Dans Mon Catalogue

English language

Published Aug. 22, 2023 by Little Brown & Company.

ISBN:: 9780316592024

(1 review)

Palo Alto’s weather is temperate, its people are educated and enterprising, its corporations are spiritually and materially ambitious and demonstrably world-changing. Palo Alto is also a haunted toxic waste dump built on stolen Indian burial grounds, and an integral part of the capitalist world system.

In PALO ALTO, the first comprehensive, global history of Silicon Valley, Malcolm Harris examines how and why Northern California evolved in the particular, consequential way it did, tracing the ideologies, technologies, and policies that have been engineered there over the course of 150 years of Anglo settler colonialism, from IQ tests to the "tragedy of the commons," racial genetics, and "broken windows" theory. The Internet and computers, too. It's a story about how a small American suburb became a powerful engine for economic growth and war, and how it came to lead the world into a surprisingly disastrous 21st century. PALO ALTO is an urgent …

Palo Alto’s weather is temperate, its people are educated and enterprising, its corporations are spiritually and materially ambitious and demonstrably world-changing. Palo Alto is also a haunted toxic waste dump built on stolen Indian burial grounds, and an integral part of the capitalist world system.

In PALO ALTO, the first comprehensive, global history of Silicon Valley, Malcolm Harris examines how and why Northern California evolved in the particular, consequential way it did, tracing the ideologies, technologies, and policies that have been engineered there over the course of 150 years of Anglo settler colonialism, from IQ tests to the "tragedy of the commons," racial genetics, and "broken windows" theory. The Internet and computers, too. It's a story about how a small American suburb became a powerful engine for economic growth and war, and how it came to lead the world into a surprisingly disastrous 21st century. PALO ALTO is an urgent and visionary history of the way we live now, one that ends with a clear-eyed, radical proposition for how we might begin to change course.

1 edition

iddcutie reviewed Palo Alto by Malcolm Harris

Malcolm Harris needs an editor

3 stars

This book could have been honed down by a huge margin. I do not understand why one would even include a footnote if it takes up half the page. While a lot of the information in this book is enlightening, there are way too many digressions, which again, are informative, but take away from what Harris is trying to achieve overall, in building a concise historiography of Palo Alto. This is especially apparent in the middle of the book, where at times it seems like Harris is grasping at straws to connect his tangents to his main thesis. The beginning and the end of the book are the main highlights, and I think make it worth a read, even though they too could use some shedding.

Don't be afraid to skip some sections.

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