Takeaways from Malcolm Harris’ Marxist History of Palo Alto, California, and the World
Content warning — discussion of suicides
Reading Malcolm Harris’s Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World reminds me how I felt while reading The Girl Who Played with Fire.
Never having been outside of Stockholm myself, the Sweden that Stieg Larsson painted in his wintry murder mystery was one full of psychopaths, killers, and hidden conspiracies, presided over by a corrupt government where no one is safe.
It was a long cry from my own Swedish memories aligning with the standard Scandinavian brand image of a stable welfare paradise filled with gorgeous people.
Meanwhile, the Palo Alto that Harris paints here is one where Herbert Hoover never lost, all the luminaries are racist eugenicists, it determines 20th century American policy, all the founders are frauds, and everyone else is a rapacious colonizer, whether for gold, missiles, silicon, dot coms, or apps.
I know Palo Alto better than I know Sweden, having grown up there. But this image is an equally long cry from my own memories of sun, wealth, diversity, and opportunity.
Then again, I wasn’t an adult! And an intrinsic part of growing up is the loss of innocence, of discovering new and unsettling facts about the world we live in. This book made me grow up real fast.
In this post I’ll summarize what I learned, list out the most eye-opening facts, and share where I disagreed with him.
Read the book to get the full story — this is by no means comprehensive!
Table of Contents
My own Palo Alto History, without Marxist bias
Silicon Valley and California have led capitalism for as long as they existed
Leland Stanford and the Palo Alto System
Herbert Hoover never lost, he just shapeshifted his power
The Civil Rights movement was the domestic front of the Cold War
The de-evolution of Silicon Valley innovation
Where I disagree with Malcolm
Other Silicon Valley fast facts
My own Palo Alto history, without Marxist bias
Malcolm, who grew up in Palo Alto, begins the book with the arresting line:
“I began this project with the fact that the railroad that brought the capitalist white settlers to California is the same railroad my classmates used to kill themselves.’”
And continues relating a memorable time in high school when a substitute teacher sat all the kids down and told them earnestly that the real world was not like this, only to have the admins and the normal teacher reassure them later that that teacher has been fired and they didn’t have to worry about such things any more.
Like Malcolm, I lived through both those experiences at a PAUSD high school: my classmates jumped in front of trains, and substitute teachers sneakily told me this wasn’t the real world.
As for history, I knew about the California genocide, that Silicon Valley was founded with Cold War defense industry investment, and that Terman senior was a eugenicist (only because they renamed my Terman middle school after I graduated), but not much more.
Unlike Malcolm, I do not identify as a Marxist, though I’m always intellectually curious to learn more. So I picked up this book knowing I’d likely disagree with the general tone, vowing as usual to take what resonates and ignore what doesn’t.
He follows in the footsteps of his leftist forebear Howard Zinn, who said ‘All history is biased, and every historian chooses which facts to highlight or discard.’
While 90% of the book is solid historical reporting, as it proceeds the Marxist bias becomes more pronounced, from spitefully referring to police as ‘pigs’, to the ‘indiscriminate seal applause’ in response to Steve Jobs, and various derisive snide comments on leading men’s foibles throughout.
However, this doesn’t detract from the intensively researched history told here, and damn, it’s a history worth knowing!
Anyone who has spent time in the Bay Area, the tech industry, or examining capitalism and Marxism will get a lot of out of this book.
Silicon Valley and California have led capitalism for as long as they existed
‘If California is America’s America, then Palo Alto is America’s America’s America.’ — Malcolm Harris
He’s not far off — the very concept of the American Dream grew out of the California Dream which was spurred by the Gold Rush.
This book traces that journey with tantalizing similarities along the way. The Industrial Revolution was hitting its stride when gold was discovered in California, and so modern capitalism cut its teeth on the state as the last place settled by Anglos.
From the ‘hydrolickers’ (early strip mining water jets that destroyed hillsides in search of gold until illegalized), to the railroads hurriedly built to extract resources, to the Stanford-Binet IQ test helping sort human capital, Malcolm argues that PA has always been at the forefront of capitalist innovation.
Apparently it’s a Marxist saying that ‘the last will be the first’, often applied to the most oppressed minorities being the ones who are first to fight for something better, and here applied to CA’s status as the edge of Western civilization and the first in investment.
And some things never change. History rhymes.
From Leland Stanford obscuring the Chinese laborers who built his railroad to Steve Jobs hiding Chinese manufacturer Foxconn during his Apple conferences, the Anglo capitalists hide the nonwhite laborers who work for them.
Just as Apple products are ‘designed in California, made in China’, so too were the earliest semiconductors. One executive described ‘small foreign and female’ as ideal qualifications for semiconductor manufacturing jobs.
He even says the South Bay has one of America’s largest population of Vietnamese immigrants because the defense industry firms who helped build the bombs of the Vietnam war “were ready to absorb refugees for the same reason they were refugees.”
