies technocultures from the South and East that do interact with Silicon Valley fantasies and effects, but that remain irreducible to them (Amrute, 2016; Chan, 2013). Unlike studies of globalisation and transnational gentrification that track West/North migrations to the South (Benson, 2015; Hayes, 2014), this paper studies Western lifestyle migrants that enter the complex space of Eastern Europe. Aligned with work critical of 1990s and 2000s cosmopolitanism and the neoliberal multiculturalism upon which it relied (Calhoun, 2002; Spivak, 2003), here I more directly look at global technoculture. Informed by postsocialist scholarship critical of the imperiality of Western ideas and materialities in the East (Chari and Verdery, 2009; Karkov and Valiavicharska, 2018), here I specifically assess techno-imperialism.

Digital nomadism

As a phenomenon, digital nomadism is often attributed to Makimoto and Manners’ Digital Nomad (1997), which pre-saged a future run by wealthy IT business professionals equipped with ‘digital toolkits’ living lives of ‘location independence’. Today, however, many nomads cite Ferriss as their ‘guru’. It was after Ferriss wrote his 2007 The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9–5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich that digital nomad blogs began popping up across the internet, and that the touristic lifestyle grew.

Popular in Silicon Valley technoculture, digital nomadism is often advertised by IT companies as an employee perk. As the digital nomad Matt Mullenweg of the San Francisco start-up Automatic boasts, 95% of his 400 employees live outside of San Francisco, in 47 countries (Do, 2017). This enables workers to live lavishly outside of expensive rental markets, and thereby attracts talent. In San Francisco, that IT companies are in large part responsible for the extremity of the rental market (Maharawal and McElroy, 2018) is, for them, beside the point. Meanwhile, when departing from San Francisco and other Western locales, digital nomads often contribute to new forms of gentrification upon arrival. As digital nomad Kay self-critiques by blog (2015):

This is gentrification at its simplest. This is globalization. This is the result of some very selfish, very narrow thinking. Every dollar we spend, every blog post we write, and every coworking space we patronize contributes to this inequality.

Not all digital nomads are this self-critical, and there are variations and discrepancies amongst them. There are wealthy nomads from San Francisco who live months at a time in various locales, and who periodically return to their companies’ headquarters. Others from Western European countries now permanently live in Romania, where they manage Western outsourcing firms. Some digital nomads have moved to Romania to take advantage of cheap labour, and to launch their own start-ups. Yet others are not employed by firms but, rather, pick up online gigs as they meander. I have interviewed several nomads of each of these genres in Cluj, and have found that while their stories all vary, benefiting from Western incomes is constant.

Today, there are countless meetups, blogs, websites and even comparative ranking sites advertising prime locations for nomadism. As one self-proclaimed libertarian digital nomad from San Francisco articulated in a Cluj café, the idea of settling down is not at all appealing to his millennial generation. The world is global, and success means being at home globally. ‘People used to brag about buying and selling real estate developments. I brag about developing my own apps while living in Airbnbs.’ As Chayka (2018) writes, ‘In the competitive freelance economy, geographic mobility has become a superficial sign of both success and creative freedom: the ability to do anything, anywhere, at any time.’

For digital nomads, location independence is often enabled by a phenomenon that Ferriss popularised as ‘geoarbitrage’, or geographic arbitrage, referencing the financial concept of arbitrage, in which commodities and labour are strategically bought and sold in different markets or derivative forms. While geographic arbitrage first expanded post-Bretton Woods, as of late it has been adopted by lifestyle migrants (Hayes, 2014: 1954). For instance, James Taylor, a ‘digital Gypsy’, who also claims Romani origins, notes by blog that ‘being a Digital Gypsy is more a frame of mind than genealogy’ (2011). The routes of his desire coffer his Gypsy identity more than social or cultural roots and recognition. Thanks to cloud-based computing and outsourcing platforms such as Elance and ODesk, he transits between San Francisco and Europe, accumulating capital while sleeping.

