Recent Writing

In Silicon Valley Imperialism, Erin McElroy maps the processes of gentrification, racial dispossession, and economic predation that drove the development of Silicon Valley in the San Francisco Bay Area and how that logic has become manifest in postsocialist Romania. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and archival research in Romania and the United States, McElroy exposes the mechanisms through which the appeal of Silicon Valley techno-capitalism devours space and societies, displaces residents, and reproduces imperial materialities and imaginaries in order to expand its reach. Silicon Valley Imperialism brings an urgently needed, intersectional perspective to the tech industry's impact on the worlds in which we inhabit, including in the technofascist present. McElroy invites readers to confront difficult questions about the alignment of liberal and fascist ideologies in today's anti-communist climate, offering an original examination of how techno-imperial expansion operates. At the same time, McElroy accounts for the ways that organizers and artists resist Silicon Valley capitalist logics to establish more just social formations—helping materialize the unbecoming of Silicon Valley. 

Counterpoints: A San Francisco Bay Area Atlas of Displacement and Resistance, edited by the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project and published by PM Press, brings together cartography, essays, illustrations, poetry, and more in order to depict gentrification and resistance struggles from across the San Francisco Bay Area and act as a roadmap to counter-hegemonic knowledge making and activism. Each chapter reflects different frameworks for understanding the Bay Area’s ongoing urban upheaval, including evictions, indigenous geographies, health and environmental racism, state violence, transportation and infrastructure, migration and relocation, and speculative futures. By weaving these themes together, Counterpoints expands normative urban-studies framings of gentrification to consider more complex, regional, historically grounded, and entangled horizons for understanding the present.

Books

Silicon Valley Imperialism: Techno Fantasies and Frictions in Postsocialist Times. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2024.

Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, ed. Counterpoints: A San Francisco Bay Area Atlas of Displacement and Resistance. Oakland: PM Press, 2021.

Podcasts about Books

Reviews of Books

Recent Articles and Book Chapters:

McElroy, Erin, and Diego Martinez-Lugo. “Disciplining Through Landlord Technologies: Why the Carceral Logics of Tenant Surveillance Require Abolition.” Antipode 58, no. 1 (2026): e70102. https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.70102.

Murillo, Luis Felipe R., and Erin McElroy. “When ‘Open’ Is Still Far from Good Enough: The Work of Counter-Mapping with Political Software.” Engaging Science, Technology, and Society 11, no. 3 (2025): 47–70. https://doi.org/10.17351/ests2023.2107.

McElroy, Erin. “Siliconization, Technofascism, and Their Unbecomings.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, December 1, 2025, 02637758251401437. https://doi.org/10.1177/02637758251401437.

McElroy, Erin, and Liviu Chelcea. “Who’s Afraid of Postsocialist Theory?” Eurasian Geography and Economics 66, no. 6 (2025): 719–31. https://doi.org/10.1080/15387216.2025.2510352.

McElroy, Erin. “Speculations Beyond Real Estate.” In Feminist Studies: An Introductory Reader, edited by Hemangini Gupta, Kelly Sharron, Carly Thomsen, and Abraham Weil. Routledge, 2025.

McElroy, Erin. “Undoing Landlord Technologies: Beyond the Propertied Logics of the Pandemic Past and Present.” In Technocreep and the Politics of Things Not Seen, edited by Neda Atanasoski and Nassim Parvin. Duke University Press, 2025.

McElroy, Erin. “Oraşul Viitorului: Beyond the Sliconisation of Postsocialist Cluj.” In Anti-Atlas: Critical Area Studies from the East of the West, edited by Tim Beasley-Murray, Wendy Bracewell, and Michal Murawski. FRINGE. UCL Press, 2025. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/A/bo257337112.html.

McElroy, Erin, Matthew Martignoni, Jeantelle Laberinto, Priya Prabhakar, and Joseph Smooke. “Against Landlord Technology in San Francisco.” In Dispatches from the Threshold: Tenant Power in Times of Crisis, edited by Rae Baker and Alexander Ferrer, 95–107. Fernwood Publishing, 2025.

