PALO ALTO: A HISTORY OF CALIFORNIA, CAPITALISM AND THE WORLD - MALCOLM HARRIS

It’s only the third day of 2026 and I’ve already finished a book that will almost certainly be on my “best of the year” list come next December. It will be one insane year of reading of this thing doesn’t end up making the cut. I’m someone who likes a book to go big. I think that books are uniquely situated to get really down deep and sprawl out and take all sorts of weird turns. I like long books and big swings. And this is certainly that. In some sense, this is the NorCal equivalent of Mike Davis’ classic City of Quartz. Normally when you think NorCal and the Bay you think San Francisco or maybe Oakland but Harris finds the dark-beating heart of America in the south bay city of Palo Alto. As he puts it in the book, California is America’s America and Palo Alto is America’s America’s America. Many of the trends and occult movements and tendencies that plague our nation, especially the more tech-flavored ones, come from this part of the world. And they don’t come out of nothing. Harris starts with the natives that occupied the area, before going onto the Califronia genocide followed by the railroads and labor unrest. But, when he gets to Stanford, both the person and later the university, he really gets cooking. Harris posits that California’s unique take on capitalism involves cultivating human capital and technology to an extreme degree. Stanford, the person and later the school, are obsessed with eugenics. Stanford’s great passion is horse breeding and he takes the ideas and mindset he cultivates in that world into the world of human education. The book does a great job tracing the career of Herbert Hoover, who ends up, among many other things, including being president, funding an institute (that still exists and currently is run by arch-demon Condoleezza Rice) at the school that injects a heavy dose of anti-communism that remains to this day. Once the post-war world allows Stanford and the larger NorCal community to tap into the endless military-industrial complex money, the Palo Alto we know really gets going. Harris really shows how the current crop of world running and ruining tech companies that we associate with the area come out of these relationships. Which themselves come out of the YT supremacist project that is California writ large. The book is full of all sorts of amazing anecdotes and facts and recreations of specific milieus, the stories about how the Chinese were used to build the railroads and how they navigated life in California was not a topic I was particularly interested in but ended up being fascinating. But the real wonder is how he’s able to connect all this back to these central ideas and forces. We never lose sight of what this all means. Obviously, I’m more interested in the more recent stuff. I would love to read Harris, who’s work I’ll be seeking out, on tech by itself. He has one of the best explanations of Peter Thiel (as always, I will remind us that his name is an anagram for “the reptile”) I’ve seen in print. The book ends with a suggestion that this problem could be solved, at least in part, by doing Land Back and giving the Bay back to the Ohlone. This strikes me as pretty un-Marxist, the issue is clearly the relationships of production, but I understand the sentiment and agree with Land Back (I just don’t think it’ll solve the problems). A towering achievement. If you’re interested in Amerika, you gotta read this thing.