Kapp Singer
Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World by Malcolm Harris, Little, Brown and Company, 720 pages, $36
Even to the casual observer, it might seem that the tech industry's wheels are falling off. In late October 2022, Elon Musk took over Twitter and axed hundreds of workers, sending the company, and the site, into a frenzy. Less than a month later, the cryptocurrency exchange FTX filed for bankruptcy, and by December, its founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, had been charged with wire fraud, securities fraud, and money laundering. Around the same time, massive layoffs swept through the Valley. Together, Alphabet (née Google), Meta (née Facebook), Apple, and Amazon cut over 50,000 employees in a matter of weeks. And in early March of this year, in what might be the most foreboding failure yet, Silicon Valley Bank collapsed. While not a household name like the others in this list of losers, SVB was critical infrastructure for the region. It financed a huge number of tech startups and venture capital firms. Its meltdown was the largest banking collapse since the 2008 financial crisis and the second-largest in U.S. history. On March 10th, the federal government took over the bank, guaranteeing all deposits in what some have called a bailout.
“Move fast and break things,” once the internal motto at Facebook and now the adage for the Valley writ large, has rarely felt more real than in the past six months. But the tech industry’s consequences-be-damned infatuation with trial and error began much earlier, long before the reign of Zuckerberg and friends. In his new book Palo Alto, Malcolm Harris suggests that to understand the dynamics of today’s technology industry—and, in fact, the world—we have to look past social networks and semiconductors. For Harris, Silicon Valley began with a late-19th century horse farm.
In 1876, a man named Leland Stanford purchased 650 acres of land among the sunny, sprawling orchards of the place he would soon name Palo Alto. He was awash with cash from his gig as president of the Central Pacific Railroad in the years after California’s Gold Rush. In 1862 Congress chartered his company to build a line from Utah to Sacramento, and upon completion of this stretch in 1869, Stanford hammered in the ceremonial Golden Spike to commemorate the final link in the long iron ribbon connecting East and West. He was also widely despised, and his San Francisco hilltop mansion was often picketed by workers. So, he retreated to his new farm in what was then countryside, thirty miles south of the city. But even there, Stanford’s thirst for profit could not be quenched, and, convinced by his doctor that he needed a hobby, he fell into the business of breeding horses.
Stanford wanted nothing less than to engineer the best animals the world had ever seen, and he did this by applying the burgeoning early-American industrial model to reproductive selection. This, he thought, would be a great way to make a buck. With a rigorous scientific eye, Stanford began to test, assess, and select the fastest and strongest trotting horses. He tested the capabilities of these colts at a younger age than anyone had previously done, seeing that it was most productive to weed out those who couldn’t keep up sooner rather than later—as Harris puts it in Palo Alto, “better to snap a yearling’s tendon than feed him to age five just to see it snap then.” To study their biomechanics, Stanford hired the photographer Edward Muybridge to take rapid-fire photographs of his horses running. As it turned out, these images did not end up revolutionizing the technical side of the breeding operation. They were, however, an unbelievably good marketing tool. Muybridge took his photographs on tour and exhibited them with what he called a “zoopraxiscope”–– a device he had designed to project frames in quick succession––simulating the motion of a running horse and giving captivated audiences one of the first cinematic experiences. His technique honed and brand burnished, Stanford began selling these precision-engineered animals for enormous sums; in 1892, he pocketed a record $125,000 ($2m in 2022 dollars) for a single horse.
But even more valuable than the body of any one animal was the knowledge that its genes could produce more victors down the road. Stanford’s real breakthrough was not in selling horses, but in selling information about horses—information that allowed a buyer to see, earlier than anyone else, that an animal was likely to produce winning offspring. Stanford called his method the Palo Alto System, and from that moment on, this “regimen of capitalist rationality and the exclusive focus on potential and speculative value” came to define Silicon Valley.
Stanford’s Palo Alto System becomes Harris’ central conceit in the book, and he uses it as a framework to explain the development of California, capitalism, and eventually, the entire globe. In his words, “the scientific principles of control, measurement, and deliberate change opened a road to modernity, and capital was the draft mule that pulled the whole world down that path, California first.” The method was soon institutionalized when Leland and his wife, Jane Lathrop Stanford, in 1885 founded a university bearing the family name. Stanford attracted a cadre of intellectuals who readily embraced the Palo Alto System, and the capital to back them up soon followed.
In an ideas market already saturated with diagnoses of what brand of capitalism we are living under, Harris’s consecration of the Palo Alto System might seem superfluous. It quickly becomes clear, however, that he is not trying to reinvent Marxian political economy (he always hews closely to Marx, even if he invokes him sparingly by name). Rather, Harris uses the Palo Alto System term to point to the historically- and geographically-specific mode of production that once and still underpins Silicon Valley. Given the region’s global influence as both driver and product of American power, the Valley’s way of thinking and doing business has permeated the world. The Palo Alto System, in Harris’ telling, emerges not so much as a ‘type’ or ‘stage’ of capitalism into which we have metamorphosed, but rather a particular manifestation of capitalism in Northern California that illustrates the trajectory of the world economy.