While geoarbitrage is real, and in the case of digital nomadism, undoubtedly linked to fantasies and materialities of location independence, there are more than simply capital calculations determining where digital nomads land. As scholars of racial capitalism argue, the spatial inheres in the racial, and one cannot theorise the contours of what Harvey terms ‘accumulation by dispossession’ (2003) without also centring how racism has always informed the workings of capital (Chakravartty and Da Silva, 2012). As Jashnani et al. (2017) suggest, processes of racial dispossession in gentrifying contexts are best understood as ‘dispossession by accumulation’. In Cluj, double dispossession transpires through the accumulation of racist histories and fantasies. Thus, dispossession itself is accumulative, and inherently racial. Reading across sites and genres, while connecting past with present, illuminates the raciality of double dispossession and its particular, rather than random, geographies.

Deracination

While Western firms appropriate space and infrastructure in Cluj, digital nomads appropriate the deracinated ‘Gypsy’. Racial appropriation has long functioned by deploying reiterative stereotypes, strategically disciplining and domesticating alterity. Byrd observes that appropriation of indigenous lives in the USA emerged as a colonial technology, in which indigeneity became ‘a site through which the US empire orients and replicates itself’ (2011: xiii). Put otherwise, appropriating indigenous – and arguably also Romani – culture abets colonialism, much like land appropriation feeds settler materiality. Kay (2015), critical of digital nomadism’s imperiality, offers:

Nomads like to talk about their enlightened lifestyles, but when it boils right down to it, we’re just a new breed of hipster. We appropriate places and lead trends, we go where life is cheap but hip, and we are a little bit in love with our own lives. … we have the economic potential to destroy communities.

Similarly, as a non-Roma ‘digital Gypsy’ articulated to me in a coworking space in 2017, ‘People forget our ancestors were nomads.’ In this way, racial appropriation obviates Roma life-worlds and contemporary realities. As Mihaela Drăgan, a Roma actress and playwright, admonishes of Roma personification in the arts and beyond: ‘We have an entire history of oppression and silencing, so no non-Roma artist has any right to represent us … without asking us first’ (quoted in Iancu, 2017).

The appropriation that she critiques (and that digital Gypsies embody) bears 19th-century Orientalist textual traces, referencing a genre in which ‘the Gypsy’ was used to allegorise Western European colonial fantasy. This figure could transgress the borders of modernity, the nation-state and private property. From Britain’s Borrow to France’s Mérimée, from Germany’s Jensen to Russia’s Pushkin, authors often writing from the hearts of empire crafted stories of the fantastical wanderer. Frequently, these texts feature a white male protagonist who falls in love and attempts miscegenation with a sexualised ‘Gypsy woman’, for instance in the popular story of Carmen. Her ‘freedom’ to transgress borders maps colonial desires, but also modernity’s desires for premodernity. As the British John Clare scribed in 1825, Gypsies fantastically ‘pay no rent nor tax … But live untythd & free … In gipsey liberty [sic]’ (Clare, 1996: 52). In this way, Gypsies signify a premodern past and spatial transgression, standing in for British indigeneity and frontier expansion. Often in these texts, the protagonist attempts life as a Gypsy, but he then realises this impossibility and thereby murders his racial fantasy. Thus, the dark Gypsy and her death have been argued to allegorise heteromasculine desire, as well as settler nostalgia (Lemon, 2000; Trumpener, 1992).

Digital nomad ontology hinges upon this ancestor to indicate the freedom that geoarbitrage facilitates. This deracinated figure is not random, nor of a random geography. Much as 19th-century writers allegorised imperial desires, digital nomads allegorise techno-imperialism. As Orientalist tales emerged from the heart of empire, so do those of today. As Kay suggests, ‘Digital nomads are unintentional pawns in a new wave of economic imperialism’ (2015). The digital nomad therefore charts techno-imperial geographies.

And yet, the digital nomad of today is not the protagonist of Orientalist novellas; much has changed since Orientalism’s first wave. While those then attempting to ‘become Gypsy’ never could fully obtain their desires, today’s digital nomads have resolved this tension, having obtained, or so they say, complete location independence. Digital nomadism thus highlights new geographies of dislocation.

