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Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World
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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
"Evaluating a book that is at once so detailed and so ambitious demands too much of any single reviewer."
"Every fact fits perfectly into a truth that is already known; exceptions only prove the rule."
"A harder edit would have helped on both the micro and macro levels."
"As the mosaic that Harris builds in Palo Alto accumulates its pieces, readers jonesing for dirt on Peter Thiel, Jeff Bezos, and Elizabeth Holmes will not be disappointed."
"Palo Alto is far from the first history of the town, its residents, or its influence, but it is among the most capacious."
"Harris reconsiders 200 years of history that many in the town would rather forget."
"While his theoretical pronouncements can be mechanistic, the story itself is layered and nuanced."
"Palo Alto misses the core of curiosity and experimentation that still exists there, fuel for a less profit-obsessed future Valley."
"A highly readable revisionist history of the Golden State, sharply argued and well researched."
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