Hoover won.
March 1, 2023 12:21 AM Subscribe
Can One City Be a Microcosm of Everything That's Wrong? [ungated] - "In his new book, 'Palo Alto,' Malcolm Harris makes the case that the story of his hometown represents way more than you might expect." (previously)
Does Palo Alto Represent Everything That Is Wrong about Capitalism? [stitcher] - "Palo Alto really emerges as the solution to the problem of the 20th century for America."
Author Malcom Harris' version of Palo Alto: a microcosm of a capitalist system - "It is a microcosm of and a metaphor for a capitalist system that advantages the few at the expense of the many, that extracts as much as it can as fast as it can, leaving exhausted soil, bodies and souls in its wake."
A History of California, Capitalism, and the World: Malcolm Harris on New Book 'Palo Alto' [yt] - "So, talk about the history of Palo Alto. Talk about the history of Leland Stanford, the history of the companies that would lead to the number of billionaires, the surge of billionaires that we're seeing today, and why that affects everyone."
How Palo Alto created capitalism as we know it - "From Stanford to Theranos, Malcolm Harris explains the weird, dark history of the mythic California city."
The Silicon Valley Loop - "How the dot-com crash created Palo Alto's clueless investor class."
Blame Palo Alto - "From Stanford to Silicon Valley, a small town in California spread tech's gospel of data and control."
A reckoning for Silicon Valley [ungated] - "Consider Harris's treatment of the 'Palo Alto System', the ruthless yet innovative horse-breeding approach in question, pioneered at Leland Stanford's stock farm on what later became the campus of Stanford University. 'Instead of optimising for adult speed,' Harris describes, 'they optimised for visible potential,' making horses trot at a younger age. The real risk of injuring colts, ruining their future potential, was compensated by the shortened production cycle and the ability to recruit outstanding talent at a young age. Besides producing champions, the offspring of the new breeding system fetched high prices – soon other breeders were keen to adopt similar methods."
California Über Alles - "Malcolm Harris on How Tech-Hub Palo Alto Is (and Isn't) Like Seattle and Why He Doesn't Mention the Grateful Dead in His New Book Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World."
The Children of California Shall Be Our Children: On Malcolm Harris's 'Palo Alto' - "Drawing upon archival research and a wide-ranging bibliography of secondary sources, Harris details Palo Alto's evolution within a California economy about which Karl Marx commented in 1880 (in a passage that serves as the book's preface): '[N]owhere else has the upheaval most shamelessly caused by capitalist centralization taken place with such speed.' Harris sees in this 'upheaval' patterns that continue into the present."
also btw...
Obituary: Borders Books and Music - "The Palo Alto Borders was my psychogeographical center. It seems strange to say that of a store, never mind an outlet of a giant and mostly uniform chain, but there was nowhere else I was so free to grow up. Borders became for us the mythic 'third place,' not school or home, where young people could encounter each other on accident."
Does Palo Alto Represent Everything That Is Wrong about Capitalism? [stitcher] - "Palo Alto really emerges as the solution to the problem of the 20th century for America."
Author Malcom Harris' version of Palo Alto: a microcosm of a capitalist system - "It is a microcosm of and a metaphor for a capitalist system that advantages the few at the expense of the many, that extracts as much as it can as fast as it can, leaving exhausted soil, bodies and souls in its wake."
A History of California, Capitalism, and the World: Malcolm Harris on New Book 'Palo Alto' [yt] - "So, talk about the history of Palo Alto. Talk about the history of Leland Stanford, the history of the companies that would lead to the number of billionaires, the surge of billionaires that we're seeing today, and why that affects everyone."
Well, it’s a long history, but you can start in the 1870s, where Leland Stanford, who’s the frontman for the railroad and, really, capital in the West, is facing a situation where workers are yelling outside his house all the time. And he lives on Nob Hill in San Francisco, on the biggest house on the fanciest hill, and the workers know just where to find him. And so, like many other rich people trying to escape class conflict, his solution is to move his family to the suburbs. But, unfortunately for him, the suburbs don’t exist yet in the 1870s, and so he has to create a suburb to move his family to in order to escape this class conflict that he’s created. And that’s really the original story of Palo Alto. And you can follow that line through the next 150 years.Palo Alto: Billionaire playground or Darwinian hellscape? Why not both? [ungated] - "The playbook remains the same, whether it’s Stanford and Hoover or Thiel and Elon Musk on the field: Boost profits by squeezing labor and ignoring regulators; absorb massive capital and government investment; justify your success after the fact with pseudoscientific theories about your innate superiority."
How Palo Alto created capitalism as we know it - "From Stanford to Theranos, Malcolm Harris explains the weird, dark history of the mythic California city."
The Silicon Valley Loop - "How the dot-com crash created Palo Alto's clueless investor class."
One of the firms in the inaugural class at Viaweb founder Graham’s Y Combinator was a location-sharing app called Loopt. Founded by an archetypal Stanford-sophomore dropout, Loopt was quick out of the gate, nabbing a $5 million Series A led by VC big shots Sequoia Capital. In 2006, Graham called Loopt “probably the most promising of all the start-ups we’ve funded so far” — a list that included Reddit and Scribd. But despite racking up tens of millions in investments, Loopt was overtaken by Foursquare and, in 2012, sold itself to the prepaid-debit-card company Green Dot for over $40 million. Green Dot, which had no need for Loopt, promptly scrapped the project and put the team to work on a banking app. This is what Silicon Valley calls a success, though industry observer Erick Schonfeld described the deal as “Sequoia taking care of its own,” since the VC firm owned a large stake in both companies.Silicon Valley Is Everywhere - "Harris traces a throughline of capitalism and exploitation that explains both the grueling pressure put on bright young people in prestigious enclaves such as Palo Alto, and also that pressure's historical roots. He illuminates the forces at work on not just one child but instead a generation of them."
