'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.
Palo Alto is haunted. “Unseen lineages of historical responsibility” lurk amidst the oak trees on Stanford’s campus and the sleek venture capital offices on Sand Hill Road, giving the town — and the capitalist world it shaped — a dark legacy it has never fully grappled with.
Harris offers a sweeping critique of capitalism from his Palo Alto perch, focusing on “characters who find ways to tug back, who pit themselves against the way things are and come to personify the system’s self-destructive countertendencies.” Unfortunately, Harris omits any critical perspective on these anti-capitalist heroes, or any positive look at his capitalist villains, leaving the reader with an incomplete understanding as to why history unfolded the way it did.
Stanford used his political connections to win extremely favorable terms for his railroad projects: In addition to federal subsidies, Stanford and his associates were granted territory larger in size than the state of Maryland. It was their lawsuit, in 1886, that led to the doctrine of corporate personhood, which has stymied progressive reform ever since.
Hoover would go on to serve as secretary of commerce and then as president, where he pioneered the practice of bringing industry leaders together to regulate themselves. That’s how we got single-family zoning and segregated suburbs; modern aviation and telecommunications; and the financial conditions that led up to the Great Depression.
This Hooverian genealogy is the great insight of"Palo Alto." Readers of any political stripe will see the remarkable extent to which Silicon Valley has become a global power center, dominating politics, the economy and the military from behind the veil of its technological prowess.
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