Startup Jerusalem: Silicon Designs and the Art of Survival in a Transcolonial Innovation City

• In Event: Technocapitalism, Anticommunism, and Technofascism in Late-Stage US Empire and Beyond

Abstract

Palestine and California are connected by a long history of transcolonial circuits of capital, technologies, and imaginaries. Already in the early 1900s, the Zionist movement invited Californian specialists in agro-tech to accelerate the colonization process and construct its own ‘garden utopia’ in Palestine. More presently, Israel’s rise as a global technology and (in)security provider has been highly dependent on US capital and investments from the Bay Area in particular. In this paper, I explore the transcolonial circuits of urbanism between Palestine/Israel and Silicon Valley by looking into the Israeli state-led project of ‘updating’ Jerusalem into a global innovation city. ‘Startup Jerusalem’ reveals itself as a playground of Silicon intellectuals, imaginaries, and techniques of urban transformation that contribute to the settler colonial takeover of Jerusalem/al-Quds. Startup Jerusalem, I argue, makes visible the transcolonial violence of innovation urbanism at the heart of contemporary technocapitalism. The paper concludes by highlighting the creative agency of Palestinians in surviving the transcolonial urbanities of innovation and mobilizing across Jerusalem/al-Quds and the Bay Area, reminding us that power, even in its siliconized form, is anything but monolithic and absolute.

Author

• Antti I Tarvainen, University of Helsinki