Digital Experiments with Landed Property: Robots, Race, and Rent

Abstract

A wide range of digital innovations has changed property relations globally over the past fifteen years. What are we to make of these digital experiments with landed property? I argue we should not mistake their technological novelty for a break with the geographic and historical specificities of property relations. The yoking of property to modernity and civilization makes technological progress a fundamental part of how relationships to land are constituted and reconstituted, and in whose interests, throughout global capitalism. In this article, I situate 21st century housing market technologies within sedimented relations of landed property in the United States, showing the history of property innovation in the United States is also one of racialized wealth accumulation and dispossession. I interpret current anxieties about ‘robot landlords’ as anxieties about how the shifting landscape of property ownership appears to threaten the economic benefits associated with racial dominance.