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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
"Though it avoids autobiography, Harris's book is nonetheless as much a product of Palo Alto as the author himself ..."
"But at the same time, he has a larger vision, one in keeping with his Marxist analytics: A system like capitalism finds the villains it needs ..."
"A harder edit would have helped on both the micro and macro levels."
"The depersonalization on display here is a welcome corrective to the overpersonalized way that history is typically written for a general audience ..."
"A searching history ..."
"Palo Alto is a skeptic's record, a vital, critical demonstration of Northern California's two centuries of mixing technology and cruelty for money ..."
"For Harris, as for Marx, capitalism is the root of all societal evil ..."
"Aan encyclopedic account of the history and impact of the town—feels like the culmination of [Harris'] upbringing and career."
"But he entirely bypasses another way forward: reclaiming Silicon Valley for the public ..."
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