The history, or better, the legend, of Silicon Valley is made of unexpected successes, of young people who went into a garage or a Starbucks and knew how to hit the winning key at the right moment. Something like this has happened with Malcolm Harris (1988), whose voluminous Palo Alto launch in the United States coincided with the fall of Silicon Valley Bank and technological layoffs in the United States: 100,000 only so far this year. Palo Alto, the Californian city, is the heart of Silicon Valley, where all this is cooked.
A coincidence that, being cynical, we could describe as lucky because of what it has as confirmation of some thesis of the book, which quickly became an editorial phenomenon. Everything to tell what until now had not been explained in such a documented (and critical) way: a history of California, of capitalism and of the world, as its subtitle says. Our history?
Malcolm Harris grew up in Palo Alto, a place, he writes at the beginning of his book, “beautiful. The climate is temperate, the people are educated, wealthy, healthy, innovative. The remnants of the counterculture mixed with technology and finance to create the ambitious material and spiritual heart of Silicon Valley. It is curious that he uses the word heart because if something is revealed throughout these 700 pages, it is how the system created there lacks this organ.
Because Palo Alto is also “a haunted toxic waste dump built on stolen Indian burial grounds, and an integral part of the world capitalist system.” And, above all, the cradle of the current culture of inequality; To demonstrate this, Malcolm Harris, a journalist who writes for The Atlantic and The New York Times, goes back to the creation of Palo Alto, in 1870, as a refuge for millionaires who wanted to escape the mix of classes in cities like San Francisco.
These couples, among whom was the railroad magnate Leland Stanford, founder with his wife Jane of the university that bears his name, gave the area a kind of essence that has been maintained for these 150 years. An essence that Harris discovered growing up and asking why there were people with big mansions and others that didn’t: “Because they deserved it.” With their talent and hard work, “without anyone’s help,” they had succeeded.
And that sentence, which sentences those who don’t make it at the same time, was even written on the walls of the city, in a literal sense, to remember that if you want, you can, and if you can’t, it’s your fault. It is not surprising that since 2002 there have been suicides among young people and adolescents, unable to keep up with the pace of extreme competitiveness. Many do so by throwing themselves onto the railroad tracks that Leland Stanford built on land taken from the Indians.
For the author, the history of Silicon Valley, from railroads to microchips, is an “extraordinary” story of disruption and destruction, which has led the world “into a shockingly disastrous 21st century.” Tracing the ideologies, technologies and policies that have been designed there over 150 years, we arrive at the so-called Palo Alto System: a type of economy based on the incessant pursuit of profit and squeezing the maximum value out of human labor at the lowest possible cost.
The system is imposed because new technologies facilitate it, make the Gig Economy possible, in which we become freelancers, with which companies have no obligation once the work they have entrusted to us has been completed. Yes, this digital nomadism has a social price, especially for those who cannot contribute something highly valued in the so-called collaborative economy.
Harris, a self-confessed Marxist, sees how quality intermediate jobs, those that nurture the middle class, and, by extension, the social class itself, are disappearing in this logic. Worse still, he concludes: the laws of effectiveness that apply to normal people do not apply to Silicon Valley millionaires, who function as associations to preserve the hierarchy and their own status. Forget the technological El Dorado, talent is a trap and of the thousands who try, only a few will succeed. “The inequality produced by these innovators is a feature, rather than a bug.” Many things are better understood that way.
Malcolm Harris. Palo Alto. Little, Brown and Company English edition. 720 pages. 36 dollars.
