The most comprehensive — and incendiary — history of the place that we’re ever likely to get. A sweeping and unsparing critique, it’s also well written, frequently surprising and, because history tends to rhyme, increasingly urgent. You may never think about Stanford, iconic tech companies like Hewlett Packard or, indeed, the Valley itself the same way again. I won’t.” —LOS ANGELES TIMES, 10 Best Tech Books of 2023
“A panoramic, deeply researched, and fundamentally truth-seeking history…Required reading.”
—WIRED, Best Books of 2023 “A sweeping biography of a place where efficiency and profitability dominated long before the tech industry as we know it ever existed, Palo Alto is an astute unraveling of how we got here…Entirely engaging.”—VULTURE, Best Books of 2023 One of THE NEW YORK TIMES’s Most Anticipated Books of 2023 One of SALON’s Best Books of 2023 One of BLOOMBERG's Best Books of 2023 One of THE NEXT BIG IDEA CLUB's Must-Read Books of 2023 One of VULTURE's, LA TIMES, ESQUIRE, NYLON, ALTA, THE MILLIONS’ and LITERARY HUB's Most Anticipated Books of 2023 “Palo Alto is a bold and ambitious work of history that provides a great deal of insight into the world today.”
—DAZED, Best Books of 2023 “Harris is a very 21st-century writer. He’s funny, he’s offhand, he’s casual. He makes all this stuff very, very accessible. And it’s a great Trojan horse, actually, if you want to have your parents read a little bit of radical history.”—SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE “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 “Malcolm Harris can be a very funny writer, but he isn’t kidding around when he called his latest book…[Harris] is an engaging writer, and the theme works so staggeringly well that “Palo Alto” holds attention and holds together. The results are frightening. Palo Alto isn’t just a town that touches our collective history; it’s one that has grabbed on to it, slaps it around, and won’t let go until it squeezes every last breath and penny out of us.”—THE INTERCEPT “Harris’s earlier book Kids These Days was a broad cultural history of millennials, zeroing in on the unfair economic stereotypes that have dogged the generation. Now, he tells an ambitious story of Silicon Valley, showing how its specific culture and history allowed it to become the site of both breathtaking technological advancement and capitalist exploitation.”—Joumana Khatib , THE NEW YORK TIMES “Engaging and unsettling.”—Bethanne Patrick , LOS ANGELES TIMES, Most Anticipated Books of February 2023 "Harris’s writing is astute and clear, accessible but never watered down. Like Silicon Valley, this book promises a lot, but unlike Silicon Valley, Harris is far more likely to deliver with this 'radical proposition for how we might begin to change course' to escape from the wasteland of technological progress."—Isle McElroy , VULTURE “A searching history of California and its role in predatory, extractive capitalism…[Harris] proposes a program of divestiture and restitution, including ‘the forfeit of Stanford’s vast accumulated wealth,’ that is breathtaking in its audacity…highly readable, sharply argued and well researched.”
—KIRKUS REVIEWS, Starred Review “Malcolm Harris traces exactly how Silicon Valley was built – from its origin as a haunted toxic waste dump built on stolen Native burial grounds to the powerful and often disastrous tech engine it is today.”—NYLON, Must Read Books of February 2023 “A monumental work of research and imagination, Palo Alto is destined to sit on a high shelf next to other unforgettable works of national history.”—Adrienne Westenfeld , ESQUIRE, Best Books of 2023 "From 19th-century railroad barons to the counterculture capitalists of the 1970s, Harris tells a story of wanton hubris and curdled idealism, one that seeks to account for the global rise—in tech, in war, in capitalism—of an otherwise forgettably pleasant suburb of San Jose."—Jonny Diamond , Literary Hub, Most Anticipated Books of 2023 “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 “Harris’s comprehensive history of Silicon Valley, from railroad capitalism to free love to big tech, does just that. Palo Alto spans centuries in order to thoroughly demystifying the region’s economics and unearth its enduring legacy of settler colonialism .”—THE MILLIONS, Most Anticipated Books of 2023 “Harris traces over a hundred years of colonialism to explore how this unlikely suburb became the mecca for the digital gold rush. This book's time is definitely now .”—Alison Stine , SALON, Best Books of 2023 “With this powerfully written and deftly articulated treatise, Harris has produced a comprehensive look at how Silicon Valley grew into the all-consuming power center it is today.”—ALTA, Most Anticipated Books of 2023 “a rollicking 600+ history that runs the gamut from antiwar movements to racial genetics to the Hewlett Packard garage.”—MIT Technology Review "It feels wild to call this 720-page tome 'immensely readable,' but it is! Harris has deeply researched and developed his analysis of 170 years of history, and synthesizes it with skill into prose that's both understandable and a joy to read."—Michelle C. , Powell's Books “In Palo Alto , Malcolm Harris gives us a comprehensive deep-dive into the history of the Silicon Valley. From stomping on the Indigenous peoples, to immigration, railroading, the gold rush, and all of the other elements found in the history of Northern California, we learn when, how and why certain people came to power and what they did with that power… This is a long read, but well worth the time and effort. So much to learn on these pages!”—Auntie's Bookstore (Spokane, Washington) "For a book whose concepts include global examples, Palo Alto exhibits mastery of local places...Harris has a planner’s ingenuity for the relationship between place and people, but a broader worldview than most of us. Even local issues have global ramifications, and vice-versa."—Asher Kohn , APA California Northern Section "[Harris] retains a keen eye for the cultural and economic hallmarks and exports of his famous hometown. . . [Palo Alto ] feels like the culmination of his upbringing and career. It’s a stunning, Technicolor anvil of a book. . . 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."