Palo Alto, Malcolm Harris
Palo Alto, Malcolm Harris
2 Rating(s)
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Palo Alto
A History of California, Capitalism, and the World

Author: Malcolm Harris

Narrator: Patrick Harrison

Unabridged: 28 hr 20 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 02/14/2023

Synopsis

The history of Silicon Valley, from railroads to microchips, is an “extraordinary” story of disruption and destruction, told for the first time in this comprehensive, jaw-dropping narrative (Greg Grandin, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The End of the Myth). Palo Alto’s weather is temperate, its people are educated and enterprising, its corporations are spiritually and materially ambitious and demonstrably world-changing. Palo Alto 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

Goodreads review by Shane on October 04, 2022

As a Stanford alum, I spent serious portions of this book thinking, "Man, I really liked my four years in paradise. I don't want to reckon with the fact that its administrators in the 1930s used it as one big eugenics experiment." So I'm grateful for its clear-eyed history of a place that leans hard......more

Goodreads review by Nathan on November 16, 2022

A smart, funny, and maddening reevaluation of where the capitalist system truly lives and has existed since the 20th century. The whole time the reader knows where the story is going, but the nearly 700 pages are full of incredible vignettes of the seizure of power- of course, in literal capital, bu......more

Goodreads review by Sharon on June 27, 2023

I lived near Palo Alto as a very young child and my father worked at Hewlett Packard for almost 30 years so I was very interested in reading this book. The book is 28 hours on audiobook and contains a ton of historical information, particularly about the Stanford family. The book eventually ended up......more

Goodreads review by Ajk on October 31, 2022

So it is definitely a 600-page book in heft and spirit. You should know that before you go in. Harris' style is very glib and chatty (in a way I really appreciated!), so sometimes you forget that it's a 600-page book. But then you're like really deep into Revolutionary Communist Party intrapolitics......more

Goodreads review by Buzz on March 08, 2023

I’ve always felt that Harris exudes a fairly obnoxious “Professor 20 Year Old” quality, so I really debated whether to bother picking this book up at all. California history and critique of modern Silicon Valley sit squarely at the intersection of my interests though, so I decided to give it a shot.......more

Quotes

“Malcolm Harris's singular and brilliant PALO ALTO is a geologic survey of the bedrock of the imperial violence that lies beneath the surface of some of the country's wealthiest ZIP Codes.  The formations it follows stretch outward across the globe, to Asia, Europe, across the Americas and to the rest of the United States.  In the end, the book provides not so much an account of strict cause and effect—the familiar history of the robber barons and tech tycoons—but a core sample of the thorough-going greed and pillage at the heart of American history: the expropriation, the violence, and the guilt that seep upward through the soil of neoliberalism's most fruitful plain.”—Walter Johnson, Winthrop Professor of History and African American Studies at Harvard University and author of The Broken Heart of America

"Extraordinary. In lucid, personal, often funny, and always insightful prose, Malcolm Harris finds the driving thrust of reaction not in capitalism’s left-behind regions but in its vanguard: California, and specifically Silicon Valley.  We have not yet felt the full force of the shit storm that the titans of tech have been conjuring. We soon will.  If you want to understand what’s coming, you need to read this book."—Greg Grandin, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The End of Myth

“Harris painstakingly connects literature, geography, and economics to understand Palo Alto's history and its relationship to capitalism…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.”—BOOKLIST

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