In this episode of Speaking Out of Place, we talk with Malcolm Harris, author of a new book entitled, Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World. Working our way back from the recent meltdown of the Silicon Valley Bank and the massive, toxic train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, to the founding of the city of Palo Alto by Leland Stanford as a haven from labor unrest in San Francisco and his first endeavor there, the world’s largest stock farm, to the founding of the university that bears his son’s name, we discover the ghostly presence of Capital.
From there we move to an in-depth study of Herbert Hoover and the Hoover Institution, and the formation of Silicon Valley itself.
Throughout, we find a common thread that links all. This thread is a continuous, if evolving, effort to sort out people into two groups–those that Nature has deemed superior, from those who are meant to serve. This is the “Palo Alto System.”
Inspired in part by the rash of suicides at Harris’s alma mater, Palo Alto High School, the author notes that the railroad tracks upon which these young people perished were laid by Leland Stanford, and that the Valley is haunted by the ghosts of people whose lives were destroyed by the “Palo Alto System.
We end by discussing his audacious proposal—to give the land back to the Muwekma Ohlone, the first of the dispossessed peoples.
Malcolm Harris is a freelance writer and the author of Kids These Days, Shit is Fucked Up and Bullshit, and Palo Alto.