Restituting racial banishment

While the deracinated digital nomad drags former colonial histories into the siliconising present, in Cluj, it lands upon a palimpsest of anti-Roma racism. To better understand this, in 2016, members of Căşi, myself included, set out to create an interactive digital story-map, Dislocari: Rutele Evacuărilor spre strada Cantonului (1996–2016)/Dislocations: Eviction Routes to Cantonului Street (1996–2016). The map follows seven Roma residents, Ioanică, Leontina, Babi, Sandu, Ligia, Katalin and Gelu, all of whom have been multiply displaced, and who now reside in Pata Rât on Cantonului Street. There, in the maidane, 160 families live fără număr, or without official addresses. In each location on the map, residents share horror stories of banishment and gentrification. Some of their former homes have been bulldozed and redeveloped into IT offices; some have been razed and are now filled with a messy array of vegetation. For them, Cantonului Street is the end point of a longue durée of dislocation.

In this and the following section, I draw upon their stories to illustrate how racial banishment is haunted by former racial histories, such as the lack of post-1856 reparations. After slavery ended in Romania, numerous Roma migrated to Ukraine, Russia, Poland and Western Europe (Achim, 2013: 122–124). While many Westerners read them as a dark threat, others used them as inspiration for Orientalist tales of ‘Gypsy freedom’ (Lemon, 2000). Yet, for those who remained in Romania, national racism accumulated. By the 20th century, most Roma still lacked property (Petrovici et al., 2019: 7). Positioned as ‘dangerous’ for ‘the nation’, they were targeted for extermination by the fascist regime. During this time, ‘nomadic’ Roma were singled out before those sedentary (Petcuţ, 2004). Thus, nomadism itself became a racial signifier.

Conversely, the Communist regime that afterwards came to power provided numerous Roma with labour-intensive jobs in heavy industry and agriculture, enabling upward social mobility (Petrovici et al., 2019: 7). Housing nationalisation was part of a state effort to reduce inequality and under-occupied shelter. As many as 241,068 dwellings were nationalised via Decree 92 (Florea and Dumitriu, 2017: 193). After 1965, a series of laws regulated landlord and tenant relations and construction, interpreting housing as a field of consumption rather than production (Vincze, 2017). During the late 1970s and 1980s, numerous Roma were moved into poor-quality nationalised buildings in city centres (Lancione, 2018: 4). Thus, although racism endured throughout socialism, at least housing was provided.

Everything changed after 1989. While laws enabled ‘sitting tenants’ in buildings constructed during socialism to purchase their state-owned homes (Chelcea et al., 2015), things were quite different for tenants in nationalised properties, many of whom were Roma. A series of property restitution laws were written in the name of ‘transitional justice’ (Law 112/1995 and its corrective Law 10/2001), which enabled the redistribution of nationalised homes to pre-socialist heirs. Incentivised by EU and Bretton Woods initiatives, restitution has been morally justified by reading socialism as a dark stain in national history. Over 202,000 court cases have been filed to date (Florea and Dumitriu, 2017: 196).

During this transitional period, urban planning was transferred from the state to local municipalities; the latter never provided incentives for developing social housing. While 30% of the country’s housing stock was nationalised during socialism, less than 2% of housing is public today (Vincze, 2017). In Cluj, planning laws have changed at least 16 times over the last 30 years, an urban planner described over coffee one 2018 summer afternoon after a new eviction in Mărăşti. Often the city incorporates the private sector through the language of ‘participation’, but this only incentivises gentrification, he sighed. ‘The City Hall is just using Pata Rât as its social housing; there is no incentive to provide anything else.’ And, because the Antonia-owning mayor maintains a 70% approval rating, he can do as he pleases. Yet as Enikö Vincze – co-founder of Căşi and co-producer of Dislocari – notes, it was the prior mayor, Gheorghe Funar, who ‘created a favourable space for capital accumulation in the hands of local entrepreneurs without completely excluding foreigners’ (Vincze, 2017: 41). Between 1990 and 2004, Funar averted regulations, preparing ‘the ground for the further development of Cluj – under neoliberal governance – as an entrepreneurial city or a “competitive city”’ (2017: 42). City centres, once rendered derelict, have now become sites of IT development, creative capital and digital nomads, much to the horror of those racially banished, as participants in Dislocari describe in the following section.