Y Combinator took care of its own, too, and after the acquisition, Graham approached the 27-year-old Loopt founder about becoming his successor at YC. “I decided I was going to partly take a mid-career sabbatical, race cars, fighter planes, travel the world, all that kind of stuff,” Sam Altman said later about his thinking at the time, “but I didn’t want to totally disengage from working, and I would try to invest for a while.” Altman took over for Graham in 2014, and he ran the accelerator to great heights before leaving in 2015 to focus on the artificial intelligence project he co-founded with Zip2’s Elon Musk: OpenAI. Loopt, indeed.
The fundamental moralistic assumption that, over the medium term, the market punishes hubris and rewards prudence is simply not true. Yesterday’s lucky fools are now wise billionaires not because they learned responsibility but because, having sussed out the general shape of the world that capital is accumulating into, they doubled down. The true moral of the dot-com bubble was “Go big fast, keep labor and fixed capital costs low, time your exit.” For this cohort of wealthy tech guys, the same one that’s responsible for a disproportionate share of early-stage private-capital allocation today, the inescapable structural-historic lesson of the dot-com bubble was “Do the dot-com bubble again.”
Blame Palo Alto - "From Stanford to Silicon Valley, a small town in California spread tech's gospel of data and control."
California can seem incoherent from top to bottom. From the south, there’s San Diego, a militarized pleasure dome that has quite effectively obscured obscene inequality with sunshine, sand, and SeaWorld. There’s Los Angeles, a gorgeous paragon of health and wellness famous for its exhaust fumes and smog, the world’s glorious entertainment capital where the most common thing to catch on TV is a news story about the rich and powerful caging as many poor people as they possibly can. There’s the Central Valley, hundreds of miles of farms so fertile that they produce more than half of America’s fruits and vegetables, resting atop a desert so perpetually drought-stricken that its denizens have been pumping the state’s groundwater dry just to keep up with demand. And then, of course, there’s the Bay Area—the coolest, queerest, most radical place in the country—and also one rapidly being made unlivable by tech bros, their tough-on-crime allies, and all of the money spewed in their wake... But the most influential spot on the map is a small, wealthy enclave called Palo Alto: the economic, cultural, and spiritual hub of Silicon Valley...'Blood That Trots Young': Malcolm Harris's History of Silicon Valley Exploitation - "Malcolm Harris opens this sweeping history of his hometown of Palo Alto with a personal anecdote: In fourth grade, a substitute teacher dramatically revealed to his class of wide-eyed kids that they lived in a bubble, that most places were not like Palo Alto. The class was later apologetically assured that their teacher was banned from ever working in their school district again."
The Palo Alto System has prevailed far beyond the corridors of power. The gospel of relentless optimization has encroached on every area of life. It’s why homeowners and car owners rent out their abodes and their vehicles as part-time servants, why laborers in Amazon warehouses and overburdened hospitals urinate in bottles rather than halting for even a minute, why writers and artists and academics without institutional homes have to tell themselves that just one more gig might lead to some stability. It’s why one high school student in Palo Alto (where the suicide rate between 2003 and 2015 was three times the state average) could write, “We are not teenagers. We are lifeless bodies in a system that breeds competition, hatred, and discourages teamwork and genuine learning.”
Instead of treating such figures solely as individuals—for good or ill—Harris asks us to recognize the forces acting through them. If, for instance, A.P. Giannini had not founded what became Bank of America, “California would have found another such outsider. The impersonal force that animates… this state, this country, this period of world history isn’t fate or human nature; it’s capitalism.” It’s a theme supported by reference to Friedrich Engels, the novelist Frank Norris, and a candid admission by Uber founder Travis Kalanick.How Palo Alto has made America worse off - "[William] Shockley was an influential racist at Stanford, but I didn’t know how central he and those ideas were to the propagating of a new kind of geneticized American racism that emerged in the final quarter of the 20th century and how that’s a Stanford project. And Jensenism [the theory, named after educational psychologist Arthur Jensen, that an individual’s IQ is largely determined by genes], that is also a Stanford product. We’re seeing that now, and in some ways that’s clear now that you have 21st century Silicon Valley guys who are declaring Jensenism as their understanding of the world."
Lurking behind California capitalism is a second, ever-present force: white supremacy. The state of California owed its political existence to the systematic murder of Indigenous peoples, and the new state joined the federal government in incentivizing settlers to go out and murder on its behalf. When capitalists needed cheap labor to work their mines, and later their farms, they relied on Chinese, Indian, and Japanese immigrants, but race laws and intimidation ensured that those workers couldn’t get an economic foothold the way European immigrants did. It’s monstrous stuff, and Harris won’t let us forget that it’s been there from the beginning.
Palo Alto’s own Stanford University became a lab for defining whiteness. “Scientific” racism blossomed at Stanford under its first president, David Starr Jordan. Jordan was a proponent of the field of “bionomics,” which held that degenerate races needed to be pruned from the evolutionary tree for the good of humankind. At first, those degenerate races included Italians, a reminder of how the arbitrary boundaries of whiteness have shifted over time. Although the name “bionomics” didn’t stick, much of the racial pseudoscience did. As Silicon Valley semiconductor firms tried to keep up with Japanese competition in the 1970s, they preferred to hire Asian women into manufacturing roles based on a belief that they were innately less susceptible than Chicanas to organizing efforts. As recently as 2016, Palantir founder Peter Thiel made a lucrative early bet on an unlikely presidential candidate: Donald Trump. At a time when many elites thought Trump was too racist to get elected, Thiel, whose company would go on to win contract after contract from the new administration, understood that “the race-nation is not the capitalist system’s vestigial tail but its right leg.”
