Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World

by Malcolm Harris

Overview

Named One of the Year's Best Books by VULTURE• THE NEW REPUBLIC• DAZED• WIRED• BLOOMBERG• ESQUIRE• SALON • THE NEXT BIG IDEA CLUB

The history of Silicon Valley, from railroads to microchips, is an “extraordinary” story of disruption and destruction, told for the first time in this comprehensive, jaw-dropping narrative (Greg Grandin, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The End of the Myth).

Palo Alto’s weather is temperate, its people are educated and enterprising, its corporations are spiritually and materially ambitious and demonstrably world-changing. Palo Alto is also a haunted toxic waste dump built on stolen Indian burial grounds, and an integral part of the capitalist world system.

In PALO ALTO, the first comprehensive, global history of Silicon Valley, Malcolm Harris examines how and why Northern California evolved in the particular, consequential way it did, tracing the ideologies, technologies, and policies that have been engineered there over the course of 150 years of Anglo settler colonialism, from IQ tests to the "tragedy of the commons," racial genetics, and "broken windows" theory. The Internet and computers, too. It's a story about how a small American suburb became a powerful engine for economic growth and war, and how it came to lead the world into a surprisingly disastrous 21st century. PALO ALTO is an urgent and visionary history of the way we live now, one that ends with a clear-eyed, radical proposition for how we might begin to change course.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780316592017
Publisher:	Little, Brown and Company
Publication date:	03/19/2024
Pages:	736
Sales rank:	223,321
Product dimensions:	9.10(w) x 5.90(h) x 2.10(d)

About the Author

Malcolm Harris is a freelance writer and the author of Kids These Days: The Making of Millennials and Shit is Fucked Up and Bullshit: History Since the End of History. He was born in Santa Cruz, CA and graduated from the University of Maryland.

Editorial Reviews

For a guy who loathes capitalism, Harris writes about the subject with vivid depth.”—Chris Vognar, SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

“Palo Alto lives up to its description, but it’s also so much more—in these whopping 720 pages, you’ll find nothing short of an exhaustive history of American capitalism. Harris deftly charts the long shadow of extraction in northern California…”—Adrienne Westenfeld, ESQUIRE

“Provocative, damning…Harris busts the myths about his hometown’s vast history, and how its reputation is nothing more than deceptive."—Yannise Jean, FAST COMPANY

"We don’t love civilizational collapse brought on by tech chodes like Elon and Zuck and Jeff and Bill, but Valentine’s Day has to do with love (and capitalism), and Palo Alto comes out on February 14, so it all works out. We’re both swooning and pulling out our wallets.”—Adam Willems, THE STRANGER

"...a staggering exploration of the historical forces that shaped the technological mecca of Silicon Valley...Harris is approachable, yet unrelenting. His subjects are as inspiring as they are insidious. The depth of his research unveils plentiful connective tissues between capitalism and exploitation, agriculture and organizing, start-ups and psychedelics, as well as the communists and labor leaders that attempted to subvert the malevolence of the ruling class."—Ryan Baesemann, CLEVELAND REVIEW OF BOOKS

"Both the earnestness and the acidity of Harris’s prose can be read as signs of an effortful articulation of the historical reality of what has been called ‘the Californian ideology,’….at once so detailed and so ambitious…Harris’s book offers no end to this tale, only the possibilities for thought and action that spring from its symbolic parricide.”—Ben Beitler, LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS

“Sweeping…the book’s expansive social history is more about how Palo Alto changed the world than it is about the suburb itself….The beauty of this sprawling book is that, although you can open it anywhere and begin reading, its scope draws connections over a vast period of time.”—Scott Feeney, THE DEMOCRATIC LEFT

"Harris avoids a propagandic tone by working from historical points that are objectively true — Palo Alto has become the most consequential suburb in the world, we live in a capitalist world system — and connecting dots throughout history that not only create a picture of California, but also offer persuasive explanations for why California looks the way it does, wields the power it has and espouses the toxic achievement philosophies that have become its trademark and albatross…"—Naomi Elias, KQED Arts

"Palo Alto reads at times like a novel by Thomas Pynchon, a psychedelic romp through Silicon Valley office parks and Central Valley union halls, Chinese iPhone factories and Afghan battlefields. The paths can be difficult to follow, but the patient traveler hoping to learn more about any one of California’s many gold rushes will be rewarded."—Benjamin Schneider, SAN FRANCISCO EXAMINER