Dispossession by accumulation

Ioanică, featured in Dislocari, lived on Turzii Street in the early 1990s, in a former state-owned building. Numerous Roma families were legally living there, most of whom were working in nearby factories, such as Clujana and Carbochim. Ioanică, now middle-aged, had been a streetcleaner. But his building was not maintained, and one day, he ‘woke up with the ceiling on the floor’. Rather than repair the building, which today remains an empty lot, the city moved Ioanică and his family to Croitorilor Street. The new apartment was nice, but soon a man living in a different city claimed it through restitution and evicted them without compensation. Similarly, Ligia, also featured in Dislocari, received a restitution notice on Eroilor Street in 2011, although her contract was good until 2014. She had been paying rent on time, but the new owners wanted hundreds of euro a month, which she could not afford. ‘So, they threw us out on the streets – we had no other choice’, she explains. ‘I asked how is this possible, and they said it was because these were their houses, and they wanted them back.’

Not only was housing privatised; so too were nationalised factories. In 1999 and 2000, the PSAL II act and national privatisation strategy were adopted, privatising and outsourcing large state-owned companies, including computer factories (Vincze, 2017). Unbeknown to many who now equate technological modernity with the West, Romanians maintained a rich IT history of computation, informatics and cybernetics throughout socialism. After socialism, firms such as IBM and Hewlett Packard rushed in, eager to take advantage of the specialised workforce. Soon it was determined the land upon which factories sat was worth more than the factories themselves. Numerous IT workers lost their jobs, as did workers from other privatised factories and labourers in heavy industry and agriculture, many of whom were Roma.

As in post-industrial gentrifying Western cities (Zukin and Braslow, 2011), former Romanian factories have become havens for creative capital. However, former residential units have also been transformed into offices. For instance, up the hill from Cantonului is a new Roma community, forced to Pata Rât in 2010 after the Finnish IT company Nokia speculated upon their Coastei Street homes to build an office building. While Nokia soon after abandoned Cluj and migrated to China, where new tax breaks awaited their ‘nomadic’ branch, the displaced residents remain, to date, stranded in the maidane. Meanwhile, the IT sector continues to be the largest driver of office development in Romania, most of which is foreign. IT generated 44% of all leasing activity in 2017, amassing 80% annual growth (Colliers International, 2018: 18). While coworking spaces (preferred by digital nomads) only take up 1% of office stock, 10% growth is anticipated over the next five years (Colliers International, 2018: 18).

Ioanică’s former home now functions as a pharmacy, and the rest of the area has been converted to IT buildings. As he questions:

I have no idea why more office buildings are built for companies, and not apartments for people. … Years have gone by, and now you wake up with so many offices … for rich people. The authorities care about one thing – to evict people without legal documents so that they can reclaim buildings, pushing people to the outskirts of the city.

While the IT buildings that Ioanică speaks of are not necessarily for digital nomads alone, they do support the nomadism of Western tech companies to Cluj, a migration that often is accompanied by an influx of digital nomads and tourists (as I contextualise in the following section).

Ioanică’s narrative is one of many critical of post-1989 socioeconomic shifts. Today, Romania maintains one of the EU’s highest poverty rates, with 37 million of its declining population of 19.6 million people experiencing poverty or social exclusion (Eurostat, 2017; World Bank, 2018). According to the UN, between 2007 and 2015, after Syria, more people emigrated from Romania than any other nation (Alexe, 2018). While the number of wage earners in formal and informal sectors decreased during socialism’s decline, the trend continued for the decades after, largely attributed to Western migration. In Cluj, the number of employees in 2010 was 73% of what it had been in 1990 (Petrovici, 2019: 41). Between 1991 and 2011, the ratio of those who remained versus those who emigrated was 13% for non-Roma, and 32% for Roma (Petrovici, 2019: 51), revealing urban racialised precarity.

