Silicon Valley's Team: The Golden State Warriors, Datafied Managerialism, and Basketball's Racialized Geography

Abstract:This essay examines how the Golden State Warriors' multimedia empire invites viewers to embrace Silicon Valley–driven transformations of space and body that appropriate value generated by Black, Brown, and working-class communities for the benefit of a wealthy, white ownership class. These transformations form part of the tech industry's imperializing adventures in bodily and societal improvement through the intertwined processes of disruption, technological solutionism, datafication, and financial speculation. First, we show how the Warriors promote analytics, wearable technology, surveillance, and white managerialism as keys to success on and off the court. We then turn to the team's 2019 move from Oakland's Oracle Arena to San Francisco's Chase Center, which offered investment and networking opportunities for Silicon Valley elites while making the team less affordable and physically accessible to its traditional Black and working-class Oakland fanbase. Ultimately, we argue that the Warriors promote Silicon Valley processes of wealth extraction by obscuring where and how value is generated, both within the labor relations that define the Warriors' sports organization and in the gentrification of the Bay Area and the commodification of Black Oakland for an increasingly non-Black fanbase.