
Palo Alto
A History of California, Capitalism, and the World
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Narrated by:
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Patrick Harrison
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By:
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Malcolm Harris
About this listen
The history of Silicon Valley, from railroads to microchips, is an “extraordinary” story of disruption and destruction, told for the first time in this comprehensive, jaw-dropping narrative (Greg Grandin, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The End of the Myth).
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.
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Critic reviews
“Malcolm Harris's singular and brilliant PALO ALTO is a geologic survey of the bedrock of the imperial violence that lies beneath the surface of some of the country's wealthiest Zip Codes. The formations it follows stretch outward across the globe, to Asia, Europe, across the Americas and to the rest of the United States. In the end, the book provides not so much an account of strict cause and effect—the familiar history of the robber barons and tech tycoons—but a core sample of the thorough-going greed and pillage at the heart of American history: the expropriation, the violence, and the guilt that seep upward through the soil of neoliberalism's most fruitful plain.” —Walter Johnson, Winthrop Professor of History and African American Studies at Harvard University and author of The Broken Heart of America
"Extraordinary. In lucid, personal, often funny, and always insightful prose, Malcolm Harris finds the driving thrust of reaction not in capitalism’s left-behind regions but in its vanguard: California, and specifically Silicon Valley. We have not yet felt the full force of the shit storm that the titans of tech have been conjuring. We soon will. If you want to understand what’s coming, you need to read this book." —Greg Grandin, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The End of Myth
"Harris painstakingly connects literature, geography, and economics to understand Palo Alto's history and its relationship to capitalism…Readers interested in U.S. history, particularly pertaining to capitalism and technology, will find an engaging and clear-eyed Silicon Valley tale of a small city with global importance.”—BOOKLIST
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- By: Yanis Varoufakis
- Narrated by: Yanis Varoufakis
- Length: 7 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Technofeudalism says Yanis Varoufakis, is the new power that is reshaping our lives and the world, and is the greatest current threat to the liberal individual, to our efforts to avert climate catastrophe—and to democracy itself. It also lies behind the new geopolitical tensions, especially the New Cold War between the United States and China. Drawing on stories from Greek myth and pop culture, from Homer to Mad Men, Varoufakis explains this revolutionary transformation: how it enslaves our minds, how it rewrites the rules of global power, and, ultimately, what it will take overthrow it.
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A non-academic, non-evidence-based look at big tech
- By Anonymous User on 08-31-24
By: Yanis Varoufakis
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The Code
- Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America
- By: Margaret O'Mara
- Narrated by: Nan McNamara
- Length: 19 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Long before Margaret O'Mara became one of our most consequential historians of the American-led digital revolution, she worked in the White House of Bill Clinton and Al Gore in the earliest days of the commercial Internet. There, she saw firsthand how deeply intertwined Silicon Valley was with the federal government - and always had been - and how shallow the common understanding of the secrets of the Valley's success actually was.
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Mostly good, but also irrating
- By Rodney on 12-20-20
By: Margaret O'Mara
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Crack-Up Capitalism
- Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy
- By: Quinn Slobodian
- Narrated by: Keith Sellon-Wright
- Length: 9 hrs
- Unabridged
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Look at a map of the world and you’ll see a colorful checkerboard of nation-states. But this is not where power actually resides. Over the last decade, globalization has shattered the map into different legal spaces: free ports, tax havens, special economic zones. With the new spaces, ultracapitalists have started to believe that it is possible to escape the bonds of democratic government and oversight altogether. Crack-Up Capitalism follows the most notorious radical libertarians around the globe as they search for the perfect space for capitalism.
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Insightful read/listening
- By Ernie on 04-17-25
By: Quinn Slobodian
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Blood in the Machine
- The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech
- By: Brian Merchant
- Narrated by: Eric Jason Martin
- Length: 15 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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The most urgent story in modern tech begins not in Silicon Valley but two hundred years ago in rural England, when workers known as the Luddites rose up rather than starve at the hands of factory owners who were using automated machines to erase their livelihoods. The Luddites organized guerrilla raids to smash those machines—on punishment of death—and won the support of Lord Byron, enraged the Prince Regent, and inspired the birth of science fiction. This all-but-forgotten class struggle brought nineteenth-century England to its knees.
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The bias of the author can not be understated
- By Donald Campo on 11-17-23
By: Brian Merchant
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Doppelganger
- A Trip into the Mirror World
- By: Naomi Klein
- Narrated by: Naomi Klein
- Length: 14 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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What if you woke up one morning and found you’d acquired another self—a double who was almost you and yet not you at all? What if that double shared many of your preoccupations but, in a twisted, upside-down way, furthered the very causes you’d devoted your life to fighting against? Not long ago, the celebrated activist and public intellectual Naomi Klein had just such an experience—she was confronted with a doppelganger whose views she found abhorrent but whose name and public persona were sufficiently similar to her own that many people got confused about who was who.
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Elite Psychobabble
- By A Reviewer on 09-30-23
By: Naomi Klein
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American Rule
- How a Nation Conquered the World but Failed Its People
- By: Jared Yates Sexton
- Narrated by: MacLeod Andrews
- Length: 10 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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In American Rule, Jared Yates Sexton upends those convenient fictions by laying bare the foundational myths at the heart of our collective American imagination. From the very origins of this nation, Americans in power have abused and subjugated others; enabling that corruption are the many myths of American exceptionalism and steadfast values, which are fed to the public and repeated across generations.