The capitalist production is exhausting of the Earth. You see that from the beginning in California: You have gold mining, and gold mining progresses so fast. The technology and development of exhausting techniques through gold mining develops so fast that it quickly becomes unbearable, even for California. Okay, we have to stop this, like it’s completely out of control. Then they export it elsewhere. But that instinct to keep pushing things forward and to develop technologies that are going to allow you to do more and more and more and create more and more profits, it’s still core to the place. The same logic that exhausted gold mining drove web scrapers and the Facebook era to go crazy.A new history unveils the exploitative origins of the tech giants [ungated] - "Harris distills the settlers' formula: 'Anglos rule; all natives are Indians; all land and water is just gold waiting to happen.' As easily accessible gold ran out, those lucky (or cutthroat) enough to survive the bust mostly pivoted to other endeavors. Here, Harris spots an incipient pattern that continues to play out: Wealthy investors pile their money into 'promising' endeavors after being charmed by enchanting visionaries who grow fabulously rich — almost always before the venture has succeeded (or even begun operations). The investments raise the valuation of the business and facilitate further cycles of capitalization, so that executives need not worry about generating profits or revenue, or having a workable project. Environmental destruction, resource depletion and worker exploitation ensued in 19th-century California, Harris shows, and those same consequences recur in our time."
A reckoning for Silicon Valley [ungated] - "Consider Harris's treatment of the 'Palo Alto System', the ruthless yet innovative horse-breeding approach in question, pioneered at Leland Stanford's stock farm on what later became the campus of Stanford University. 'Instead of optimising for adult speed,' Harris describes, 'they optimised for visible potential,' making horses trot at a younger age. The real risk of injuring colts, ruining their future potential, was compensated by the shortened production cycle and the ability to recruit outstanding talent at a young age. Besides producing champions, the offspring of the new breeding system fetched high prices – soon other breeders were keen to adopt similar methods."
California Über Alles - "Malcolm Harris on How Tech-Hub Palo Alto Is (and Isn't) Like Seattle and Why He Doesn't Mention the Grateful Dead in His New Book Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World."
The Children of California Shall Be Our Children: On Malcolm Harris's 'Palo Alto' - "Drawing upon archival research and a wide-ranging bibliography of secondary sources, Harris details Palo Alto's evolution within a California economy about which Karl Marx commented in 1880 (in a passage that serves as the book's preface): '[N]owhere else has the upheaval most shamelessly caused by capitalist centralization taken place with such speed.' Harris sees in this 'upheaval' patterns that continue into the present."
also btw...
Obituary: Borders Books and Music - "The Palo Alto Borders was my psychogeographical center. It seems strange to say that of a store, never mind an outlet of a giant and mostly uniform chain, but there was nowhere else I was so free to grow up. Borders became for us the mythic 'third place,' not school or home, where young people could encounter each other on accident."
wow. "[more inside]" has rarely if ever been more true!
This sounds like the intersection of a lot of my interests. Really looking forward to digging into these links tonight. Thanks, Kliuless!
posted by martin q blank at 6:13 AM on March 1, 2023 [3 favorites]
This sounds like the intersection of a lot of my interests. Really looking forward to digging into these links tonight. Thanks, Kliuless!
posted by martin q blank at 6:13 AM on March 1, 2023 [3 favorites]
re: (2) from the new republic review -- Blame Palo Alto :P
In any case, as Harris makes clear, the Palo Alto System is much bigger than Palo Alto or even California. The regime of incessant investment and labor that Harris describes in fact is so dominant that it makes one wonder whether today’s culture can be directly traced to Palo Alto, or whether Palo Alto simply serves as a neat exemplar of that culture. If, as Harris writes in the epilogue, there “is just capitalism, an impersonal system that acts through people toward the increasing accumulation of capital,” then where exactly does the Palo Alto System enter the equation? And how distinct is the Palo Alto System from, say, what the historian Edward Baptist calls “the ‘whipping-machine’ system,” through which slaveholders literally beat consistent increases in productivity out of increasing numbers of enslaved Black people between 1800 and 1860? How distinct is it from the scientific management regimes long deployed by agents of imperialism, which sought to profit from and regulate native life to such an extent that—as the scholar Warwick Anderson has described—early–twentieth-century American agents even tried to dictate the manner in which Filipinos defecated? How distinct, in other words, is the Palo Alto System from empire, from capitalism itself?or from the stranger interview -- California Über Alles: "Redmond isn't exactly worshiped on blue-chip altars in the same way; so why does Palo Alto have such stay? Does it matter?"
Yet if Palo Alto is an imperfect frame for understanding a history as gargantuan as the one that Harris recounts, Palo Alto nonetheless manages to tell a story that is grand in its scope, startling in its specifics, and ingenious in the connections it draws. Ultimately, neither California nor the broader world is incoherent when viewed, clear-eyed, in the harsh light of history. By striving to extract profit at every conceivable opportunity, the pioneers and innovators have condemned us all, and the places where we live, to a trudge toward collapse.
That's a great question. I think to a certain degree, when you're dealing with a world system with a totality, you can find the whole in every part. So if you looked at any town—like not just Palo Alto or Seattle or Los Angeles, whatever, we could pick a small town—you could dig down and you could find the shape of the whole system. Walter Johnson's book on St. Louis does this really well; my friend David Banks has a book about upstate New York and how it's changed in the past decades. So you can take a lot of places and find the same story in terms of the story of the 20th century.posted by kliuless at 6:14 AM on March 1, 2023 [1 favorite]
Ok, i get the guy wants to sell books, but Palo Alto as ground zero for capitalism just doesn't work. Yes, Leland Stanford was a robber baron, but hardly the first.
