This is a sprawling mess of a book that takes Palo Alto the city and uses it as a symbol of all the ills that capitalism has wrought. Harris takes the “Palo Alto System,” originally Leland Stanford’s innovative program for breeding thoroughbreds, as the original articulation of the ethos that pervades the companies revolving around the university which bears his late son’s name, as well as the students who study in its halls. (The System might be the original articulation, but Harris begins the book with the California Gold Rush, which can be seen as the origin of the ethos). In the System, colts are trotted young to determine quickly which of them are born to be good racehorses. It does not matter that some of the colts are injured in the process; the System only cares to maximizes profit. Capitalists in Silicon Valley function the same way: they find early companies to invest in (to “trot young,” so to speak), and these companies “move fast and break things” to maximize profit. Harris also chronicles various Stanford academics’ forays into eugenics as a quest to find young talent to cultivate as part and parcel of this System.
Despite its title, the book strangely does not actually have much to say about Palo Alto the city. The beginning chapters cover Leland Stanford and the city’s founding in great detail, but in the main the narrative is propelled by histories of economic development, companies and Stanford University’s involvement in the military-industry complex, not the actual development of the city from Stanford’s farm to the heart of Silicon Valley. In Harris’s telling, Palo Alto the city remains a vague, suburban sketch. This vague impression of Palo Alto one is left with after reading the book points to a bigger problem. Palo Alto is self-consciously a big book of Marxist history, and it beats you over the head with its message. Which is fine---it’s a message that is hard to argue with given what Harris covers. But the problem is that the structure of the book---or lack thereof---suffers for this browbeating. Palo Alto reads as if from the perspective of the angel of history, watching as the “pile of debris before him grows skyward,” except the storm blowing the angel to the future is not Progress but rather Capitalism. Harris invites us to sift through the pile of debris wrought by capitalism with scattershot profiles of companies, entrepreneurs, and investors, but one wonders if there is a more inviting, less disorienting way to structure Harris’s compelling narrative.
In the closing chapter of the book Harris makes the case for returning Stanford University’s lands to the Ohlone indigenous to the Bay Area. The thrust of the argument is that Stanford has been the origin of so many of capitalism’s ills that giving its land to the Ohlone would be a way of repairing the damage---not just to those oppressed and immiserated by capitalism but also to the environment. But with this argument he conflates rectifying the historical injustices that America as a settler state have inflicted on the Ohlone with their ability to be better environmental stewards of the Stanford lands. It might be the case that they would be better stewards; but citing the actions of indigenous activists (read: a small slice of the indigenous population) seems rather flimsy evidence to make such a case. So Harris’s romantic depiction of the Ohlone smacks more than a little of the Noble Savage trope.