In January 2011, a 19-year-old in Palo Alto died by suicide on the train tracks running through town, part of a disturbing, decade-long pattern of deaths of despair in the wealthy heart of Silicon Valley. The same week, a 19-year-old Chinese worker at Foxconn, the company that built iPhones, also died by suicide, part of a series of deaths among young people working on the grueling assembly lines at one of China’s most famous tech manufacturers.
Palo Alto, a new book by the American author Malcolm Harris, attempts to understand the connection between these patterns of suicide at two different hubs of the global tech economy. To do so, Harris digs deeply into the history of Palo Alto, the home of Stanford University and the town where he grew up. As a teenager coming of age in the early 2000s, he saw the town’s international influence grow along with the tech companies headquartered around it, and the number of suicides among his classmates.
The book is ambitious. Its full title is Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World, and it examines the global spread of what Harris terms the “Palo Alto System”, a strategy to achieve fast growth and big returns for investors at any cost, with a focus on exploiting young talent and new technologies. Since the late 19th century, as Harris tells it, the Anglo settlers of California have operated on the principle of Facebook’s infamous slogan, “move fast and break things”, which has also meant moving fast and breaking people.
The book, named one of the most anticipated of the year by the New York Times, Bloomberg and the Los Angeles Times, has already gone through four printings, not a guaranteed outcome for a 700-page history of capitalism written by a 34-year-old. But Harris, like the tech disruptors he dissects in his book, got his start early, describing being arrested in high school for passing out flyers against standardized testing, and fighting a legal battle at 23 when his own tweets about an Occupy Wall Street protest were used against him in court.
Harris, who now lives in Washington, DC, spoke to the Guardian about the personal and political history behind his sweeping historical polemic. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
You open the book by writing about a series of youth suicides at your Palo Alto high school, and across the town, starting in 2002. Why were these suicides so shocking, and why did they attract so much national attention?
Quantitatively, the rate was much higher than other towns, which a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report confirmed, even though they couldn’t confirm anything else about what was going on. It felt unrelenting.
It involved kids who went to college and died their freshman year, and kids who came back after dropping out of their freshman year. The last suicide involving Caltrain by a young person in the Palo Alto community was, I think, two weeks ago. It keeps happening.
How did you understand this sequence of suicides of your classmates?
I understood it as a consequence of the exceptionalism of our community. Young people were asked to perform a particular role within the community, which was to work hard enough to justify and perpetuate the privileges of this place. They were having us compete against each other, at a very high level, all the time, in a way that was breaking kids. The school responded by trying to have “homework holidays” two days in the semester – two random days off from homework when you can go play with your friends, which, of course, didn’t work, because the teachers had to assign twice as much work the day before. The conditions under which young people were operating, this expectation of hard work leading to burnout and self-destructive behavior, was the solution to some larger historical problem, though I didn’t know that at the time. But I knew it had something to do with inequality in America. It had something to do with wealth.
What helped you understand the historical roots of this crisis?
I read Charles Marvin’s description of the “Palo Alto System”, a new scientific method of breeding and training horses developed by Leland Stanford in the 1880s, and how they were running through these young horses at a higher rate, and busting their limbs. That was really chilling. I’ve talked to people in the community, and it’s resonated with them in the same way. This idea of wasting good material, and that still being part of a rational production process under capitalism, has creepy resonances with the deaths of these children.
You originally pitched Palo Alto as part history, part memoir, but in the writing of it, you ended up taking out most of the personal stories. What are some of the memoir pieces that you cut?
One of my first jobs was working at Score!, a for-profit tutoring center in Palo Alto. It was so sad. The tutoring was automated through computers, based on a behaviorist system. The employees weren’t teaching anything. You’re acting as a reinforcer, not as a teacher: checking stuff off, making sure the students stayed sitting at their desks, controlling the reinforcement system, which was about points, and pieces of plastic. It was awful for the students and pretty miserable for the employees, and it paid minimum wage.
How did you become radicalized?
