California dreamin' 2 (electric bugaloo ;)

April 17, 2023 2:22 AM

System Failure [ungated] - "The world Palo Alto made." (previously)

@BigMeanInternet: "Ominous first line to Jonathan Lethem (!) review of PALO ALTO in the Nation"

I met Malcolm Harris once, back in 2011... He offered a class-based analysis that was capable of binding to contemporary social justice uprisings and eluding woke-controversy traps, without chewing off its own leg in the process...

What interests me is not so much the personal qualities of the men and women in this history but how capitalism has made use of them. To think about life this way is not to surrender to predetermination; only by understanding how we’re made use of can we start to distinguish our selves from our situations. How can you know what you want or feel or think—who you are—if you don’t know which way history’s marionette strings are tugging? In the following pages you’ll meet characters who find ways to tug back, who pit themselves against the way things are and come to personify the system’s self-destructive countertendencies. People aren’t puppets, and to pull a person is to create the conditions for rebellion. Maybe we’re more like butterflies, pinned live and wriggling onto history’s collage... If, as I have been convinced, the point of life and the meaning of freedom is to make something with what the world makes of you, then it’s necessary to locate those places where history reaches through your self and sticks you to the board...

Harris’s voice rises thrillingly as he lays out the stakes and begs us to understand them: “Competition and domination, exploitation and exclusion, minority rule and class hate: These aren’t problems capitalist technology will solve. That’s what it’s for. In the proper language, they are features, not bugs.”

also btw:

• Palo Alto: A History of California, Innovation & Exploitation
• Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World by Malcolm Harris

How 1970s California created the modern world - "Enormous amounts of wealth were generated. Tolerance of difference increasingly became the norm. Diversity was celebrated as a positive attribute. Global economic and cultural interaction intensified. Innovation exploded, and technology dramatically increased access to vast amounts of knowledge and information, and communication became much easier and cheaper. The choices available to the newly empowered individual – from travel, to what they ate or worshiped, to how they earned their living, to what they laughed at, or who, or even if, they married – was unparalleled... The California dreaming story was not uniformly positive, as we continue to deal with the consequences of polarisation, inequality, climate change, disinformation, and other consequences from the 1970s. It is, however, a dynamic story of American growth, rebirth, and reimagination. In this historical retelling, culture and technology matter as much as politics and, over time, intersect."

posted by kliuless (5 comments total)

That review was a good read and I'm interested in the book. Maybe Lethem should stop reviewing books while my reading backlog is still finite, though. Thank you for posting this!
posted by Western Infidels at 10:04 AM on April 17, 2023

In early Silicon Valley lore, I'm always interested in IBM's role in that. (As an IBM lifer)
Looks like IBM showed up in 1943 with the war effort mentioned in TFA. Then invented the disk drive there.
I remember looking at a map of pollution in San Francisco Bay (1980's??) and seeing IBM as a major polluter, but that was before Silicon Valley was Silicon Valley.
Lots of help from other semiconductor companies since then.
Back to reading...
posted by MtDewd at 5:53 PM on April 17, 2023

I'm currently in late postproduction on the second season of a leftist streaming documentary series about early virtual worlds, and one of our episodes takes a broad historical view of this time and place, so this book is right up my alley! Going to pick it up today. Thanks for the post!
posted by One Second Before Awakening at 8:53 AM on April 18, 2023

One Second Before Awakening, I'm going to assume you mean Preserving Worlds. Those episodes were great, and I'm happy to hear there's going to be another season!
posted by everdred at 10:30 AM on April 18, 2023 [1 favorite]

That's the one! Thank you for the kind words. I think season 2 is shaping up well so far! Should be starting to release in a month or two I think.
posted by One Second Before Awakening at 11:38 AM on April 18, 2023 [1 favorite]