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

Palo Alto is a small American suburb that has become a powerful engine for economic growth and war, and has led the world into a disastrous 21st century. Malcolm Harris' book explores how and why Northern California evolved in the particular way it did, tracing the ideologies, technologies, and policies that have been engineered there over the course of 150 years of Anglo settler colonialism.

Format: Hardback
Length: 720 pages
Publication date: 11 May 2023
Publisher: Quercus Publishing

The true, unvarnished history of the town at the heart of Silicon Valley.

Palo Alto is a lovely city. The weather is temperate, the people are educated, rich, healthy, and enterprising. Remnants of a hippie counterculture have synthesized with high technology and big finance to produce the spiritually and materially ambitious heart of Silicon Valley, whose products are changing how we do everything from driving around to eating food. It 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, 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.

Weight: 1012g
Dimension: 166 x 242 x 58 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781529430875