Here, beneath the Santa Cruz mountains, capitalist innovation transcends improvements in machinery and the organization of production. A crucial tenet of the Palo Alto System is an attempt to engineer our very species while casting off those who don’t fit the bill. First the horses were ‘perfected.’ The humans would soon follow—debugged like a line of code. Many of the Valley’s early movers and shakers, perhaps unsurprisingly, were eugenicists, including David Starr Jordan, Stanford’s first president, William Shockley, a professor at the university and one of the inventors of the semiconductor, and Lewis Terman, the inventor of the Stanford-Binet IQ test. The psychologist Philip Zimbardo, who ran the now-infamous Stanford Prison Experiment and later laid the foundations for the theory of broken windows policing, is another figure representative, for Harris, of the moral rot at the core of the Valley’s intellectual production. And while it’s true that, upon arriving at Stanford as an undergraduate, future president Herbert Hoover, might not have held this same explicitly racist outlook, Harris depicts the university’s first contribution to the Oval Office as a keystone actor in American attempts to crush global communist movements and stateside unions. Fed on the intellectual fruit of the Valley, Hoover consolidated capitalist interests and laid the groundwork for the diffusion of the Palo Alto System around the world. His memory, and, more importantly, his theories, still hover over Stanford today in the form of the eponymous Hoover Institute.
Palo Alto deftly demonstrates that the racist ideologies of imperialism and racial superiority which built Silicon Valley still define it to this day. In Harris’ Hegelian prose. “History doesn’t stay put,” he writes. “It works itself under your skin in fragments like shrapnel; it steals into your bloodstream like an infection.” The past haunts our present, in the racial segregation of the Bay Area’s cities, in the land seized from indigenous tribes by American colonists and troops, and in the devices of surveillance, policing, and labor exploitation that tech giants now produce.
Capitalism’s drive to fashion the perfect worker, while persistent, necessarily tends towards collapse, bringing with it macroeconomic crises, but also crises of daily life. In particular, Harris examines the spate of suicides that swept through Palo Alto’s high schools in the late 2000s and early 2010s. As a child of Palo Alto himself, these were Harris’s classmates, and in his reading, the high-pressure training grounds for the next generation of tech workers placed kids under the microscope of the Palo Alto System. As high schoolers vied for spots at the nation’s most competitive universities—Stanford the most coveted of them all—they were forced into a system where you either succeeded or were cast aside. “Stanford’s horses were the original achievement subjects,” Harris writes, and while “Stanford [University] switched from colts to young people…it was still a breeding and training project. Labor intensification applied to students as well as to wage workers.” Harris points out the haunting fact that the commuter trains his classmates jumped in front of ran down the same tracks that Leland’s company had laid a century before. He discusses these tragedies alongside a series of suicides by Foxconn factory workers building iPhones in Shenzhen, which happened at the same time. Wrought by the chains of capital that emanated from Northern California and encircled the entire globe, the long hours and low pay of these especially brutal manufacturing jobs were a product of the Palo Alto System, too. Chinese assembly line workers and American high school students, Harris argues, were dying from the same root cause.
While the book excoriates Silicon Valley’s exploitation of workers around the world, struggle does not always spell tragedy for Harris. As much as Palo Alto is a history of technology, business, politics, the university, and the city, it is also, deeply at its heart, a history of labor. One line, written with the author’s characteristically delightful pith, sums up the confrontation between labor and capital well: “Bringing people together to work always risks bringing them together to do other stuff, like think, and sometimes what workers think about together is that maybe they shouldn’t have to work so hard.” Harris arrives at this insight by narrating the stories of labor activists across California’s time and geography, from Kōtoku Shūshi, a Japanese writer and organizer who was influential in building a multiracial working-class movement in the Bay Area in the early 20th century, to Amy Newell, who, in the early ‘70s, was one of the first people to attempt to unionize the semiconductor factories in California. In that same decade, anticolonial and antiwar politics surged at campuses across the country, and Harris discusses numerous militant actions carried out by trade unions, student organizers, and political organizations such as the Black Panthers in and around Palo Alto. In one fiery and entertaining section, he details a series of early 1970s student-led acts of sabotage on university computer equipment. From Fresno State to the University of Kansas to NYU, activists bombed hardware used for Cold War-era military research, causing millions of dollars of damage and interrupting operations. The story of the Palo Alto System barreling forward, as Harris describes throughout the book, is not as seamless or as inevitable as an iMac unveiling might lead you to believe.
Harris is here to play hardball. Armed with a sometimes-blinding barrage of facts and anecdotes, he exposes Silicon Valley’s most egregious perpetrators of injustice while avoiding vindictive ad hominem attacks. We are constantly reminded that even the most odious tech CEOs are only the most visible symptoms of larger forces that have shaped the Bay Area since the years of Stanford and Muybridge. In Harris's effort to de-emphasize the prevailing narrative that smelly Bay Area hippies got their hands on some circuit boards and revolutionized computing, he doesn’t so much as mention previous landmark scholarship on the construction of Palo Alto as an idea—in particular Richard Barbook and Andy Cameron’s 1995 essay “The Californian Ideology” or Fred Turner’s 2006 book From Counterculture to Cyberculture. He’s a materialist through and through, and the action worth examining, for him, happens on the shop floor. “The book is not polemical. I’m a Marxist, I wrote a Marxist book because I think that’s the best way to get at the truth of this historical situation,” Harris said in a recent interview with the Los Angeles Times. At times, the commitment to a grand historical narrative can make the text feel disjointed, and Harris often takes the reader far from the titular city. But these detours are intentional and always come boomeranging back to the book’s primary narrative. By the end, Harris leaves us with the sense that the crises of our time were not handed down from God nor brought about by ignorance or ill will. They were coded into the genes of Silicon Valley from the moment Stanford began honing his horses.