The East India Company had global influence and the Americar Resolution was in part triggered by its financial issues (the famous tea taxes were how the British were trying to bail out the EIC).
The cotton industry was also global and traders were using capital to enslave human beings well before Palo Alto was founded.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 6:22 AM on March 1, 2023 [3 favorites]
The East India Company had global influence and the Americar Resolution was in part triggered by its financial issues (the famous tea taxes were how the British were trying to bail out the EIC).
The cotton industry was also global and traders were using capital to enslave human beings well before Palo Alto was founded.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 6:22 AM on March 1, 2023 [3 favorites]
I was listening to the Vox podcast on a flight yesterday from (ironically) the San Francisco Bay Area, and I think to be fair to the author's thesis, it's not about Palo Alto being the originator of capitalism but the way in which Palo Alto and Stanford found its niche explicitly to profit off the booms that were occurring in the West Coast at the time (the rail industry which led to mining which led to defence which led to tech) combined with an exploitation of immigrant labor, very loose oversight compared to the East Coast, and this overall ethos of one-upping and superceding whatever was happening in New York or Washington underlies a lot of the disruptor / gig economy / winner takes all facets of the tech-enabled capitalism that we're living through right now.
posted by bl1nk at 6:40 AM on March 1, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by bl1nk at 6:40 AM on March 1, 2023 [2 favorites]
Compared to the Civil War, building out the railroads was childsplay in capital investment.
The same GOP conservatism that animates the corpse of the right today prevented any rational public investment in public utilities like the railroad.
Instead, we got parasites like Stanford & friends getting fat, fat, fat on the labor of Americans.
Any honest writing of the history of the 19th century US is hair-raising stuff indeed.
Oops, here come the GOP thoughtpolice.
I went from Fresno to UCLA, little did I know Kerman, CA and Kerckhoff Hall shared a history...
>East India Company
pretty good reading on that
funny how a continent of land to be claimed and exploited corrupts so easily, and deeply
we're out of land now, unless we go underwater or out of our gravity well . . .
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 6:40 AM on March 1, 2023 [1 favorite]
The same GOP conservatism that animates the corpse of the right today prevented any rational public investment in public utilities like the railroad.
Instead, we got parasites like Stanford & friends getting fat, fat, fat on the labor of Americans.
Any honest writing of the history of the 19th century US is hair-raising stuff indeed.
Oops, here come the GOP thoughtpolice.
I went from Fresno to UCLA, little did I know Kerman, CA and Kerckhoff Hall shared a history...
>East India Company
pretty good reading on that
funny how a continent of land to be claimed and exploited corrupts so easily, and deeply
we're out of land now, unless we go underwater or out of our gravity well . . .
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 6:40 AM on March 1, 2023 [1 favorite]
another implicit critique from UC berkeley's own brad delong across the bay!*
COWEN: What do you take to be the best understanding of the 17th-century Scientific Revolution, if indeed you view it as a 17th-century revolution?or as cosma shalizi puts it:
DELONG: I always think Joel Mokyr is absolutely magnificent on this. I think he understates the role that having printing by movable type played in creating the community of scientific practice and knowledge seeking.
There’s one thing that happens that is extremely unusual. Back before 1870, there’s no possibility at all that humanity is going to be able to bake the economic pie sufficiently large that everyone can have enough. Which means that, principally, politics and governance are going to be some elite constituting itself and elbowing other elites out of the way, and then finding a way to run a force-and-fraud domination and exploitation scheme on society so that they at least can have enough. When Proudhon wrote in 1840s that property is theft, it was not metaphor. It was really fact.
What does this elite consist of? Well, it’s a bunch of thugs with spears, the people who have convinced the thugs with spears that they’re their bosses, and their tame accountants, bureaucrats, and propagandists. Which means, most of the time, when you have a powerfully-moving-forward set of people thinking about ideas, whether the idea is true is likely to be secondary to whether the idea is useful to helping me keep my place as a tame propagandist in the force-and-fraud domination and exploitation elite machine.
This is a point I’ve stolen from Ernest Gellner[1,2], and I think it is very true. Yet, somehow, the Royal Society decides, no. The Royal Society decides nothing except through experiment — what we are going to demand that nature tell us, or tell one of us, or at least someone writes us a letter saying they’ve done the experiment about what is true. That is a miraculous and completely unexpected transformation, and one to which I think we owe a huge amount.
The late social anthropologist and philosopher Ernest Gellner had a really profound analysis of the political aspects of scientific rationality (see e.g. Plough, Sword and Book, or most centrally Legitimation of Belief; or the exegesis by Michael Lessnoff), where he pointed out that one of the effects of rationalism and empiricism was to "locate the well of truth outside the walls of the city", i.e., to create a source of epistemic authority which was not under social control, and which could be appealed to by those currently lacking in power. (He was, of course, fully aware of all the ways in which this is only an imperfect approximation.)posted by kliuless at 6:59 AM on March 1, 2023 [13 favorites]
Palo Alto as ground zero for capitalism just doesn't work.
I haven't read the book (though I have a copy checked out from the library), but as I understand it Harris is not saying that capitalism started in Palo Alto, but rather using a city that he knows well, and has a personal connection to, as a way to tell a bigger story.
One review compared it to Sofia Ali-Khan's A Good Country : My Life in Twelve Towns and the Devastating Battle for a White America, where the author looks at the history of forced migration through the lens of the cities that she's lived in.
