Name: Palo Alto
ISBN: 9780316592031

Malcolm Harris

A History of California, Capitalism, and the World

Palo Alto

Boothby

When I say haunted, I don't mean haunted in the ghost sense, not exactly, or at least not necessarily. We use the word all the time without referring to actual phantoms. We can be haunted by a loss or a traumatic event or even by that dumb thing we said that one time. Haunting happens when a past action won't go away, won't stay past. But the word usually refers to a relation between the living and the dead: There's an imbalance between the realms, something stuck where it isn't supposed to be. Haunting is homologous with theft, which also involves things being where they shouldn't, but we're not talking about a stolen wallet; it takes more than that to disturb hell. What haunts are the kinds of large historical crimes that, once committed, can never truly be set right.

soochie

“What interests me is not so much the personal qualities of the men and women in this history but how capitalism has made use of them. To thìnk about life this way is not to surrender to predetermination; only by understanding how were made use of can we start to distinguish our selves from our situations. How can you know what you want or feel or think —who you are— if you don't know which way history's marionette strings are tugging: In the following pages you'll meet characters who found ways to tug back, who pit themselves against the way things are and come to personify the systems self destructive countertendencies. People aren't puppets, and to pull a person is to create the conditions for rebellion. Maybe we're more like butterfies, pinned live and wriggling onto history's collage.”

“He ended up near the communists not because they convinced him of their ideas but because liberal internationalists weren't as liberal or international as they claimed to be. Beneath the midcentury consensus were hundreds of martyred Bolivian miners, and Galarza didn't let the United States forget about them.”

Jayme Cochrane

The first 1/3 is a genuinely great historical read of what led to modern Palo Alto. Gets a big convoluted in the middle as global events are repeatedly tied back to Silicon Valley (with mixed results).

Last 1/3 should just be called “big tech is bad” - the strings holding the arguments together are very taught and fragile. The concluding chapter’s argument (how to “fix” Palo Alto) is baffling, makes little sense and is given with hardly any explanation. Disappointing.

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