Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World

Malcolm Harris

Palo Alto was named one of the year's best books by Vulture, The New Republic, Dazed, Wired, Bloomberg, Esquire, Salon, and The Next Big Idea Club. 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. 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.