Harris's earlier book, Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials (previously), takes kind of a similar approach.
posted by box at 7:53 AM on March 1, 2023 [7 favorites]
I haven't read the book (though I have a copy checked out from the library), but as I understand it Harris is not saying that capitalism started in Palo Alto, but rather using a city that he knows well, and has a personal connection to, as a way to tell a bigger story.
One review compared it to Sofia Ali-Khan's A Good Country : My Life in Twelve Towns and the Devastating Battle for a White America, where the author looks at the history of forced migration through the lens of the cities that she's lived in.
Harris's earlier book, Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials (previously), takes kind of a similar approach.
posted by box at 7:53 AM on March 1, 2023 [7 favorites]
That New York Times review is some seriously hilarious but Marxism! pearl-clutching. I mean:
Despite the fact that his entire book is a Marxian critique of capitalism, Harris never mentions the fact that the 20th century’s two major attempts to create alternatives to that economic system were horror shows that left tens of millions dead.
Is almost verbatim the kind of retort I got from my conservative grandmother whenever she asked me what I was studying in college thirty+ years ago.
posted by thivaia at 8:09 AM on March 1, 2023 [9 favorites]
Despite the fact that his entire book is a Marxian critique of capitalism, Harris never mentions the fact that the 20th century’s two major attempts to create alternatives to that economic system were horror shows that left tens of millions dead.
Is almost verbatim the kind of retort I got from my conservative grandmother whenever she asked me what I was studying in college thirty+ years ago.
posted by thivaia at 8:09 AM on March 1, 2023 [9 favorites]
That NYT review, sheesh.
It is inherently racist: “The human-capital production system was hostile to everyone except certain white men, as eugenicists designed it.”
If you're going to say the author is saying capitalism is inherently racist, maybe don't quote the sentence where he says it was intentionally designed that way.
posted by box at 8:37 AM on March 1, 2023
It is inherently racist: “The human-capital production system was hostile to everyone except certain white men, as eugenicists designed it.”
If you're going to say the author is saying capitalism is inherently racist, maybe don't quote the sentence where he says it was intentionally designed that way.
posted by box at 8:37 AM on March 1, 2023
I'm surprised there's nothing about East Palo Alto, the historically Black (and heavily red-lined) city.
Un-forgetting the segregationist history of Palo Alto (and Daly City, and San Francisco, and…)
posted by AlSweigart at 8:41 AM on March 1, 2023 [2 favorites]
Un-forgetting the segregationist history of Palo Alto (and Daly City, and San Francisco, and…)
posted by AlSweigart at 8:41 AM on March 1, 2023 [2 favorites]
I am about halfway through the book (and I live in Palo Alto).
It is among other things an attempt to give Palo Alto an important place in the post-WWII US world system, by virtue most importantly of the role of Silicon Valley technology and thinkers in the development of US strategic bombing capability and (slightly later) their role in the leading edge of off-shoring.
The Times review is extremely uncharitable, not even thinking about the evidence Harris musters for his views. And it's wild that, more than 30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, you can write a book about America and get in trouble for not criticizing the Soviet Union. Even wilder, the piece is by a journalist, not some Heritage think-tanker! I am not at all sympathetic to where this review is coming from. I am just about as cynical about where I live as Harris is about his hometown, and I share much of his theoretical perspective. I am learning a lot from the book, too, for example about the extent and details of the Hoover influence network in Palo Alto (and in the US government), and about the first couple generations of Silicon Valley companies (the radio ones and then the literal silicon ones). (The stuff about the early years of Stanford is also very fun to read but covers ground I knew a little about already. Still, I was impressed with how much the Stanfords loved their son, which redeems them to me a little bit in spite of everything.)
Still, I find myself wanting more. I compare the book to City of Quartz, Mike Davis's history of LA, which I think must have been on Harris's mind in writing it. They are similar in style and aim. They both try to rescue a real history of a place that is intensely mythologized. They both go back to early white settlement of the areas they deal with. They both tell broadly Marxian political-economic histories of the cities. They both zoom into the lives of particular individuals to tell the stories of larger economic movements. But I think Davis's book is better. Maybe it is more attentive to the contradictions and struggles, the eddies in the apparent progress of history. Harris's history often devolves into a sardonic "one damned thing after another." We get the career trajectories of all the founding scientists at Shockley Semiconductor, for example, but it's not really clear why. Not that they aren't important trajectories -- from the point of view of the history of the computer industry, they are extremely important. But the book doesn't really justify their inclusion, doesn't make them a part of the overall drama commensurate with how much detail there is. (Heck, maybe the book needs to be 1,000 pages instead of just 700.)
In Davis's LA, the dynamics of capital also create hopeful moments of opposition. They create the conditions for labor struggle, for example. The chapter on noir shows the Hollywood system producing something like a critique of itself and the city. Davis is also kind of a pessimist, but he manages to give a sense of openness, of historical possibility, of capitalism as an imperfect system that brings along the forces that can challenge it. Harris's vision (so far anyway) seems much more hermetic, not just pessimistic but already defeated. Now, maybe that's just the difference between Palo Alto and LA, or the difference between 2023 and 1990. But it seems to me also the product of a less sensitive eye for political-economic history.
All that said, though, the history the book tells deserves to be known, and deserves to be told as a counter-history to the pure hype about "innovation" and so on that's still the main narrative about the Bay.
posted by grobstein at 9:17 AM on March 1, 2023 [6 favorites]
It is among other things an attempt to give Palo Alto an important place in the post-WWII US world system, by virtue most importantly of the role of Silicon Valley technology and thinkers in the development of US strategic bombing capability and (slightly later) their role in the leading edge of off-shoring.
