Data, dispossession, and Facebook: techno-imperialism and toponymy in gentrifying San Francisco

Abstract

This article situates the 2015 rebranding of Zuckerberg San Francisco General within San Francisco's technopolitical landscape. After Facebook's CEO Mark Zuckerberg donated to the hospital, thereby acquiring naming rights, local toponymical tension percolated. This was in part due to Facebook's gentrifying role in the city and the racial violence such processes constitute, as well as ongoing practices data colonialism. The latter includes Facebook's attempt at pairing hospital data with user data in order to augment its scope into intimate and bodily geographies. In exploring the intertwining of gentrification and data colonialism, here I forge the concept of techno-imperialism as an analytic and as a point of departure in understanding Facebook's multi-scalar impacts. As I suggest, the transformation of "The General" to "The Zuckerberg" indexes the company's techno-imperiality, as well as its efforts to mask its dispossessive impacts.

Whose (Im)moral rent gap?

“…On Zuckergerg/Facebook/Meta, who can forget Cambridge Analytica whereby ‘accumulation by dispossession … through the colonization and commodification of … everyday life [occurs] in ways previously impossible [before social media]’ (Thatcher et al, 2016: 1). Additionally, on Zuckerberg and gentrification, and perhaps an ‘immoral’ rent gap, a telling example is the renaming of San Francisco's General (hospital) to ‘The Zuckerberg’ (McElroy, 2019), after a donation which led to this renaming. Such an event occurred ‘in the context of techno-speculative gentrification [locally], and globally, in the context of … data colonialism, or utopic promises that facilitate capitalist accumulations’ (Thatcher et al in McElroy, 2019: 2).…”

Design Actions for the Global Gaze. Evolution and Contradictions of Temporary Installations in San Francisco’s Public Space

“…Post-industrial San Francisco has followed the path of many world-class cities. The pressures that began during the dotcom boom continue today as more and more industrial land shifts to high-end residential uses, and trajectories of displacement deviate from the neighbourhood level to the regional one (Centner, 2008;John, 2015;McElroy, 2019).…”

YIMBY: The Latest Frontier of Gentrification

“…Or the gentle reminder of the older Black Panther, who says ‘excuse me, you're all white, except you [there was one other Black guy there]’ (Ege, 2017)? Or the people and peoples who never had a chance to go to the meeting because the Mission District itself was produced through the colonial ‘technologies of erasure’ of displacement, land titles, and toponomy as Spanish colonists dispossessed Ohlone communities in the eighteenth century (McElroy, 2019)? Successive generations of racial capitalism produce dynamic historical‐geographical contingencies in the specific configurations of competition for urban space, with corresponding implications for who gets access to any of the new housing supply sought by YIMBYs.…”