Rage Against the Landlord Tech Machine: The Domestic Data Grab in Technocapitalist Times

Keywords: property, landlords, data, capitalism, technocapitalism, surveillance, carcerality
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

Over the last decade, landlords have been experimenting with new forms of data capture in tenant housing, deploying technologies ranging from biometric cameras to virtual rental payment platforms. While presented as a means of creating frictionless rental and ownership experiences, these technologies often instigate new material and psychic fears for tenants, as well as righteous rage. Across the US and beyond, tenants in low-income housing are forced to contend with technological systems accumulating data about them which could (and often time does) lead to the automation of dispossession, gentrification, and carcerality. This paper theorizes this technologically mediated housing-carceral conjuncture and the means through which the accumulation of real estate and tenant data become increasingly blurred. It also studies how tenants theorize and experience intimate data theft and eviction automation, charting the affective landscapes of rage produced by this new scopic regime. While grounded contexts of property monopolization and control (with property here including tenant data and housing), this paper also considers contemporary political debates as to whether new scopes of accumulation have pushed capitalism into technofeudal realms. Today, some are considering that due to the massive scale of monopolization, property is increasingly become mediated by lord-like entities rather than the state. While considering these arguments, this paper argues that the contemporary domestic data grab and its spatial and affective implications still fit squarely within the spacetime of technocapitalism. Despite feudal aspirations, landlords and their technologies are still machines of capitalism, and tenant organizing is still grounded in anticapitalist struggle.