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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
"The book should be of urgent interest to anyone living inside its ambit—that being, according to its subtitle, California, capitalism, and the world ..."
"It's a stunning, Technicolor anvil of a book ..."
"It's a cartoonishly negative and over-theorized portrait that bears little or no resemblance to the complex realities of California, capitalism or the world ..."
"Harris instead argues that returning the land to the Ohlone could help 'draw a new path' ..."
"Long but consistently engaging ..."
"This work of rewriting stories that saturated the author's own childhood environment is what makes Harris's book more than a synthesis and vulgarization of academic histories of Silicon Valley ..."
"Cuts past the deceit, examining the histories the fable dresses up in heroic garb ..."
"But the book usually comes alive when he's delving into people, rather than ideas, and he remembers that he's writing a story, not a treatise ..."
"The depersonalization on display here is a welcome corrective to the overpersonalized way that history is typically written for a general audience ..."
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