Palo Alto

The history of Silicon Valley, from railroads to microchips, is an “extraordinary”* story of disruption and destruction, told for the first time in this comprehensive, jaw-dropping narrative. (*Greg Grandin, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The End of the Myth)

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,"…