Or that the Draper Fisher Jurvetson VC fund has the third generation of Drapers, the first of whom invested in the West Germany economy by memorably strip searching miners clocking out to make sure they weren’t smuggling their subsidized food back to their starving family, as ‘their labor didn’t turn food into oil’. Now that’s a nasty legacy.
In the 70s human augmentation researchers were saying things like ‘programmers should be augmented first so they can augment better. They are developing tools for a class to which they themselves belong.’
Sounds familiar to the AI researchers building AI tools to better research AI, huh? And the entire productivity tips sector.
Likewise, Bob Kaufman was a key figure of the ‘60s counterculture I had never heard of, who’d wander into open mics off the streets where he lived and spit fire like:
‘Alien winds sweeping the highway fling the dust of medicine men, long dead, into the floating eyes of spitting gadget salesmen, eating murdered hot dogs, in the California afternoon.’
If that doesn’t still accurately describe today’s Valley what with ayahuasca shamans and widget salesmen I don’t know what does. The only thing that’s changed is that the hot dogs are plant based meat alternatives now. :)
Leland Stanford and the Palo Alto System
There was also plenty to learn about Leland Stanford himself. I knew he was a railroad robber baron, but I didn’t know that his cofounders looked down on him and used him as the public face to keep him away from the business, which may have contributed to his greater wealth and ire at the hands of detractors.
He founded the town of Palo Alto in part to escape said detractors, who had a habit of protesting loudly outside his Nob Hill home to disrupt his social events.
I also didn’t know that he used his railroad wealth to innovate in both equestrianism and photography, by inventing the Palo Alto Stock Farm and siring many racehorse winners, along with a critical step in the development of motion pictures with the Muybridge photos proving a horse travels without any legs on the ground at times.
Harris says the horses at the Stock Form were where Stanford developed ‘the Palo Alto system’, devoting to finding the ‘blood that trots young’ since it’s better to break a horse’s leg earlier through training than later so as to not waste further capital on a loser.
This risk-heavy early potential movement lingers throughout the valley, and the author makes the point that these sort of expectations might be what is to blame for the high school suicides and the Sand Hill road VCs all in one.
Herbert Hoover never lost; only adapted
You may know Herbert Hoover as the president during the Great Depression, who lost soundly to FDR in this second term and was never heard from again.
But here, we trace his life in detail, as it fits remarkably well with Malcolm’s theses around all three of the subtitles. Hoover was an orphan in Stanford’s inaugural class, who went on to supervise mining operations around the world at the exact same time such assets were being de-colonialized.
As President, he was a staunch right wing capitalist, even going so far as to deploy tanks and one Douglas MacArthur on WW1 vets camped out in DC to demand promised money during the Depression.
But it was only after he was voted out in a landslide that his influence shifted into a conservative icon. His Hoover Institute began as a library of his presidential items but became a think tank, and his style of thinking has informed every conservative president to come later, from Nixon to Reagan to the Bushes.
Even today the likes of Peter Thiel further Stanford conservatism in his image, funding and advancing right wing thought forward.
The Civil Rights movement was the domestic front of the Cold War
Malcolm Harris shares Malcolm X’s sentiment that ‘African Americans are a domestic colony of the United States.’
After all, colonized peoples declare war against their own government, and that is what many waves of civil rights movements have done in some form or another.
He sketches out a compelling argument that it’s not a coincidence this happened at the same time as the height of the Cold War, as they were demanding the same things for minorities that the socialists did for all.
He devotes substantial chapters to the Black Panther party, which barely fit into the theses, based as they were in the East Bay.
I hadn’t heard of the leftist firebombings of computer labs in the 70s. They decried the labs as part of the military industrial complex and had students actually blow up computers. NYU students even held a ransom for the Black Panthers asking for “$100,000 or the robot gets it!”
The tenth point of the 10 Point Program of BPP demands was for ‘community control of modern technology’, which is noteworthy in a time before the internet.
The devolution of Silicon Valley innovation
Another theme of the book is the decreasing innovation of the Valley.
The first wave of semiconductor men in the 60s were highly credentialed scientists from the military and adjacent fields.
The next wave of hardware innovation in the 80s with Gates and Jobs was done by iconoclasts who knew computers and not much else.
Next “Google combined Microsoft’s monopoly with Napster’s scraper ethos”, and merely scraped the information of others, while monetizing through advertising.
And the marketplace platforms of the 2010s take this even further by aggregating the existing work of others rather than creating their own new items.
He repeats Malcolm Gladwell’s point that Bill Gates (here derisively called by his childhood nickname Trey, as in the third of his name) was lucky to have time on the mainframe computer at his private high school, while making the Marxist critique that these were private benefits that went into the hands of the elite. Just like the public hydroelectric power powering the Microsoft server farms.
This attitude around society being nothing by family and business is reflected in Gates’ ’95 Open Letter to Hobbyists — “he didn’t owe people shit and he acted like it.”
He highlights Uber far more than Lyft, since Travis Kalanick’s odious personality and growth ethos fit his thesis better than the Lyft guys, inspired as they were by African car-sharing.
