Human capital and digital citizenship: Postsocialism's urban dispossessions

With a focus on human capital initiatives in postsocialist Romania, this chapter centres on the exclusionary and dispossessory logics that digital citizenship promises to uphold. Looking to the institutionalization of digital nomadism alongside state-sanctioned projects such as the European Capital of Culture, this chapter theorizes the uneven geographies of human and cultural capital in techno-urban contexts. In particular it questions who is afforded dreams of digital ascendancy and who is racialized as not worthy of, or perhaps in the way of, assimilation into imaginaries of Western becoming. Through interdisciplinary engagement, the chapter homes in on and unravels the racial and anticommunist underpinnings of contemporary smart, light, European, and algorithmic programmes. Focusing upon how longstanding imperial and nationalist fantasies map onto contemporary state enterprises, it troubles the continuities of anti-Roma racism and urban dispossession in postsocialist technological times.