Black Bird Bookstore

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

by Malcolm Harris
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.
in Bay Area Interest
in Our Country, Our Culture
Regular price
$36.00
Sale price
$36.00
Regular price
Sold out
Unit price
per 
More Info

Published February 2023

Little, Brown and Company

Hardcover, 720 pages

Shipping calculated at checkout.
Quantity
This is a gift
Gift details will be collected at checkout

“Engaging and unsettling.”―Bethanne Patrick, LA TIMES, Most Anticipated Books of February 2023