But these statistics do not reveal the entire picture; the language of percentages can never fully describe the day-to-day horrors of racial banishment. For instance, after being evicted from Croitorilor, Ioanică moved to ‘the NATO block’. His building was smoky and derelict, full of garbage and animals. ‘No one picked up the garbage because the people living here were Roma,’ he explains. ‘The children named this block NATO. It was back when our country got into NATO, and we said, okay, this is the NATO block.’ While entry into NATO and the EU has been heralded by anti-communists as progress, in the NATO block, residents lacked running water, electricity and toilets. There, they formulated their own critiques of EU accession and its false promises, most prominently by naming the block NATO. ‘Instead of electricity, we used candles. We made fire with wood. It was very smoky. … Some people had jobs, some people were picking up garbage, exactly as it is now,’ Ioanică laments, referencing the informal labour that many in Pata Rât partake in. Recalling Christmas, he recollects looking out from glassless windows, enviously watching people in other buildings watch TV. ‘Some people had cassette players, we had food, and used candles for light. Or we connected a small bulb to the car battery.’ All of this in the burgeoning Silicon Valley of Europe.

Because NATO residents had no formal contracts, the military police began raiding the block. While many in Cluj presume that Roma reside in Pata Rât because of poverty, Ioanică argues that instead he landed there because the City Hall never offered his community guidance on how to apply for social housing. Today he remains in Pata Rât with his two adolescent daughters, crammed into a 16 m² barrack. Cantonului lacks a sewage system and only has two water hydrants. Many people lack electricity. In 2015, the community was granted two portable toilets but, before that, people had to use the train tracks. Meanwhile, the City Hall refuses to pick up their garbage, citing technicalities. As Leontina, also featured in Dislocari, laments:

They didn’t bring us toilets, they didn’t bring garbage containers, they didn’t care about us. As if we were already dead, and they already put us under the ground, and that’s it. We were put in the garbage dump and that’s it. It’s worse for us than it is for the rats.

For Leontina and others in the maidane of urban renewal, postsocialist transition and the influx of global capital has only meant heightened dispossession. That techno-imperialism and its avatars fetishise nomadism simply adds insult to injury.

Techno-imperialism

While neoliberalism preyed upon and destroyed socialist-era property and labour regimes, many middle-class Romanians nevertheless herald Western arrival, disavowing the socialist past (Atanasoski and McElroy, 2018). As the CEO of a software company articulated to me in the winter of 2017: yes, 1989 was disastrous, but transition created new opportunities. ‘The multinationals, they really ended up saving us,’ he proffered, suggesting that foreign investment was necessary for future development. While the IT percentage of Romania’s GDP is low today, the rate is steadily rising (Colliers International, 2018: 7).

In recent years, Cluj’s IT industry, not known to hire Roma, has upsized. According to a report by the Romanian IT recruitment agency, Brainspotting, the industry boasts over 20,000 companies, over 110,000 professionals, and up to 8500 annual graduates (2018: 1). In Cluj, one in three employees is a professional, and IT is the second largest sector. Yet exploitation abounds, with over 100,000 people in outsourcing (AT Kearny, 2017: 14). As of 2016, foreign-owned companies generated 40% of the country’s GDP, with up to 90% of banking owned by foreign capital (Ban, 2016). According to Softech, a Cluj-based software development agency that provides outsourcing, the USA and the UK are the top IT outsourcing countries, followed by Germany, the Netherlands, Canada, Switzerland and then France (2017). Of IT graduates in Cluj, Google is the top desired employer, followed by Emerson, Endava, Bosch and Microsoft (Brainspotting, 2018: 6).

As Cluj becomes siliconised, its residential market has topped Bucharest’s. This process has been accompanied by an influx of Western tourists, some of whom identify as digital nomads, many of whom become imbricated in processes of gentrification. This correlates with Cocola-Gant’s argument (2018) that gentrifying areas frequently become the objects of tourism consumption, so that gentrification and touristification become entwined in a cyclical loop. It further aligns with Gentile’s observation (2015: 139) that in Eastern European cities, gentrification was induced first by the closing of functional gaps and then by the migration of wealthy expat populations. Indeed, prior to 2008, ‘gentrifiers’ in Romanian cities were mostly tied to local scenarios; after, they became imbricated in international dynamics (Chelcea et al., 2015: 127). These entangle with former racialised property histories.