—Scott W. Stern , THE NEW REPUBLIC “Palo Alto is a skeptic’s record, a vital, critical demonstration of Northern California’s two centuries of mixing technology and cruelty for money…Even while attending to larger patterns, [the book] studiously works through the town’s history by focusing on its most famous and influential residents.…conviction and research burn through the page and give coherence and urgency to a daunting subject.”—Federico Perelmulter , THE WASHINGTON POST “Part history book, part indictment of an American idyll fueled by environmental destruction, racism and dubious business practices, Palo Alto is a valuable contribution to the city’s mythology.”—James Tarmy , BLOOMBERG, Best Books of 2023 “It’s a sprawling tale, covering juicy stories…Harris handles it all with dizzying detail and charmingly loopy metaphors…Harris describes himself as a communist, and that analysis is peppered through the text, but he has a knack for boiling down complicated dynamics to their blunt basics.”—Sam Dean , LOS ANGELES TIMES
10/17/2022
Silicon Valley’s epicenter has nurtured an unholy symbiosis of capitalism and racism, according to this sweeping yet jaundiced study. The New Inquiry contributing editor Harris (Kids These Days ), a Palo Alto native, surveys the city’s history from the Gold Rush onward, paying particular attention to its dominant institution, Stanford University. He indicts the school for pioneering the “military-academic-industrial complex,” brainstorming conservative ideology at its Hoover Institution, and incubating Silicon Valley’s computer industry—an especially pernicious variant of globalism, he contends. Harris puts Palo Alto at the core of a California capitalism that combined labor exploitation with racism by recruiting low-wage, nonwhite workers, then condoning white-supremacist backlashes to intimidate them. Vivid sketches of Stanford-linked capitalists (railroad baron Leland Stanford; venture capitalist Peter Thiel) dwell on their sins more than their achievements and celebrate the Indigenous rebels, union organizers, Black Panthers, and campus militants who challenged them. The result is a somewhat discordant mix of jibes and Marxist theorizing: “Bill Gates and Steve Jobs... had poor personal hygiene, didn’t play sports, and were both noted jerks.... These repellent young men were the tools that got capital from the crisis of the 1960s to the ‘greed is good’ ’80s.” Harris’s frequently gripping history gets lost in the shuffle of his doctrinaire politics. Photos. (Feb.)
Patrick Harrison combines a fine storytelling style with a sure sense of the dramatic and a good tempo. His resonant voice fits this massive evocation of the dark side of Silicon Valley, the outsized role of technology giants, and the political influence of Stanford University’s Hoover Institute. The thesis is that technological innovators and their political allies became unfathomably wealthy as they despoiled the planet, exploited workers, and were ruthless in the accumulation of money and power. Few heroes emerge in this massive yet compelling audiobook. Palo Alto itself is characterized by hyper-motivated high school students with an extraordinarily high suicide rate. And Stanford, which has the largest acreage of any U.S. university and which sits on Native American land, is described as a venal institution. A.D.M. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine
FEBRUARY 2023 - AudioFile
Patrick Harrison combines a fine storytelling style with a sure sense of the dramatic and a good tempo. His resonant voice fits this massive evocation of the dark side of Silicon Valley, the outsized role of technology giants, and the political influence of Stanford University’s Hoover Institute. The thesis is that technological innovators and their political allies became unfathomably wealthy as they despoiled the planet, exploited workers, and were ruthless in the accumulation of money and power. Few heroes emerge in this massive yet compelling audiobook. Palo Alto itself is characterized by hyper-motivated high school students with an extraordinarily high suicide rate. And Stanford, which has the largest acreage of any U.S. university and which sits on Native American land, is described as a venal institution. A.D.M. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine
FEBRUARY 2023 - AudioFile
★ 2022-11-24 A searching history of California and its role in predatory, extractive capitalism.
“California is very important for me,” wrote Karl Marx in 1880, “because nowhere else has the upheaval most shamelessly caused by capitalist centralization taken place with such speed.” Native son Harris, who quotes Marx’s apothegm, begins his story of that upheaval with the Ohlone, Indigenous inhabitants of the Bay Area who were mistakenly assumed to have disappeared in a wave of genocide. It’s easy to understand the confusion, since so many Native peoples were wiped out in the rush to ravage the lands and waters of California. The business of making a few people wealthy was the work of many. Chinese laborers, who were so instrumental in building the railroads, also labored in the farm fields until Mexican workers replaced them. The Irish and Swiss Italians did well in politics and winemaking, facing less prejudice than elsewhere, but as for people of color—well, consider that Palo Alto banned buildings over 40 feet high from residential areas, the better to control access to housing by lower-income people. Palo Alto is, of course, the home of Stanford University, which Harris sees as foil and fulcrum of the military-industrial complex. Said one dissident in the 1970s, “The university isn’t a temple of the intellect or a place where disinterested scholars examine the world,” but instead a hub of military research. While Harris nods with some appreciation to the techno-libertarians who invented the personal computer, he also urges that the real heroes were the builders and not the venture capitalists, those who have since become Silicon Valley royalty. In closing this long but consistently engaging narrative, the author proposes a program of divestiture and restitution, including “the forfeit of Stanford’s vast accumulated wealth,” that is breathtaking in its audacity—and probably doesn’t stand a chance of being put in place.
A highly readable revisionist history of the Golden State, sharply argued and well researched.