“In these lively pages, Malcolm Harris provides counterweight to that modern mythology, painting a far more detailed and complicated picture of the entire region, and exploring the social and economic inequalities that are often glossed over in other accounts.”—CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR, 10 Best Books of February

"Harris’ book—written in engaging prose while filling more than 700 pages—represents both an overdue corrective and a compelling counternarrative. Offering nothing less than what its subtitle suggests—a comprehensive origin story of modern capitalism."—Luke Savage, SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE

"If you’re looking for a beautifully written, continually surprising, deeply researched book about why so much of life is, on balance, so f**ked up right now, get your hands on [Palo Alto]."—BLACKBIRD SPYPLANE

"A useful counter to Silicon Valley’s self-mythologizing, this history of Palo Alto begins in the late nineteenth century, with the state-funded genocide of Alta Indians by settlers and the coming of the railroad, which led, via the fortune of Leland Stanford, to the establishment of Stanford University ('the pseudostate governing Palo Alto'). Harris highlights the city’s connection to the horrors of napalm, Japanese internment, and eugenics, and notes that many of the early tech companies in the area began 'in the space between the military and academia.'"—THE NEW YORKER

“Engrossing. Harris has an engaging narrative voice and a marvelous command of language despite his propensity for peppering his work with expletives.”—Leonora Cravotta, THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR

“Epic…Palo Alto is crystalizing…not only for a generation of Americans, but for any citizen of the world who wishes to understand their situation in order to change it.”—Adrian Chen, INTERVIEW MAGAZINE

“The question driving Malcolm Harris’s inquisition into the flashy hollowness of Silicon Valley—predicated upon exploitation, grotesque inequality, and a total disavowal of the public good—becomes more urgent than ever: ‘How does the Palo Alto System end without taking the rest of the transformed world down with it?’”—David Helps, PROTEAN MAGAZINE

“Poignant…Harris compellingly shows that one of the distinctive historical faults of California was the oppression of Asian-Americans….Readers who can withstand, or enjoy, Harris’s ideological bludgeon will learn some things about the region…Harris’s explanations of scientific advances are detailed and punchy.”—Jason Willick, WASHINGTON EXAMINER

“[A] welcome and necessary new book…illuminating and revelatory. Triple exclamation points, and skull and crossbones—doodles to which I rarely resort—pepper the margins of my copy…I couldn’t stop reading…By the end of the book, Harris has mounted a largely persuasive and extremely damning argument.”—David Leavitt, THE NEW YORKER

“Readers will relish Palo Alto for its scope and precision, for its pugnaciousness, and for its sardonic amazement at an emperor who couldn’t be strolling down the avenue any nakeder. There’s a brute glee is Harris’s version of historical materialism; even the book’s title eschews metaphor and abstraction. Harris has done the hard work, and he has done it in a cause: to urge us awake from our capitalist-technological inertial dream state. The truth may sometimes hurt, but the lies are in bed with collective death.”—Jonathan Lethem, THE NATION

“Deeply researched and richly detailed, Palo Alto is a prehistory of today’s all-too-familiar Valley of oligarchs and Big Brother brogrammers who seem to taint everything they touch…Unlike related critiques of Silicon Valley, which usually highlight its libertarian and dystopian dimensions, Palo Alto is a takedown grounded in the long-term history of an actual place.”—Ross Perlin, THE ATLANTIC

"Harris lands his ambitious claims alarmingly convincingly...the chains of connection that Harris traces accumulate gradually into a web of persuasive and often shocking revelation that this wealthy Bay Area enclave really might be the economic, cultural, and moral epicenter of our universe—less a shining city on a hill than a hideous Lovecraftian maw."—Michael Docherty, LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS

"[Palo Alto] is an urgent and visionary history of the way we live now, one that ends with a clear-eyed, radical proposition for how we might begin to change course."—Annalee Newitz, SCIENCE FRIDAY

"[Harris's] ability to make complex, thorny topics highly readable makes him a must-read; [Palo Alto] is a tour de force."—ASK MEN

"Palo Alto reads like a big social novel in the tradition of John Dos Passos . . . The picture Harris presents of the valley is more complete than any attempted thus far."—Ben Tarnoff, THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