Digital nomads often find Romania attractive because of its technological prowess, Western firms, anti-communist values, English fluency, cheap housing and exploitable labour. Citing Romania’s fast internet alongside its emergent EU status, the Nomad Capital website brags, ‘Romania is one of the top countries in Europe to find outsourced labor on sites like Odesk, and you should be able to easily find relatively qualified technical gurus for as little as several hundred dollars a month’ (Henderson, 2013). The Transylvania Hostel (2018) ranks the best wi-fi in coffee shops for digital nomads, describing Cluj as a ‘cheap destination for digital nomads who look for quiet places where they can sneak-in with their laptops and work on their revolutionary ideas’.

Like fast wi-fi, digital nomads celebrate the availability of Airbnb accommodations and Uber transit. As one blogged, ‘The fact that we also landed a kick-ass Airbnb rental obviously helped us feel at home’ (Backpack Me, 2017). Thus, the more Romania siliconises, the more desirable it becomes for digital nomads. As has been observed in cities worldwide, the adoption of San Francisco startups Airbnb and Uber often sparks tourism gentrification. The tour guide Lonely Planet ranked Transylvania as the top ‘region’ of 2016, promising: ‘Yes, horses and carts still rumble through the wooded countryside, but they’ll soon share the roads with Uber cabs ferrying visitors to chic Airbnb lodgings’ (2015).

In Romania, Uber usage not only enforces siliconisation, but also racism. As a French digital nomad developer blogs, ‘Before I arrived, I was told I would be chased by beggars and if I survived, all my belongings would be stolen by thiefs. The chief risk that you take by coming to Romania is to pay 5 times the real taxi fare. Before you learn how to spot a honest taxi, better use Uber [sic]’ (Morin, 2016). This fear of beggars and taxi drivers alike is rooted in classist and racist histories. Not only are many drivers Roma, but also, I have also heard countless tales of people losing their jobs after 1989, only to find refuge in taxi driving. For instance, Ion trained to be an engineer during socialism. The industry shrank after 1989 and he could not find work, igniting a deep depression. Today, Ion drives taxis by night, and watches pirated movies by day, barely able to afford food. Uber entered Bucharest in 2015, and Cluj in 2016. As of 2017, there were at least 250,000 users in the country (Romania Insider, 2017). In 2018, it launched the food delivery service Uber Eats. There have been numerous protests by taxi drivers in Bucharest and Cluj, and even lawsuits, as there have been worldwide, from Barcelona to San Francisco. Nevertheless, Uber, itself a digital nomad of sorts, continues to prey upon tourists and local aspirational culture of Western recognition.

Meanwhile, Romania’s own taxi app, Clever Taxi, which allows users to hail taxis with smartphones, was acquired by a German company in 2017. When questioned, several digital nomads told me that they prefer Uber to Clever Taxi, particularly as one can order rides from airports without having to exchange currency. I have also heard Romanian developers laud its Western origins and integration with Google Maps. This aligns with a longer postsocialist trajectory of using tourism and IT to affirm Western values. As Light (2001: 1057–1058) observes, beginning in the mid-1990s, Romania began disavowing its socialist past through tourism, ‘re-imaging’ the country as ‘“reborn”, “free” and having shaken off its totalitarian past’. As underground technoculture was also endemic to both late socialism and postsocialist transition and often pathologised by the West, the celebration of Western technological tourism reifies anticommunism within and beyond Romania.

