Undoing Landlord Technologies: Beyond the Propertied Logics of the Pandemic Past and Present Available to Purchase

This chapter assesses landlord technologies such as biometric building access systems and tenant screening algorithms that extend racialized surveillance creep into domestic space and incite dispossession. Looking to the landlord tech industry’s growth throughout the Cold War and its subsequent expansion during the dot-com boom, 9/11, the subprime mortgage crisis, the artificial intelligence boom, and the COVID-19 era, the analytic of racial technocapitalism gets mobilized to map the logics undergirding the proliferation and automation of gentrification. Yet at the same time, this chapter charts possible ways out, looking toward abolitionist approaches to undoing the property-making of data and housing. From tenant organizing efforts intended to thwart the deployment of landlord technologies in the space of one’s home to digital justice projects that mobilize property data in order to identify corporate evictors, there are countless ways to undo landlord technologies and the racial technocapitalist logics that they encode.