I meet Malcolm Harris, voice of millennials and anti-capitalist activist, in a Brooklyn coffee shop, suggested by his publicist for an interview around a book tour. He opts for a guava croissant with his $3.75 drip. He suggests that this is not an endorsement of bourgeois micro-luxury, but an irony against the Condé Nast media moguls who foot the bill.
Harris, a 34-year-old, is generating considerable buzz with his book, Palo Alto. He knows the city and the tech industry at its heart well. He grew up there, went to school there and even learned journalism at Palo Alto High School under Esther Wojcicki, mother of YouTube CEO Susan (recently retired) and former mother-in-law of Sergey Brin. His father, an antitrust lawyer, took Microsoft into a major trademark case in the middle of August. But as an author, Harris is less interested in writing a first draft of a story than using research to promote his pre-existing point of view. “It’s not journalism,” he says of his book. “It’s a Marxist story.”
Whatever you call it, Palo Alto is epic – a relentless 700-page indictment of capitalism, California and the city that railroad baron Leland Stanford named in 1876 to honor a great tree that still stands, and which soon after made its new university , which still dominates the region. . Some might view Harris’ book as a complement to another obstacle-sized tech rejection, that of Shoshana Zuboff. The era of surveillance capitalism. But Harris thinks Zuboff’s book placed too much emphasis on surveillance and was too soft on capitalism. “It’s not really about the global political economy,” he says.
Harris’ book achieves this, in spades. In its sprawling and familiar narrative, the story is not a botched progression but a nefarious plot serving capitalism’s theft of people’s labor and dignity. His touchstone is the system by which Leland Stanford bred racehorses, which combined genetics with an innovative emphasis on pushing horses to run faster at an earlier age than was customary. (Kind of like Move Fast and Take Things.) Harris applies this “Palo Alto system” as a metaphor everywhere, calling everything from venture capital to Tiger Woods’ training methods inhumane descendants of Stanford’s original sin. Of course, one could argue that, having been nurtured in the city’s famed school system and its tech community, Harris — a skilled wordsmith and effective marketer — is himself a product of the Palo Alto system.
Harris has no problem digging up more villains than a thousand Marvel worms. There’s Stanford, of course, and the first president of the university he founded, David Starr Jordan, who allegedly murdered Stanford’s widow. (At least that’s what Harris thinks.) Lewis Terman, a pioneer in college psychology, not only encouraged IQ tests based on eugenics, we learn, but he also slept with his students . Harris even attacks well-meaning leftists like Congressman/activist Allard Lowenstein for working too deep inside the system. (Harris despises the Grateful Dead wing of the protest movement; he’s the guy at the SDS meeting who yells at the druggies in the back of the room.) Among the more recent scoundrels are the vaunted founders of Silicon Valley. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs are “stinking fools,” he says, but “more significant as personifications of impersonal social forces.”
Harris does, however, have a real supervillain in William Shockley, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist. Shockley, father of the transistor, Stanford professor and founder of a Silicon Valley semiconductor company, was a racist bully who fully deserves Harris’ one-word summary: asshole.