The Times review is extremely uncharitable, not even thinking about the evidence Harris musters for his views. And it's wild that, more than 30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, you can write a book about America and get in trouble for not criticizing the Soviet Union. Even wilder, the piece is by a journalist, not some Heritage think-tanker! I am not at all sympathetic to where this review is coming from. I am just about as cynical about where I live as Harris is about his hometown, and I share much of his theoretical perspective. I am learning a lot from the book, too, for example about the extent and details of the Hoover influence network in Palo Alto (and in the US government), and about the first couple generations of Silicon Valley companies (the radio ones and then the literal silicon ones). (The stuff about the early years of Stanford is also very fun to read but covers ground I knew a little about already. Still, I was impressed with how much the Stanfords loved their son, which redeems them to me a little bit in spite of everything.)
Still, I find myself wanting more. I compare the book to City of Quartz, Mike Davis's history of LA, which I think must have been on Harris's mind in writing it. They are similar in style and aim. They both try to rescue a real history of a place that is intensely mythologized. They both go back to early white settlement of the areas they deal with. They both tell broadly Marxian political-economic histories of the cities. They both zoom into the lives of particular individuals to tell the stories of larger economic movements. But I think Davis's book is better. Maybe it is more attentive to the contradictions and struggles, the eddies in the apparent progress of history. Harris's history often devolves into a sardonic "one damned thing after another." We get the career trajectories of all the founding scientists at Shockley Semiconductor, for example, but it's not really clear why. Not that they aren't important trajectories -- from the point of view of the history of the computer industry, they are extremely important. But the book doesn't really justify their inclusion, doesn't make them a part of the overall drama commensurate with how much detail there is. (Heck, maybe the book needs to be 1,000 pages instead of just 700.)
In Davis's LA, the dynamics of capital also create hopeful moments of opposition. They create the conditions for labor struggle, for example. The chapter on noir shows the Hollywood system producing something like a critique of itself and the city. Davis is also kind of a pessimist, but he manages to give a sense of openness, of historical possibility, of capitalism as an imperfect system that brings along the forces that can challenge it. Harris's vision (so far anyway) seems much more hermetic, not just pessimistic but already defeated. Now, maybe that's just the difference between Palo Alto and LA, or the difference between 2023 and 1990. But it seems to me also the product of a less sensitive eye for political-economic history.
All that said, though, the history the book tells deserves to be known, and deserves to be told as a counter-history to the pure hype about "innovation" and so on that's still the main narrative about the Bay.
posted by grobstein at 9:17 AM on March 1, 2023 [6 favorites]
I'm surprised there's nothing about East Palo Alto, the historically Black (and heavily red-lined) city.
Un-forgetting the segregationist history of Palo Alto (and Daly City, and San Francisco, and…)
It's in there.
posted by grobstein at 9:18 AM on March 1, 2023 [1 favorite]
Un-forgetting the segregationist history of Palo Alto (and Daly City, and San Francisco, and…)
It's in there.
posted by grobstein at 9:18 AM on March 1, 2023 [1 favorite]
I grew up in Fremont, a city created in 1956 when 5 small towns got incorporated together, across the bay from Palo Alto. In a local history class, the teacher told us that back in the olden days, Stanford owned land in both areas. In Irvington, one of those small towns, he had a winery. We used to play on the ruins there. He decided to build a university, but where, east bay or the peninsula? He flipped a coin, and the peninsula won. If true, Palo Alto was a fluke…
posted by njohnson23 at 9:35 AM on March 1, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by njohnson23 at 9:35 AM on March 1, 2023 [1 favorite]
I think it was a fluke, although the coin-flip story if true isn't in the book iirc. Most proximately I think Stanford got built where it did because it was already the site of the Palo Alto Stock Farm, an enormous horse-breeding and research facility owned by Leland Stanford. But presumably he could have built the Stock Farm somewhere else.
posted by grobstein at 9:49 AM on March 1, 2023
posted by grobstein at 9:49 AM on March 1, 2023
Shallow Alto
posted by gkr at 11:00 AM on March 1, 2023 [3 favorites]
posted by gkr at 11:00 AM on March 1, 2023 [3 favorites]
Tucks napkin into collar
posted by rrrrrrrrrt at 11:31 AM on March 1, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by rrrrrrrrrt at 11:31 AM on March 1, 2023 [2 favorites]
I lived in Palo Alto for a short time and really really hated it, so I'm all for people making the place an avatar of any societal development they dislike. Sad to hear about the Borders though
posted by potrzebie at 7:10 PM on March 1, 2023
posted by potrzebie at 7:10 PM on March 1, 2023
Despite the fact that his entire book is a Marxian critique of capitalism, Harris never mentions the fact that the 20th century’s two major attempts to create alternatives to that economic system were horror shows that left tens of millions dead.
I might have found the rest of the review somewhat compelling, but this really gives the game away.
I’d be astounded that such glib nonsense made its way into a “respectable” publication, except that those publications have so assiduously and repeatedly clowned themselves over the past couple decades that I now find it hard to muster the indignation.
I’m a Stanford alum, and I gleefully throw every alumni donor pamphlet in the trash, because — besides the fact that nobody needs my money less — the idea of “gather the brightest minds and teach them to exploit humanity rather than help it” ranks pretty high on my own yardstick of evil.
posted by bjrubble at 7:25 PM on March 1, 2023 [4 favorites]
I might have found the rest of the review somewhat compelling, but this really gives the game away.
I’d be astounded that such glib nonsense made its way into a “respectable” publication, except that those publications have so assiduously and repeatedly clowned themselves over the past couple decades that I now find it hard to muster the indignation.