I was a leftwing Democrat, and wanted to do the whole West Wing thing. But I took my opposition to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq really seriously, and liberals were not organizing against the war. The protests were led by radicals and anarchists, and that’s who I ended up organizing with.
The financial crisis is when I came to embrace revolutionary politics. You can be a Marxist in terms of class analysis, but that wasn’t the important shift for me. It was realizing I didn’t want this system to continue, I don’t think it can solve its own problems: in fact, I think it is the problem. It was during the votes around the bailouts. I didn’t want to bail the system out.
Your book presents a belief in eugenics as one of the most important intellectual threads that runs through Palo Alto’s history. Is eugenics still a force in the region today?
We’ve seen a huge swing back towards eugenic philosophy in Palo Alto. There are a lot of startups invested in eugenic technology. If you ask people, “Is that eugenics?” they’ll say “No!” But if you ask, “Are you trying to improve the quality of the baby stock?” “Well, yes, obviously.” These people are constantly forgetting the names for what they’re doing, intentionally, or as a useful adaptation, because then they can sell old-school eugenics as some new app.
One of the wildest sections of your book describes how Jane Stanford, one of the university’s wealthy founders, appears to have been murdered with strychnine, perhaps with the involvement of David Starr Jordan, Stanford’s president at that time. Why don’t more people know about this?
It’s crazy, right? Richard White, the author of Who Killed Jane Stanford?, gives Jordan slightly more benefit of the doubt than I do. But people in Palo Alto know Jordan is shady. They took his name off the middle school. I’m waiting for the Netflix show.
Your book follows the history of technological innovation in California before Silicon Valley even became Silicon Valley – tracing the rise of Hewlett Packard and Intel, the invention of the semiconductor and the personal computer, to more recent social media innovators like Facebook and Twitter. Looking back at technological change over the decades, does it seem like Silicon Valley is getting dumber over time?
Yes, straight up. The leading Silicon Valley companies now, what’s attracting investment, is incredibly stupid if you compare it to the 60s, when they were creating microchips.
You don’t have a very flattering view of Silicon Valley billionaires, whom you refer to as “Airbnbozos” and “slack-limbed puppets who have nailed their hands to historical forces”. As someone who has chronicled a century’s worth of notorious California entrepreneurs, what do you make of Elon Musk?
We should think about him less. I don’t think Elon Musk is going to be an important man in 10 years. He’s gotten lucky a few times. He’s good at being a gambler. There aren’t that many people in the world who are willing to take billions from the Saudi royal family and gamble it on some stupid bullshit. People who can do things like this – Musk, WeWork founder Adam Neumann – and go to sleep and do it again in the morning are very important to how the economy works right now. They might not be good at anything except being willing to takehuge risks again and again, despite the results.
In the book’s conclusion, you endorse the abolition of Silicon Valley. What is your specific proposal for what should happen?
Stanford, as an institution, acknowledges the ancestral title of the Muwekma Ohlone tribe The university has the opportunity to lead in returning land to Indigenous tribes. If Stanford wants to change things – they have this new climate school I was just reading about, with oil and gas companies directly involved – they can lead on returning resources to a group of people who have plans for what an ecologically sustainable village would look like on that land. Some people treat this proposal as reasonable and pragmatic. Some people treat it as a ridiculous provocation. I think these kinds of transfers are one of the only ways humanity can move forward.
As a book with a bright, Instagrammable cover and an impressive heft, Palo Alto seems designed to be one of this summer’s trendy leftist beach reads. But it has also sparked some very negative reactions. The New York Times assigned a reviewer, for instance, who wrote: “Karl Marx’s long shadow darkens every page.” What happened there?
You’d have to ask them. It looked like a political agenda. The Times review was a real outlier. Even the conservative publications said, “This guy is a dirty commie, but, eh, we like the writing.”
Have you heard any responses yet to your book from Palo Alto’s current tech bros?
No. I’ve seen a little pooh-poohing from Twitter venture capitalists, but I don’t think they’ve read the book. It’s only been out a couple of months, and it’s long, especially for anyone who is like, “I work 17 hours a day answering emails.” I’m skeptical of people who have already finished it.
