Palo Alto

October 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.

November 1, 2022
Harris (Kids These Days, 2017; Sh*t is F*ucked Up and Bull*Shit, 2020), an editor at nonprofit news site The New Inquiry, explores the complicated history of Palo Alto, the Northern California city with a population of 68,000 and the home of Stanford University. Drawing on numerous sources, and occasionally from his own experiences, Harris painstakingly connects literature, geography, and economics to understand Palo Alto's history and its relationship to capitalism. In his overall critique of capitalism, Harris contends that its associated colonialism, exclusion, and exploitation have played crucial roles in developing the political policies and ideologies of Northern California over the past 150 years and have directly influenced local and U.S. technological and economic practices. Harris also covers the major players who shaped the city and their respective enterprises: Leland and Jane Stanford, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Steve Jobs, and Bill Gates. Readers interested in U.S. history, particularly pertaining to capitalism and technology, will find an engaging and clear-eyed Silicon Valley tale of a small city with global importance.

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Starred review from December 15, 2022
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.

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