Home › Books › Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, a…
Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World
by
47/99
Critics' Rating Index
22/99
Readers' Rating Index
96/99
Scholars' Citation Index
89/99
Volume of Reviews
74/99
Volume of Reader Ratings
Sign in to add to your shelf, rate, or review this book.
About This Book
The first comprehensive, global history of Silicon Valley, from railroad capitalists to microchip assemblers, showing how Northern California created the world as we know it Palo Alto is nice. The weather is temperate, the people are educated, rich, healthy, enterprising. Remnants of a hippie counterculture have synthesized with high technology and big finance to produce the spiritually and materially ambitious heart of Silicon Valley, whose products are changing how we do everything from driving around to eating food. It 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.
Reviews
"At its best, Palo Alto reads like a big social novel in the tradition of John Dos Passos ..."
"It's a stunning, Technicolor anvil of a book ..."
"But he entirely bypasses another way forward: reclaiming Silicon Valley for the public ..."
"Harris demonstrates that the charming story with which we began, in which hippies freed the world by virtue of their genius and creativity, was always a convenient deception."
"They will, however, be made to sit on their hands for a while."
"It does not succeed ..."
"Though it avoids autobiography, Harris's book is nonetheless as much a product of Palo Alto as the author himself ..."
"A searching history ..."
"With its tangents and excursions...you may find yourself coming back to the same question: What exactly does this have to do with Palo Alto?"
Preview
Reader Reviews
0 reviewsSign in to write a review.
No reader reviews yet. Be the first!