McElroy, Erin. “Silicon Valley Imperialism: Contemporary Conjunctures.” Dialogues in Urban Research 3, no. 1 (March 1, 2025): 136–41. https://doi.org/10.1177/27541258251318989.

McElroy, Erin. “Human Capital and Digital Citizenship: Postsocialism’s Urban Dispossessions.” In Urban Marginality, Racialisation, Interdependence, edited by Alexandrescu, Ryan Powell, and Ana Vilenica. Routledge, 2025.

McElroy, Erin. “The Work of Landlord Technology: The Fictions of Frictionless Property Management.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 42, no. 4 (2024): 456–75. https://doi.org/10.1177/02637758241232758.

McElroy, Erin. “Dis/Possessory Data Politics: From Tenant Screening to Anti-Eviction Organizing.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 47, no. 1 (2023): 54–70. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.13150.

McElroy, Erin. “Techno-Imperialism.” In In Decoloniality in Eastern Europe: A Lexicon of Reorientation, edited by Ana Vilenica. Kuda, 2023.

Halperin, Brett A., and Erin McElroy. “Temporal Tensions in Digital Story Mapping for Housing Justice: Rethinking Time and Technology in Community-Based Design.” Proceedings of the 2023 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference, ACM, July 10, 2023, 2469–88. https://doi.org/10.1145/3563657.3596088.

Halperin, Brett A., Gary Hsieh, Erin McElroy, James Pierce, and Daniela K. Rosner. “Probing a Community-Based Conversational Storytelling Agent to Document Digital Stories of Housing Insecurity.” Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (New York, NY, USA), CHI ’23, Association for Computing Machinery, April 19, 2023, 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3581109.

McElroy, Erin. “Digital Cartographies of Displacement: Data as Property and Property as Data.” ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies 21, no. 4 (2022): 4.

McElroy, Erin, and Manon Vergerio. “Automating Gentrification: Landlord Technologies and Housing Justice Organizing in New York City Homes.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 40, no. 4 (2022): 607–26. https://doi.org/10.1177/02637758221088868.

McElroy, Erin. “Corruption, Șmecherie, and Siliconization: Retrospective and Speculative Technoculture in Postsocialist Romania.” Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 6, no. 2 (2020): 2. https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v6i2.32905.

McElroy, Erin. “Property as Technology: Temporal Entanglements of Race, Space, and Displacement.” City 24, nos. 1–2 (2020): 112–29. https://doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2020.1739910.

McElroy, Erin. “Speculating upon San Francisco’s Futurity: From Shell Company Evictions to Decolonial Action.” In Housing Displacement. Routledge, 2020.

McElroy, Erin. “Digital Nomads in Siliconising Cluj: Material and Allegorical Double Dispossession.” Urban Studies 57, no. 15 (2020): 3078–94. https://doi.org/10.1177/0042098019847448.

McElroy, Erin, and Alex Werth. “Deracinated Dispossessions: On the Foreclosures of ‘Gentrification’ in Oakland, Ca.” Antipode 51, no. 3 (2019): 878–98.

McElroy, Erin. “Data, Dispossession, and Facebook: Techno-Imperialism and Toponymy in Gentrifying San Francisco.” Urban Geography 40, no. 6 (2019): 826–45. https://doi.org/10.1080/02723638.2019.1591143.

McElroy, Erin. “Digital Nomads and Settler Desires: Racial Fantasies of Silicon Valley Imperialism.” Imaginations: Journal of Cross-Cultural Image Studies 10, no. 1 (2019): 1. https://doi.org/10.17742/IMAGE.CR.10.1.8.

Atanasoski, Neda, and Erin McElroy. “Postsocialism and the Afterlives of Revolution: Impossible Spaces of Dissent.” In Reframing Critical Literary, and Cultural Theories, edited by Nicoletta Pireddu. Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.

Maharawal, Manissa M., and Erin McElroy. “The Anti-Eviction Mapping Project: Counter Mapping and Oral History Toward Bay Area Housing Justice.” Annals of the American Association of Geographers 108, no. 2 (2018): 380–89.

