The villains of Silicon Valley

Historians joke that some parts of the world – Crete and the Balkans, for instance– produce more history than they can consume locally. The California town of Palo Alto produces more economics than it can consume, and therefore more politics, and therefore more culture. But this comes at a price. Malcolm Harris, a thirtysomething Marxist writer who grew up there, begins his book by citing the alarming rate at which his high-school classmates committed suicide, and argues that Palo Alto is haunted by the historical crimes on which it is built. He then itemises them across two centuries of history, tracing their influence from Stanford University and Silicon Valley out across the world.

The town has long been at the forefront of communication technologies: the railroad that Leland Stanford, among others, brought to California; then radios, vacuum tubes and transistors; the silicon chips that gave the Santa Clara Valley its new name; personal computers; and the contemporary apparatus of surveillance capitalism, from Apple to Google. Along the way the technologies, at least in terms of what is visible in Palo Alto, become more abstract, but the urge to extraction remains the same.

At times Palo Alto is as dense as its southern Californian twin, Mike Davis’s City of Quartz, but its narrative has the intoxicating capitalist rush of Stefano Massini’s play The Lehman Trilogy, though hewing tighter to actual chronology. It is a story told around people: Leland Stanford, who became the prime mover behind Stanford University, and his wife Jane, until she was fatally poisoned; Herbert Hoover, Stanford alumnus, who became an ill-fated president but whose subsequent career, Harris argues, shaped and continues to shape American politics; William Shockley, who helped commercialise the silicon chip and whose failures as a manager catalysed the rise of Silicon Valley when all the people who couldn’t stand working with him set up their own companies; Peter Thiel, the investor whom Harris depicts as the centre of a nexus of science fiction; and ‘handsome young white men with elite credentials and very conservative politics’.