From the Publisher

10/17/2022

Silicon Valley’s epicenter has nurtured an unholy symbiosis of capitalism and racism, according to this sweeping yet jaundiced study. The New Inquiry contributing editor Harris (Kids These Days), a Palo Alto native, surveys the city’s history from the Gold Rush onward, paying particular attention to its dominant institution, Stanford University. He indicts the school for pioneering the “military-academic-industrial complex,” brainstorming conservative ideology at its Hoover Institution, and incubating Silicon Valley’s computer industry—an especially pernicious variant of globalism, he contends. Harris puts Palo Alto at the core of a California capitalism that combined labor exploitation with racism by recruiting low-wage, nonwhite workers, then condoning white-supremacist backlashes to intimidate them. Vivid sketches of Stanford-linked capitalists (railroad baron Leland Stanford; venture capitalist Peter Thiel) dwell on their sins more than their achievements and celebrate the Indigenous rebels, union organizers, Black Panthers, and campus militants who challenged them. The result is a somewhat discordant mix of jibes and Marxist theorizing: “Bill Gates and Steve Jobs... had poor personal hygiene, didn’t play sports, and were both noted jerks.... These repellent young men were the tools that got capital from the crisis of the 1960s to the ‘greed is good’ ’80s.” Harris’s frequently gripping history gets lost in the shuffle of his doctrinaire politics. Photos. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

Patrick Harrison combines a fine storytelling style with a sure sense of the dramatic and a good tempo. His resonant voice fits this massive evocation of the dark side of Silicon Valley, the outsized role of technology giants, and the political influence of Stanford University’s Hoover Institute. The thesis is that technological innovators and their political allies became unfathomably wealthy as they despoiled the planet, exploited workers, and were ruthless in the accumulation of money and power. Few heroes emerge in this massive yet compelling audiobook. Palo Alto itself is characterized by hyper-motivated high school students with an extraordinarily high suicide rate. And Stanford, which has the largest acreage of any U.S. university and which sits on Native American land, is described as a venal institution. A.D.M. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine

FEBRUARY 2023 - AudioFile

Patrick Harrison combines a fine storytelling style with a sure sense of the dramatic and a good tempo. His resonant voice fits this massive evocation of the dark side of Silicon Valley, the outsized role of technology giants, and the political influence of Stanford University’s Hoover Institute. The thesis is that technological innovators and their political allies became unfathomably wealthy as they despoiled the planet, exploited workers, and were ruthless in the accumulation of money and power. Few heroes emerge in this massive yet compelling audiobook. Palo Alto itself is characterized by hyper-motivated high school students with an extraordinarily high suicide rate. And Stanford, which has the largest acreage of any U.S. university and which sits on Native American land, is described as a venal institution. A.D.M. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine

FEBRUARY 2023 - AudioFile

★ 2022-11-24
A searching history of California and its role in predatory, extractive capitalism.

“California is very important for me,” wrote Karl Marx in 1880, “because nowhere else has the upheaval most shamelessly caused by capitalist centralization taken place with such speed.” Native son Harris, who quotes Marx’s apothegm, begins his story of that upheaval with the Ohlone, Indigenous inhabitants of the Bay Area who were mistakenly assumed to have disappeared in a wave of genocide. It’s easy to understand the confusion, since so many Native peoples were wiped out in the rush to ravage the lands and waters of California. The business of making a few people wealthy was the work of many. Chinese laborers, who were so instrumental in building the railroads, also labored in the farm fields until Mexican workers replaced them. The Irish and Swiss Italians did well in politics and winemaking, facing less prejudice than elsewhere, but as for people of color—well, consider that Palo Alto banned buildings over 40 feet high from residential areas, the better to control access to housing by lower-income people. Palo Alto is, of course, the home of Stanford University, which Harris sees as foil and fulcrum of the military-industrial complex. Said one dissident in the 1970s, “The university isn’t a temple of the intellect or a place where disinterested scholars examine the world,” but instead a hub of military research. While Harris nods with some appreciation to the techno-libertarians who invented the personal computer, he also urges that the real heroes were the builders and not the venture capitalists, those who have since become Silicon Valley royalty. In closing this long but consistently engaging narrative, the author proposes a program of divestiture and restitution, including “the forfeit of Stanford’s vast accumulated wealth,” that is breathtaking in its audacity—and probably doesn’t stand a chance of being put in place.

A highly readable revisionist history of the Golden State, sharply argued and well researched.

Kirkus Reviews