I’m a Stanford alum, and I gleefully throw every alumni donor pamphlet in the trash, because — besides the fact that nobody needs my money less — the idea of “gather the brightest minds and teach them to exploit humanity rather than help it” ranks pretty high on my own yardstick of evil.
posted by bjrubble at 7:25 PM on March 1, 2023 [4 favorites]
While I’m at it, let me share one of my “knew them when” bits — I’m a rough contemporary of David Sacks, who I mainly remember for openly fantasizing about murdering a (very conservative, eventual Harvard MBA and health insurance CFO) classmate. Just a classy guy from the start.
Oh, yeah, also can’t forget I was there when Keith Rabois — Peter Thiel acolyte and fellow obvious “deflective gay bashing” douchebag — had his particular moment of Stanford glory.
posted by bjrubble at 7:48 PM on March 1, 2023 [1 favorite]
Oh, yeah, also can’t forget I was there when Keith Rabois — Peter Thiel acolyte and fellow obvious “deflective gay bashing” douchebag — had his particular moment of Stanford glory.
posted by bjrubble at 7:48 PM on March 1, 2023 [1 favorite]
Thinking about it now, asking a Stanford alum “have you ever given them money after you left?” might be close to 100% indication of character.
posted by bjrubble at 7:54 PM on March 1, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by bjrubble at 7:54 PM on March 1, 2023 [1 favorite]
Nuke the entire site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.
posted by slogger at 8:38 PM on March 1, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by slogger at 8:38 PM on March 1, 2023 [1 favorite]
Anything to bring the rent down.
posted by grobstein at 9:20 PM on March 1, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by grobstein at 9:20 PM on March 1, 2023 [1 favorite]
Obituary: Borders Books and Music - "The Palo Alto Borders was my psychogeographical center.
In the early 80s I was hanging out in this same building- because the New Varsity Theater hosted all ages punk shows. I often got in free because a friend lived with one of the people putting them on. Somewhere I still have the flyer I did for a Black Flag show, when Kira was playing bass, and I got to meet Henry Rollins afterward.
All the local freaky kids- punks, mods, dirge kids ("goths" wasn't a name to us yet), drama kids, art weirdoes and anyone else who didn't fit the local prep school scene could be found on University ave at all times of day. A nearby chiropractor in a former bungalow had a picnic table in the backyard. At night we'd buy alcohol from an East Palo Alto liquor store that did not give a shit about selling to obvious teenagers, and then hop the fence to drink- or take acid- at the chiropractor's. Or we'd get drunk in the closed and graffiti'd stairwell of an underground parking lot before arriving at a rich friend's house in Atherton in order to eat all the appetizers at a party their parents were having.
Several friends lived nearby- one whose mother was a witch, and whose blood orange tree in the front of their house on Middlefield road made tons of fruit we refused to eat for spooky reasons. Somebody's else's mom owned an adorable but completely wrecked bungalow on Lytton street, and after a show dozens of people would be sleeping on the floor there the next day. There was a run down creamery near the Stanford Theatre whose booths were missing half the seats and we'd sit all day drinking coffee.
Anyway, yeah, Palo Alto. Even at that time it was fancy, but quite a lot of my Palo Alto friends were poor kids from one parent households, living in rented bungalows or weird hippy accretions in various parts of the town. 10 years later I worked as a barista in Stanford Mall and after work we'd go up into the hills above Stanford to smoke bowls and swing on a wooden swing someone had installed in an oak tree that said on it "FOR MEGAN: SWING THE HEARTACHE" and then walk a little further to look over at the Big Dish. I have to say that I like my personal history of Palo Alto quite a bit, but it was a strange mashup of small town, university town, rich person playground and Page Mill Road industries* that certainly doesn't exist now. Weirdly I never actually lived there myself.
posted by oneirodynia at 10:28 PM on March 1, 2023 [5 favorites]
In the early 80s I was hanging out in this same building- because the New Varsity Theater hosted all ages punk shows. I often got in free because a friend lived with one of the people putting them on. Somewhere I still have the flyer I did for a Black Flag show, when Kira was playing bass, and I got to meet Henry Rollins afterward.
All the local freaky kids- punks, mods, dirge kids ("goths" wasn't a name to us yet), drama kids, art weirdoes and anyone else who didn't fit the local prep school scene could be found on University ave at all times of day. A nearby chiropractor in a former bungalow had a picnic table in the backyard. At night we'd buy alcohol from an East Palo Alto liquor store that did not give a shit about selling to obvious teenagers, and then hop the fence to drink- or take acid- at the chiropractor's. Or we'd get drunk in the closed and graffiti'd stairwell of an underground parking lot before arriving at a rich friend's house in Atherton in order to eat all the appetizers at a party their parents were having.
Several friends lived nearby- one whose mother was a witch, and whose blood orange tree in the front of their house on Middlefield road made tons of fruit we refused to eat for spooky reasons. Somebody's else's mom owned an adorable but completely wrecked bungalow on Lytton street, and after a show dozens of people would be sleeping on the floor there the next day. There was a run down creamery near the Stanford Theatre whose booths were missing half the seats and we'd sit all day drinking coffee.
Anyway, yeah, Palo Alto. Even at that time it was fancy, but quite a lot of my Palo Alto friends were poor kids from one parent households, living in rented bungalows or weird hippy accretions in various parts of the town. 10 years later I worked as a barista in Stanford Mall and after work we'd go up into the hills above Stanford to smoke bowls and swing on a wooden swing someone had installed in an oak tree that said on it "FOR MEGAN: SWING THE HEARTACHE" and then walk a little further to look over at the Big Dish. I have to say that I like my personal history of Palo Alto quite a bit, but it was a strange mashup of small town, university town, rich person playground and Page Mill Road industries* that certainly doesn't exist now. Weirdly I never actually lived there myself.
posted by oneirodynia at 10:28 PM on March 1, 2023 [5 favorites]
> tech's gospel of data and control
So, this could be a post of it's own, but I want to bring up the military-industrial complex's involvement in Silicon Valley's growth. Steve Blank, a retired VC did a talk a few (well, 15) years ago at the Computer History Museum that reveals the importance that electronic warfare had in WWII and the Cold War and how some of the people figuring that out ended up at Stanford.
