Description
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.Author: Malcolm Harris
Binding Type: Hardcover
Publisher: Little Brown and Company
Published: 02/14/2023
Pages: 720
Weight: 1.94lbs
Size: 9.30h x 6.50w x 1.90d
ISBN: 9780316592031
Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 10/17/2022
Booklist 11/01/2022 pg. 23
Kirkus Reviews 12/15/2022
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.