Palo Alto, the Californian enclave where everything went wrong?

How much blame can a small California town take for so much that is wrong with our world, from white supremacy and neo-colonialist oppression to the exploitation of marginalized workers and wide-open wealth inequality?

A lot of things, if Malcolm Harris is to be believed. To a casual visitor to the leafy Palo Alto enclave in the heart of Silicon Valley, the wealth and privilege are almost palpable. After strolling through the shops of University Avenue (YouTube’s dizzying early days were above a pizzeria on the right, while Google and PayPal started in a small office further up, and Facebook hunkered down briefly across the street) , the road takes you to the middle of Stanford University. In the endless California sun, it feels like a country club for the next would-be billionaires and an almost otherworldly place of complacency.

According to Harris, something much more sinister is going on. This is the epicenter of a form of hyper-capitalism that is devouring the planet. In the same way that California’s first capitalists rode on the backs of the state’s original native population, along with successive waves of Chinese railroad workers and Hispanic farm laborers, today’s tech titans are harnessing the entire world’s workforce.

The subtitle – “A history of California, capitalism and the world” – gives an idea of ​​the ambition and scope of the book. A rousing story of about 700 pages, extending far beyond Palo Alto in an attempt to explain how a particularly free form of capitalism, mixed with racist ideology, has won.

Harris continues his diatribe with enthusiasm. A political activist who started out in the Occupy Wall Street movement, he writes with passionate advocacy. One criticism that has been leveled at this book is that it does not suggest any solutions to the problems it purports to describe. But amid the current backlash against the tech industry, it seems enough to expose the charge. The brand of libertarian capitalism displayed by Silicon Valley in its most extreme form risks stirring up powerful historical forces. The technicians can’t say they weren’t warned.

Thanks to Harris’ keen eye for character study and a sharp turn for a sentence, the book is never boring. But despite all this, he inserts his story into a rigidly Marxist polemic, in which each episode ultimately boils down to the exploitation of workers by capital. You don’t have to be a regular reader of the Financial Times to find this analysis overly simplistic.

high pole begins with railroad magnate Leland Stanford, who left San Francisco (in Harris’s account, to escape the “howling winds of class conflict”) to settle in rural peace some 30 miles south. This “pseudo-feudal” idyll was interrupted when 15-year-old Leland junior died suddenly. The grieving monopolist and his wife, Jane, founded Stanford University in the boy’s memory.

For Harris, everything is connected, both in time (the same themes echo back and forth) and between different realms of human experience. Take how the elderly tycoon decides to develop a new and more scientific method of breeding horses. His trainers are happy to push a young colt to the limit and beyond, snapping his tendons, if that means discovering a weakness first. It’s about “data and control,” says Harris, who calls it the Palo Alto System. With enough money behind it, he says, is the blueprint for all of the following: “All a man needed to improve the world was an uncompromising dedication to profit and the capital to bring about the scale needed.”

Eugenics and white supremacy are a necessary part of this project. Stanford’s widow dies of an unexplained poisoning that Harris has no qualms about blaming University President David Starr Jordan, and Jordan is left free to put his own stamp on the institution. His abiding interests are in science, and in particular an overarching theory known as bionomics which has reinforced belief in racial superiority and the need for selective breeding.

“Though it did not last long under that name,” Harris writes, “bionomy, with its vision of ‘degenerate’ races and extraordinarily normal heroes, underpins the Palo Alto ethos to this day.” An implicit belief in white superiority, he concludes, was necessary to justify the exploitation of California’s native population then, as it argues for the exploitation of Asian workers today.

Science and technology have a lot to answer for in this book. Most stories of California’s tech industry emphasize the yin and yang at the heart of digital technologies: how both can empower the individual (the personal computer and the early Internet) and also lead to the centralization of power and of control (mainframe computing, today’s internet monopolies, the cloud).

Harris does not acknowledge this tension. For him, any drive towards self-realization and the personal are just distractions from the serious business of class struggle. The only role of technology, as he sees it, has been to devise tools for mass exploitation and to support military aggression (he dwells at length, and well, on the Pentagon money wave that floated the technology industry in California after World War II).

Engineers, meanwhile, are willing handmaids of rapacious capitalism, starting with the people who fueled the state’s gold rush: “Californian engineers have become the heralds of proletarianization worldwide, the shock troops of closure global, drawing the lines that so many others have been forced to follow”.

This awkward foreshadowing brings Harris’s critique of today’s tech industry to life. Amazon’s story boils down to the story of one company’s efforts to exploit a non-union workforce. And if you thought Apple’s huge profits had something to do with Steve Jobs’ brilliance at turning technology into must-have gadgets, think again: “The returns [in California] are higher, because Apple has minimized the margins of its contractors and has found a way to extract monopoly profits from what should be a consumer item.

There is nothing subtle about this. Capitalists do what capitalism requires. Harris makes the system itself his main character. In this reading, Jobs and Bill Gates were simply personifications of historical forces. If they “hadn’t been themselves, they would have been other kids instead.”

For Harris, the ultimate villains are those who sense the historical forces flowing through them and willingly make themselves its tools. His list includes Jordan, the eugenicist president of Stanford; Herbert Hoover, the Republican president and founder of Stanford’s Hoover Institution, the think tank that helped shape Ronald Reagan; and William Shockley, Nobel Prize-winning co-inventor of the transistor and “one of the most notorious American bigots of the twentieth century.” You won’t be surprised to hear that Peter Thiel, the bête noire of the tech industry for today’s progressives, rounds out this list.

Harris’ deeply hostile view of today’s tech industry fits the mood of the times. In trying to debunk the selfish myths that Silicon Valley has created about itself, he’s certainly had some successes. But his firing of the entire California enterprise oversimplifies a complex story.

high pole it is preceded by a quote from Marx asking a friend for material on California’s economy, because “nowhere else has the most shameless upheaval caused by capitalist centralization occurred with such speed.” Many readers may find themselves weary of the author’s anti-capitalist attempt at an answer. But with Silicon Valley’s brand of capitalism already fueling extreme wealth inequality and the risk that the next wave of AI and automation will only make matters worse, it’s a reminder that history can teeter in unexpected directions.

high pole: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World by Malcolm Harris, riverrun £30 / Little, Brown $36, 720 pages

Richard Waters is the West Coast Editor of the FT

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