Maharawal, Manissa, and Erin McElroy. “Mapping Dispossession, Mapping Affect.” Anthropology News 59, no. 6 (2018): e70–77. https://doi.org/10.1111/AN.1038.

McElroy, Erin. “Countermapping Displacement and Resistance in Alameda County with the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project.” American Quarterly 70, no. 3 (2018): 601–4.

McElroy, Erin. “Postsocialism and the Tech Boom 2.0: Techno-Utopics of Racial/Spatial Dispossession.” Social Identities 24 (May 2017): 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1080/13504630.2017.1321718.

McElroy, Erin. “The Racial Contours of YIMBY/NIMBY Bay Area Gentrification.” Berkeley Planning Journal 29, no. 1 (2018): 7–44.

McElroy, Erin. “Mediating the Tech Boom: Temporalities of Displacement and Resistance.” Journal of the New Media Caucus 13, no. 1 (2017): 38–57. https://doi.org/10.21900/j.median.v13i1.3.

Recent Public Scholarship:

2024 “Boycotting, Identifying, and Organizing Against Serial Evictors.” E-Flux, no. Spatial Computing.

2023    “Counterpoints: A Review Forum.” Society and Space, with Mary Shi and Manissa M. Maharawal.

2023 “Automating Gentrification in Times of Crisis." Just Tech. Social Science Research  Council.

2022    “Picturing the Homeless, Building International Solidarities.” Radical Housing Journal, 4(1):141-150. Coauthored with Rob Robinson.

2022    “Public Thinker: Sophie Gonick on Housing Justice and Mass Movements.” Public Books.

2021    “Prison Tech Comes Home.” Public Books. Coauthored with Meredith Whittaker and Nicole Weber.

2021    “Keeping an Eye on Landlord Tech.” Shelterforce. Coauthored with Wonyoung So and Nicole Weber.

2021    “Landlord Tech in Covid-19 Times.” Metropolitics. Coauthored with Wonyoung So.

2021    “Reflections on Doing the Work.” Radical Housing Journal, Issue 3.1. Coauthored with Manissa M. Maharawal and City Life Vida Urban.

2020    “Evictor Structures: A New Website is Putting Eviction Data at Tenant Organizers’ Fingertips.” Logic Magazine. Coauthored with Azad Amir-Ghassemi.

2020    “Landlord Tech and Racial Technocapitalism in the Times of Covid-19.” In “Virushumans,” Foundry, University of California Humanities Research Institute.

2020    “Covid-19 Crisis Capitalism Comes to Real Estate.” Boston Review. Coauthored with Meredith Whittaker and Genevieve Fried.

2020    “Housing Struggles in Romania and Central Eastern Europe.” Radical Housing Journal. Coauthored with George Zamfir, et al.

2019    “Disruption at the Doorstep.” The Urban Omnibus.

2019    “‘The Most Dangerous Town on the Internet’ and the Cold War 2.0.” Obieg Magazine.

2019    “The Anti-Eviction Mapping Project: Counter-mapping Evictions in the San Francisco Bay Area and New York City.” Notes From Below. Coauthored with Sam Rabiyah and Manon Vergerio.

2019    “Building a Radical Housing Justice Movement in Bucharest.” Notes From Below. Coauthored with Veda Popovici.

2019    “(Dis)location Black Exodus and the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project.” Radical History Review, Abusable Past. Coauthored with Ariana Fay Allensworth and Adrienne Hall.

Recent Reports

2023 “San Francisco Landlord Tech Report.” With the Anti-Eviction Lab.

2022    “Facial Recognition and Building Access Technologies in New York City Homes.” With Paula Garcia-Salazar and Manon Vergerio. Published by the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project.

2022    “Displacement Impacts of Upzoning in Berkeley.” With the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project.

2019    “AI Now 2019, Annual Report.” With the AI Now Institute, New York University.

2019    “Wall Street Landlords in California.” With the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project and Tenants Together.

2018    “Disrupting Displacement Financing in Oakland.” With the California Reinvestment Coalition.

2016    “Counterpoints: Data and Stories for Resisting Displacement in Alameda County.” With the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project