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.
"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
"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
"Engaging and unsettling."--Bethanne Patrick, LOS ANGELES TIMES,
Most Anticipated Books of February 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 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
"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
"Palo Alto reads like a big social novel in the tradition of John
Dos Passos . . . The picture Harris presents of the valley is more
complete than any attempted thus far."--Ben Tarnoff, THE NEW YORK
REVIEW OF BOOKS
"[Harris's] ability to make complex, thorny topics highly readable
makes him a must-read; [Palo Alto] is a tour de force."--ASK
MEN
"[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."--Annalee Newitz, SCIENCE
FRIDAY
"Harris lands his ambitious claims alarmingly convincingly...the
chains of connection that Harris traces accumulate gradually into a
web of persuasive and often shocking revelation that this wealthy
Bay Area enclave really might be the economic, cultural, and moral
epicenter of our universe--less a shining city on a hill than a
hideous Lovecraftian maw."--Michael Docherty, LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF
BOOKS
"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
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
"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
"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
"...a staggering exploration of the historical forces that shaped
the technological mecca of Silicon Valley...Harris is approachable,
yet unrelenting. His subjects are as inspiring as they are
insidious. The depth of his research unveils plentiful connective
tissues between capitalism and exploitation, agriculture and
organizing, start-ups and psychedelics, as well as the communists
and labor leaders that attempted to subvert the malevolence of the
ruling class."--Ryan Baesemann, CLEVELAND REVIEW OF BOOKS
"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
"Palo Alto reads at times like a novel by Thomas Pynchon, a
psychedelic romp through Silicon Valley office parks and Central
Valley union halls, Chinese iPhone factories and Afghan
battlefields. The paths can be difficult to follow, but the patient
traveler hoping to learn more about any one of California's many
gold rushes will be rewarded."--Benjamin Schneider, SAN FRANCISCO
EXAMINER
"a rollicking 600+ history that runs the gamut from antiwar
movements to racial genetics to the Hewlett Packard garage."--MIT
Technology Review
"[A] welcome and necessary new book...illuminating and revelatory.
Triple exclamation points, and skull and crossbones--doodles to
which I rarely resort--pepper the margins of my copy...I couldn't
stop reading...By the end of the book, Harris has mounted a largely
persuasive and extremely damning argument."--David Leavitt, THE NEW
YORKER
"[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
"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
"A useful counter to Silicon Valley's self-mythologizing, this
history of Palo Alto begins in the late nineteenth century, with
the state-funded genocide of Alta Indians by settlers and the
coming of the railroad, which led, via the fortune of Leland
Stanford, to the establishment of Stanford University ('the
pseudostate governing Palo Alto'). Harris highlights the city's
connection to the horrors of napalm, Japanese internment, and
eugenics, and notes that many of the early tech companies in the
area began 'in the space between the military and academia.'"--THE
NEW YORKER
"Both the earnestness and the acidity of Harris's prose can be read
as signs of an effortful articulation of the historical reality of
what has been called 'the Californian ideology, '....at once so
detailed and so ambitious...Harris's book offers no end to this
tale, only the possibilities for thought and action that spring
from its symbolic parricide."--Ben Beitler, LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF
BOOKS
"Deeply researched and richly detailed, Palo Alto is a prehistory
of today's all-too-familiar Valley of oligarchs and Big Brother
brogrammers who seem to taint everything they touch...Unlike
related critiques of Silicon Valley, which usually highlight its
libertarian and dystopian dimensions, Palo Alto is a takedown
grounded in the long-term history of an actual place."--Ross
Perlin, THE ATLANTIC
"Engrossing. Harris has an engaging narrative voice and a marvelous
command of language despite his propensity for peppering his work
with expletives."--Leonora Cravotta, THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR
"Epic...Palo Alto is crystalizing...not only for a generation of
Americans, but for any citizen of the world who wishes to
understand their situation in order to change it."--Adrian Chen,
INTERVIEW MAGAZINE
"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
"For a guy who loathes capitalism, Harris writes about the subject
with vivid depth."--Chris Vognar, SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
"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 avoids a propagandic tone by working from historical points
that are objectively true -- Palo Alto has become the most
consequential suburb in the world, we live in a capitalist world
system -- and connecting dots throughout history that not only
create a picture of California, but also offer persuasive
explanations for why California looks the way it does, wields the
power it has and espouses the toxic achievement philosophies that
have become its trademark and albatross..."--Naomi Elias, KQED
Arts
"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 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
"Harris' book--written in engaging prose while filling more than
700 pages--represents both an overdue corrective and a compelling
counternarrative. Offering nothing less than what its subtitle
suggests--a comprehensive origin story of modern capitalism."--Luke
Savage, SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE
"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
"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
"If you're looking for a beautifully written, continually
surprising, deeply researched book about why so much of life is, on
balance, so f**ked up right now, get your hands on [Palo
Alto]."--BLACKBIRD SPYPLANE
"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)
"In these lively pages, Malcolm Harris provides counterweight to
that modern mythology, painting a far more detailed and complicated
picture of the entire region, and exploring the social and economic
inequalities that are often glossed over in other
accounts."--CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR, 10 Best Books of
February
"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
"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
"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
"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
"Palo Alto lives up to its description, but it's also so much
more--in these whopping 720 pages, you'll find nothing short of an
exhaustive history of American capitalism. Harris deftly charts the
long shadow of extraction in northern California..."--Adrienne
Westenfeld, ESQUIRE
"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
"Poignant...Harris compellingly shows that one of the distinctive
historical faults of California was the oppression of
Asian-Americans....Readers who can withstand, or enjoy, Harris's
ideological bludgeon will learn some things about the
region...Harris's explanations of scientific advances are detailed
and punchy."--Jason Willick, WASHINGTON EXAMINER
"Provocative, damning...Harris busts the myths about his hometown's
vast history, and how its reputation is nothing more than
deceptive."--Yannise Jean, FAST COMPANY
"Readers will relish Palo Alto for its scope and precision, for its
pugnaciousness, and for its sardonic amazement at an emperor who
couldn't be strolling down the avenue any nakeder. There's a brute
glee is Harris's version of historical materialism; even the book's
title eschews metaphor and abstraction. Harris has done the hard
work, and he has done it in a cause: to urge us awake from our
capitalist-technological inertial dream state. The truth may
sometimes hurt, but the lies are in bed with collective
death."--Jonathan Lethem, THE NATION
"Sweeping...the book's expansive social history is more about how
Palo Alto changed the world than it is about the suburb
itself....The beauty of this sprawling book is that, although you
can open it anywhere and begin reading, its scope draws connections
over a vast period of time."--Scott Feeney, THE DEMOCRATIC LEFT
"The question driving Malcolm Harris's inquisition into the flashy
hollowness of Silicon Valley--predicated upon exploitation,
grotesque inequality, and a total disavowal of the public
good--becomes more urgent than ever: 'How does the Palo Alto System
end without taking the rest of the transformed world down with
it?'"--David Helps, PROTEAN MAGAZINE
"We don't love civilizational collapse brought on by tech chodes
like Elon and Zuck and Jeff and Bill, but Valentine's Day has to do
with love (and capitalism), and Palo Alto comes out on February 14,
so it all works out. We're both swooning and pulling out our
wallets."--Adam Willems, THE STRANGER
"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
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