There is a startling quote by Travis when questioned on why he raised bazillions from Saudi oil funds etc. Emblematic of the growth at all cost ehtos.
“Fundraising is not my preference, but it’s required when that money is available.”
Carcinization is the documented tendency of searborne animals evolving to look like crabs, as those adaptations are the most effective.
The author says modern companies do the same, flattening into platforms suspended on contractor pin legs, and further undermining the working class. “For every new app billionare, average job quality decreases further.”
And he attacks the ideas that SV’s meritocracy of diversity is good for the world, saying “for every diverse founder there are many families of refugees in basements doing the actual labor.”
Where I disagree:
“There is no Chinese labor shown in the Golden Spike painting”
Yet there they are, just to Lelands right. Maybe this was simply an oversight?
This tiny error puts a crack in all the rest of his copious research, though there is so much of it, and so well cited, that I dare not wade deeper.
His wider point around Anglos hiding the non whites in their endeavors stands strong however.
“It’s hard to call the acts of the Weather Underground terrorism as all bombs targeted property and were forewarned.”
I understand this reflects the socialist tendency to defend property damage waged for human rights (like the George Floyd lootings), but it’s still terrorism.
They’re using violence to further a political cause. That’s exactly what terrorists do. If you want to contrast it against state sponsored terrorism, that’s a valid juxtaposition, but don’t soften the violence of your side.
The Weathermen literally issued a declaration of war against the US government. What are you gonna call that, ‘militantism’?!
“There is nothing against saying pigs. So: pigs.”
He uses this slur often against police, again likely due to immersion in Marxist circles that think it’s okay to punch Nazis or whatever. (FYI: punching a Nazi legitimizes the use of force in politics, which makes you a fascist.)
But this seems counterproductive to me. Why radicalize your history and call people names if you’re trying to convince the moderates?
Maybe he’s not trying to convince anyone. Still, it makes it harder to defend this as a trustworthy history.
“Forces shape history and appoint men to act on their behalf, not the inverse” — Stanford analogue Shelgrim, in Frank Norris’ The Octopus
He dunks generally on Napoleon, saying he was not a ‘great man’ and merely a product of his time.
You can say that someone else could have united France and taken on Europe due to that unique time in history, but you can’t say that Napoelon’s use of supply trains and infantry tactics were not world-class and innovative.
The man took on all the biggest powers of the time and won! That wasn’t something inherent to French troops — it was their strategist.
Again, I understand he’s trying to poke holes in the Great Man theory of history, but to do so by forgetting the specific aspects of the men who were able to take such reins of history, he is again casting doubt on his ability to relate history.
I assume he’s trying to say we’re all slaves under capitalism and there is only true freedom in socialism. In which cases the forces are still there, but tame under the yoke of the state somehow.
Sounds a bit rosy. Then again, so does socialism. :P
Other Silicon Valley fast facts
Despite having lived in the Bay Area for most of my life, I learned many, many things about this place that I’d never heard before. Such as:
Nob Hill in SF is short for ‘nabob’ which is a slang term for the rich, and had the world’s first commercial cable car go up it to the capitalists homes on top.
Modem stands for modulator-demodulator, of electrical signals.
Cisco Systems is named for the latter syllable of San Francisco.
The first president of Stanford David Starr Jordan was a eugenicist who likely poisoned Jane Stanford to gain control of the nascent university.
Terman Senior was a eugenicist who popularized IQ tests.
William Shockley was a narcissist that succeeded in his failures, who then became (surprise) a eugenicist.
David Packard of Hewlett Packard briefly served as Reagan’s defense secretary.
The SCORE child education mountain I grew up with purposefully didn’t have a top rung to it, to keep children striving.
The inspiration for Zorro was not a rich man, but a poor native/Chicano farmer who was driven to banditry by Anglo settlers driving him off his farm.
VC Glenn Mueller shot himself for missing a Netscape funding round in 1994, while Michael S Malone relayed tales of engineers doing cocaine off silicon wafers.
Amazon’s first CFO Joy Covey was killed by an Amazon delivery driver while biking in the bay, which Malcolm deploys as karma for the fact that they contract out such employees with less training.
Ticketmaster sued Microsoft around whether deep links to certain pages are protected IP, which paved the way for Google and the entire web I’ve inhabited since.
Conclusion
He ends with a call to return Stanford lands to the native Ohlone people, as the best way to steward the future under indigenous sustainable philosophy, and a way to right the past wrongs.
I understand why he ended on this note and how it fits in with his thesis, but I think it’s the wrong thing to ask. Maybe it’s because I’m not a Marxist, but such a request doesn’t seem reasonable or feasible. It seems ideologically stalled for the same reason parts of the #Landback movement are — Anglos have developed the land since they stole it. Who gets the buildings?
Then again, maybe the preposterous ask is meant to stoke discussion, and in that it succeeds, as does the book’s equally far reaching thesis around Palo Alto as a lynchpin of California, capitalism and the world.
What a magnum opus. Bravo, Malcolm!
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