Romania’s portrayal as both safe and exotic, as freed from its aberrant past and yet not fully Western, appeals to nomadic fantasy. During the winter of 2018, I sat down in a fancy coffee shop with a German digital nomad, Fabian, who founded a geospatial data firm in 2007 in Cluj, which has since expanded to San Francisco, Detroit, Berlin and China. As he sipped a green tea latte, he described Cluj’s appeal. After college, he began dabbling in Berlin politics, but found it boring. He then realised that the one thing that would never bore him was entrepreneurship. Attracted to ‘the wild east of Europe’, he considered Romania, Bulgaria and the Ukraine. It became a choice between Cluj and Sofia, as he wanted to remain in the EU and as Bucharest was ‘too political’. Cluj won because of its cheap Berlin flights. While his employees did not earn much at first, now they make three times as much as doctors in the region, competing within an international market. His travels are non-stop, and he even owns an apartment in San Francisco that he rarely visits. It is a great life, but he is thinking of selling his share and starting something new soon, just for fun.

While Fabian’s office sits in a new IT tower called The Office (formerly a textiles factory), other digital nomads prefer cafes or coworking spaces. In the latter, Western entrepreneurs lead training sessions on project acceleration and incubation, while Western firms sponsor events such as Tech Fest, Techsylvania, StartupTransilvania, TEDxCluj. There are at least 21 coworking spaces in Romania today, mostly in Bucharest and Cluj.

In the summer of 2016, I attempted to attend a ‘mingler’ party in the coworking space ClujHub, hoping to learn more. I already knew some of its nomads, such as Victor, who travels to Berlin weekly. He believes that IT is big in Romania because of foreign language skills, a sentiment often attributed to the 1990s influx of un-dubbed US television. As television was restricted to state channels during socialism (although people often pirated neighbouring countries’ stations), after 1989 people became obsessed with new programming, he explained. There was also the IT manager, Danny, who grew up in London and who works for a London-based company. With Brexit, he imagines nomads migrating from UK to Silicon Valley companies. Andre, who works for a Cluj start-up partnered with a German Microsoft-funded company, builds smart home security devices. It is gaining popularity in the West ‘with this new immigrant problem’, he explained, failing to acknowledge that, especially since Romania’s 2007 EU accession, many of these immigrants are Romanian Roma.

My room-mate, curious about ClujHub, decided to attend the event with me. But when we arrived, we were greeted by a 50 lei fee (US$12). While for Westerners this is not much, for my room-mate, it was laughable. ‘On a normal Cluj salary, that’s ridiculous. Most people could buy all the food that they needed for a week on that. It’s extreme,’ she scoffed. Thus, we changed course for Fabrica de Pensule, a collective art space (once a paintbrush factory), which, over the last year, has been partly displaced by tech companies, aligned with classic gentrification teleology. Rather than a hefty fee, there we were greeted by a multimedia piece curated by Claudiu Lazăr, ‘?uropa”|“?urope’. The piece highlighted the discrimination that Eastern Europeans encounter when migrating west. This is only more extreme for Roma, as was the case during the 19th century. Yet, when Westerners migrate eastward, particularly digital nomads, they incite rather than face dispossession. This process is haunted by former imperial trajectories, aligned with other postsocialist technologies of installing Western dependence. In times of postsocialist techno-imperialism, dispossession of home and identity are collapsed as Western nomads arrive.

Conclusion

On the surface, it might appear that Cluj is indeed the new Silicon Valley of Europe, gentrifying much like its Western counterpart. While of course there are parallels, with rents rising and racialised evictions accumulating, there is more at work than simply replication. As the interconnected phenomena of racial banishment and appropriation reveals, racial histories haunt the materialities and allegories of techno-urban transformation. By reading across fields and narratives, and by thinking from the maidane, interconnection begins to crystalise. Digital nomadism is entwined with Orientalist onto-epistemologies built upon Roma slavery, failed reparations and forced migration. Further, the siliconisation of Cluj rests upon prior techno-urban infrastructure and histories. Might it be a form of epistemological gentrification to only read Cluj as Silicon Valley, or to simply read material and allegorical dispossession as isolated phenomena? Rather, by reading across narratives, allegories and routes of eviction and geoarbitrage alike, techno-imperialism and its Orientalist hauntings surface. These spectres point to the need for a connected approach to theorising material and allegorical dispossessions across time, space and genre.