Tech
Malcolm Harris on his historical and critical book “Palo Alto”
on the shelf
Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World
Written by Malcolm Harris
Little, Brown: 720 pages, $36
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Malcolm Harris good luck growing up Palo Altoa blessed piece of real estate in the American economy, lit by the sun of Silicon Valley and the pink sandstone glow of Stanford University’s campus.
He also had the good luck of making it out alive. In the years Harris attended Palo Alto, students killed themselves rate between four and five times the national average, walking to their deaths on the train tracks built by Leland Stanford to escape labor unrest in San Francisco more than 100 years ago.
Harris’ meal from the pressure cooker at Paly high was that it required a revolution to fix it, or something.
In high school, he was arrested on campus for handing out fliers telling kids they didn’t have to take the state standardized test. He marched against the Iraq war and established a new chapter of the Students for a Democratic Society When he entered college at the University of Maryland. There, he and his buddies began to occupy things—school buildings, oil company headquarters, and political conventions.
By the time he got to the first meeting of Occupy Wall StreetIn 2011, Harris had already begun researching and writing about the subtle ways the world is screwing up, specifically in education and student debt. his first bookkids these daysHow millennials became millennials through the dual phase of education and finance–forced to do more homework while the institutions they were assigned to continued to increase tuition.
But he knew he would eventually return to his hometown to explain our modern world, which is now dominated by tech companies and billionaires. On that day he will come to write his last book next week – “Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World.”
Malcolm Harris’s “Palo Alto” returns to the city that raised him and reveals the fraught history of a place that dominated American capitalism.
(Julia Burke)
We met up on a winter’s day in Washington, D.C., to spend a cold afternoon strolling the capital. Harris has lived on the East Coast since college (mostly in Philadelphia), but he still carries himself with a Northern California set of stone-cold vibes and a tightly wound core. He has a shock of red hair, like a cartoon version of a left-wing model, but dresses like a man who would rather disappear into a crowd. Ask a stupid question, as I often do, and he’ll dodge nicely, then tell you what’s wrong with your hypothesis and recommend something to read.
He spent most of the last few years reading hundreds of pages of research, eight hours a day—sometimes on a park bench in Philly, and most recently on a barge from a desk at the National Gallery, where the museum chief’s office was. It turned into an abandoned living room. His first iteration of the project was almost a memoir, but as he continued reading, he found more material that was largely untouched—or at least unwoven into a comprehensive history.
Like the story of the Palo Alto System: The Stanford Railroad Baron He first used the land that would become his university as a stud farm, training young horses on the brink of physical collapse. Either the colt will break down early – and be shot – or he will escape the system and live to advance the bloodline – and create more value for his eventual owners.
“When I talked to my brothers and other people who grew up in Palo Alto” about the system, Harris said, “they found it scary, the way they talked about young horses and early possibilities, the way we saw kids in Palo Alto kill themselves because they weren’t up to par.” .
“Palo Alto” traces the path from those early days to Silicon Valley now, tracing the way horse-meat eugenics and frothy capital behind gold and railroads made a perpetual machine that spewed scientific racism and hardline anti-labor politics returns on investment no matter the human cost. . It’s a sprawling tale, covering sensational stories like the possible assassination of Jane Stanford by the university’s first president; racial labor wars; mid-century communists on campus; the university’s role in the cocaine trade in the Gulf region; and links between high-tech corporations and international CIA plots.
Harris handles it all with stunning detail and charmingly beguiling metaphors – describing modern-day tech tycoons as “slack-legged puppets who got their hands on these historical powers” and “Mickey Mouse”. [surfing] Wave in a stolen wizard’s hat, flashes four fingers hanging.” And that’s just one syllable.
Harris describes himself as a communist, and this analysis is peppered throughout the text, but he has a knack for simplifying complex dynamics to their blunt essentials. “Because the workers have always been quick to understand,” he wrote early, “the maximization of production tends to diminish.” “If we see this process from the point of view of the workers, it is not the owners who generously divide the returns of their investment with the workers, it is the workers who divide the returns of their further production with the shareholders.”
Nevertheless, Harris set out to write a fiercely marginal history, not an anti-technology book. “The book is not polemical. I am a Marxist, I wrote a Marxist book because I think this is the best way to get to the bottom of this historical situation.”
The Truth Harris Finds Out revolves around a few central characters, mostly the old men on the Stanford campus.
Herbert Hoover looms as a first-class graduate of Stanford in 1895, owner and manager of an international mine and the nucleus of a right-wing political mob whose eponymous institute is based on campus. Lewis Termanthe genetics-obsessed Stanford professor who popularized the IQ test, followed suit by his son Fred, who turned Stanford into a public and private powerhouse. William Shockleywho invented the transistor and became an eugenicist in the 1970s and 1980s, held the ball for a few more decades. George Schultz He runs it all the way to the 2000s, blessing Reagan and George W. Bush from the throne of the Hoover Institution. Meanwhile, the Stanford boys like Dave Packard, Vinod Khosla and Peter Thiel Investment continued to flow into the neighborhood with a dense network of companies spun off from Stanford Research.
“I thought I’d be more figurative” to connect the dots, Harris said, but the lines were already there: “Those horses were tools of war, and so were children who had been raised in Palo Alto for over 100 years, under the same notions of competence.”
The playbook remains the same, whether it’s Stanford & Hoover or Teal W Elon Musk In the field: maximizing profits by squeezing labor and ignoring regulators; absorbing massive capital and government investments; Justify your success after the fact with pseudoscientific theories about your innate superiority.
Railroad Baron Leland Stanford, Jane Stanford, and Leland Stanford Jr. 1878, from Who Killed Jane Stanford.
(from W.W. Norton & Company)
But it’s not quite the same as it used to be. Harris admits in Palo Alto that the story has, as he puts it, “stupid” with time. Technology is becoming less transformative, and game winners seem to be chosen at random via a venture capital lottery. investment companies such as Andreessen Horowitz They have declared that it is “time to build” companies that change the real world, only to pour billions into coded Vaporware.
If you want to understand Palo Alto today, watch Harris said.Shark tank. “It’s a moment-to-moment feeling of how the capitalists are moving in that moment,” Harris said. “It was so much fun during the pandemic—in the first episode, every single one of them was absolutely foaming at the mouth, and the money was free. Do you have an exercise ball? do it. And now they don’t care if someone has a perfectly logical business plan; If they don’t see the blast go off, they pass.”
Then what to do? The book ends with a call for the official dissolution of Stanford University, at least in Palo Alto, and the return of the campus to the indigenous people of the Bay Area. Harris finds it a reasonable demand, given the alternatives.
“I don’t think that’s less realistic than full employment; it’s no less realistic than Medicare For All, depending on your understanding of the situation,” Harris said. So what’s the point of issuing this kind of transitional request? Region “.
Leland Stanford, grieving the death of his son in 1884, decided to found his alma mater with the feeling that “the children of California will be our children.” Harris simply takes it at his word: “California kids? Well, that’s me, so you.”
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