Note from this episode’s host, Meilin Obinata
Last week, David Sacks addressed the crowd at the Republican National Convention 2024 in Milwaukee, an event our Talk of the Bay host Chris Krohn has been covering [LINKS COMING SOON]. I strongly recommend reading Malcolm Harris’s book “Palo Alto” to understand how exactly we arrived at this point: how did we get from exporting Californian mining engineering expertise around the globe after the Gold Rush to the venture capitalists like Joe Londsdale and David Sacks impacting national politics?
The book is an absolute page-turner, a rare description for a history text spanning seven hundred pages because it’s packed with surprises – a history most of us have never learned – sculpted by a writer whose skills show the muscular discipline of freelance writing – concise, colorful, entertaining – while anchored by plenty of footnotes and endnotes to satisfy the most demanding seeker of “receipts.” No wonder it has been a national bestseller!
Harris shows us the primacy of the Hoover Institution’s conservative thought leadership, nestled within Stanford University, long after Hoover himself passed from this world, requiring the likes of Ronald Reagan, and George Bush Jr. to kiss the proverbial ring. Personally, I was shocked to learn that Proposition 13 in California, which causes controversy to this very day, was set into motion by a Hooverite, Howard Jarvis, after Hoover himself invented zoning laws.
Harris also tells the story of those who stood up for their neighbors, whether the Black Panthers working in solidarity with others in the Third World Liberation movement out of San Francisco State University, or Stanford students literally bombing enormous computer rooms on their own campus to protest the Vietnam War.
As we wrapped up the interview, Harris asked KSQD listeners to pay attention to VCs (venture capitalists) who are using their money in politics, such as Joe Lonsdale and David Sacks. Ami Chen Mills has covered the role of Silicon Valley tech movers and shakers including Peter Thiel in the Republican Party’s choice of JD Vance as the vice president in her recent Instagram post.
Synopsis
Named One of the Year’s Best Books by VULTURE – THE NEW REPUBLIC – DAZED – WIRED – BLOOMBERG – ESQUIRE – SALON – 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 (Greg Grandin, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The End of the Myth).
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.
About the Author
Malcolm Harris is a freelance writer and the author of Kids These Days: The Making of Millennials and Shit is Fucked Up and Bullshit: History Since the End of History. He was born in Santa Cruz, CA and graduated from the University of Maryland.
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