He also wrote about it in 16 parts (I'll link all of 'em here because some of the "next" links at his page are borked)
1. If I Told You I’d Have to Kill You: The Story Behind “The Secret History of Silicon Valley”
2. Getting B-52s through the Soviet Air Defense System
3. The Most Important Company You Never Heard Of
4. Library Hours at an Undisclosed Location
5. Happy 100th Birthday Silicon Valley
6. Every World War II Movie was Wrong
7. We Fought a War You Never Heard Of
8. The Rise of Entrepreneurship
9. Entrepreneurship in Microwave Valley
10. Stanford Crosses the Rubicon
11. The Rise of “Risk Capital” Part 1
12. The Rise of “Risk Capital” Part 2
13. Lockheed-the Startup with Nuclear Missiles
14. Weapons System 117L and Corona
15. Agena – The Secret Space Truck, Ferret’s and Stanford
16. Balloon Wars
Let's remember the Cold War paranoia funded "Blue Cube" (Onizuka Air Force Station) and the MiG-watching radar station on top of Mount Umunhum
We've got Lockheed Martin (with their own light rail station), the old Hendy Iron works now owned by Northrop Grumman making containment vessels for nuclear subs. Raytheon and General Dynamics? Sure. Also for the war at home, Palantir can root out the thought criminals.
posted by ASCII Costanza head at 8:51 PM on March 2, 2023 [7 favorites]
So, this could be a post of it's own, but I want to bring up the military-industrial complex's involvement in Silicon Valley's growth. Steve Blank, a retired VC did a talk a few (well, 15) years ago at the Computer History Museum that reveals the importance that electronic warfare had in WWII and the Cold War and how some of the people figuring that out ended up at Stanford.
He also wrote about it in 16 parts (I'll link all of 'em here because some of the "next" links at his page are borked)
1. If I Told You I’d Have to Kill You: The Story Behind “The Secret History of Silicon Valley”
2. Getting B-52s through the Soviet Air Defense System
3. The Most Important Company You Never Heard Of
4. Library Hours at an Undisclosed Location
5. Happy 100th Birthday Silicon Valley
6. Every World War II Movie was Wrong
7. We Fought a War You Never Heard Of
8. The Rise of Entrepreneurship
9. Entrepreneurship in Microwave Valley
10. Stanford Crosses the Rubicon
11. The Rise of “Risk Capital” Part 1
12. The Rise of “Risk Capital” Part 2
13. Lockheed-the Startup with Nuclear Missiles
14. Weapons System 117L and Corona
15. Agena – The Secret Space Truck, Ferret’s and Stanford
16. Balloon Wars
Let's remember the Cold War paranoia funded "Blue Cube" (Onizuka Air Force Station) and the MiG-watching radar station on top of Mount Umunhum
We've got Lockheed Martin (with their own light rail station), the old Hendy Iron works now owned by Northrop Grumman making containment vessels for nuclear subs. Raytheon and General Dynamics? Sure. Also for the war at home, Palantir can root out the thought criminals.
posted by ASCII Costanza head at 8:51 PM on March 2, 2023 [7 favorites]
Forgot to mention that Harris mentioned the military-industrial complex when he was on KQED’s Forum.
posted by ASCII Costanza head at 9:41 PM on March 2, 2023
posted by ASCII Costanza head at 9:41 PM on March 2, 2023
Despite the fact that his entire book is a Marxian critique of capitalism, Harris never mentions the fact that the 20th century’s two major attempts to create alternatives to that economic system were horror shows that left tens of millions dead.
Is almost verbatim the kind of retort I got from my conservative grandmother whenever she asked me what I was studying in college thirty+ years ago.
I always like to point out the British killed something like 140 million in Asia while being capitalist and many of the companies that were instrumental in it are still incorporated today.
posted by srboisvert at 1:23 PM on March 7, 2023 [1 favorite]
Is almost verbatim the kind of retort I got from my conservative grandmother whenever she asked me what I was studying in college thirty+ years ago.
I always like to point out the British killed something like 140 million in Asia while being capitalist and many of the companies that were instrumental in it are still incorporated today.
posted by srboisvert at 1:23 PM on March 7, 2023 [1 favorite]
I was 15 the first time I went to Palo Alto. The thing that sticks out in my mind the most is being told about and shown East Palo Alto. I hear it's improved at lot since then (this was more than 20 years ago), but at that time it was a highly impoverished, segregated, and "dangerous" part of town. It boggled my 15 year old brain that these temples of education and wealth could exist right next door to a place of poverty and immiseration. I didn't have the vocabulary or knowledge to understand how inequality works, but I was really disturbed by the dichotomy.
posted by chaz at 1:43 PM on March 7, 2023
posted by chaz at 1:43 PM on March 7, 2023
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Especially in the 21st century it seems like the formative politics of the ruling class are much older than suburban escapism of Stanford and the blinkered enlightenment of tech. To me neo-feudalism seems like the chosen antidote to a capitalism that doesn't scale both in terms of inclusion and lack of frontier.
The colonialists have run out of sea and are turning their digital gaze inwards.
posted by Reasonably Everything Happens at 5:16 AM on March 1, 2023 [3 favorites]