Based Digital Resistance

Keywords: digital capitalism, land, proptech, landlord tech, housing justice
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

This paper is a call to action for geographic studies of digital capitalism to center the changing, digitalizing landscape of anticapitalist resistance. We present ongoing empirical research on real estate consolidation in Massachusetts as an example, and build on three bodies of scholarship.

First, the long line of geographic scholarship which argues for skepticism of “capitalist hegemony,” reclaiming space for alternative possibilities (Gibson-Graham 1996, 2006). Second, we draw on work in critical GIS and digital geographies to think through digital methods as both objects of study and tools of resistance (Shelton 2022; D’Ignazio Forthcoming; Schuurman and Pratt 2002). Third, the rapidly growing body of research examining platform real estate, proptech, and opposition to the same (Shaw 2020; Fields and Rogers 2021; McElroy and Vergerio 2022).

We will present our ongoing work connecting graph databases of corporate entities to land parcels, and how we are using it to advocate for housing justice movements in the COVID-19 pandemic in Massachusetts (Huntley et al. 2022), even as new technologies drive accumulation and precarity in the built environment. Rather than taking it as exemplary of pure resistance (or as a novel gadget), we situate it within a broader landscape of tools that are simultaneously pushing against the effects of platform real estate while also reinforcing its logic (cf. McElroy 2022). This paper posits that, in other words, novel forms of resistance to capitalist entanglements between land, property, and the digital must also be figured within geographic scholarship on digital capitalism.