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Truth
- By Laurie on 09-28-20
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Elite Capture
- How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (and Everything Else)
- By: Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò
- Narrated by: Jaime Lincoln Smth
- Length: 3 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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“Identity politics” is everywhere, polarizing discourse from the campaign trail to the classroom. But the “identity politics” so compulsively referenced bears little resemblance to the concept as first introduced by the radical Black feminist Combahee River Collective. While the Collective articulated a political viewpoint grounded in their own position as Black lesbians with the explicit aim of building solidarity across lines of difference, “identity politics” is now frequently weaponized as a means of closing ranks around ever-narrower conceptions of group interests.
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An Essential Read
- By TheFrozenBiscuit on 04-22-23
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If We Burn
- The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution
- By: Vincent Bevins
- Narrated by: Timothy Andrés Pabon
- Length: 12 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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From 2010 to 2020, more people participated in protests than at any other point in human history. Yet we are not living in more just and democratic societies as a result. IF WE BURN is a stirring work of history built around a single, vital question: How did so many mass protests lead to the opposite of what they asked for?
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The final word on horizontalism on the left
- By Patrick Foote on 02-25-24
By: Vincent Bevins
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The Venture Mindset
- How to Make Smarter Bets and Achieve Extraordinary Growth
- By: Ilya Strebulaev, Alex Dang
- Narrated by: Will Damron
- Length: 10 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Ilya Strebulaev has spent the last two decades at Stanford studying VCs’ counterintuitive approaches to decision-making, and the reasons behind the success and failure of corporate innovation efforts. Alex Dang, a senior leader at McKinsey and Amazon, has seen up close the impact VCs’ thinking and mechanisms can have on a business’ success. Together in The Venture Mindset, they present nine distinct principles that can help anyone looking to transform their business and achieve extraordinary results, no matter the industry.
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Basic VC concepts
- By Jethro Pwez on 01-09-25
By: Ilya Strebulaev, and others
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City of Quartz
- Excavating the Future in Los Angeles
- By: Mike Davis
- Narrated by: Tim Campbell
- Length: 15 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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No metropolis has been more loved or more hated. To its official boosters, "Los Angeles brings it all together". To detractors, LA is a sunlit mortuary where "you can rot without feeling it". To Mike Davis, the author of this fiercely elegant and wide-ranging work of social history, Los Angeles is both utopia and dystopia, a place where the last Joshua trees are being plowed under to make room for model communities in the desert, where the rich have hired their own police to fend off street gangs, as well as armed Beirut militias.
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A People’s History of Los Angeles
- By J. Briggs on 08-03-18
By: Mike Davis
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Tools of Titans
- The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers
- By: Tim Ferriss
- Narrated by: Ray Porter, Kaleo Griffith, Tim Ferriss, and others
- Length: 22 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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The latest groundbreaking tome from Tim Ferriss, the number-one New York Times best-selling author of The 4-Hour Workweek. For the last two years, I've interviewed more than 200 world-class performers for my podcast, The Tim Ferriss Show. The guests range from super celebs (Jamie Foxx, Arnold Schwarzenegger, etc.) and athletes (icons of powerlifting, gymnastics, surfing, etc.) to legendary Special Operations commanders and black-market biochemists. For most of my guests, it’s the first time they’ve agreed to a two-to-three-hour interview.
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If I could sum it up: too much of a good thing
- By Brian Sachetta on 06-08-20
By: Tim Ferriss
What listeners say about Palo Alto
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- Alex halladay
- 02-15-23
Yes, it's Marxist. it's also good.
I imagine you'll see in the coming weeks, months, or years, no less than a dozen reviews that say "Wow what garbage, socialism in history? what are this guys qualifications?? I don't need this America hating garbage!" which first, very funny that you bought a book that describes itself as a "Marxist history" expecting something else, and second, is so bad faith an argument against this book that it isn't worth engaging with in the slightest.
Simply put, this is a work of genius. an elegant sweeping group of narratives that is, in fact, pretty fair to a lot of the players involved. From the earliest days of the American project to settle the furthest frontier to the screeching digital age, this strange patch of land just south of California is shown to be a synecdoche of a far larger world, a microcosm of soul sickness and horrors and fascinating uniquely American figures who themselves reflect social and economic forces beyond their personal control.
you can disagree with the conclusions or asides, certainly, and there are some ways where this shows itself to be more an informal history than an academic work of dry rote observation, but behind those conclusions, and before any of that, there are very interesting and well written passages that flow beautifully into this nearly 30 hour odyssey. there is a Hobsbawm style wit to the historiography, which kept me so engrossed that I literally ended up working an additional hour not realizing I was just sitting down mesmerized by the story of Herbert Hoover's adventures through Stanford University's founding class.
also the narrator is very good but my wife thinks he sounds sarcastic most of the time. which might be a selling point for some people.
five stars! give it a read if you love the film Chinatown! similar stories of california-cities-as-vampires
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17 people found this helpful
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- Shadie Ossei
- 09-17-23
The Ideal Silicon Valley Book
A must read for ambitious tech entrepreneurs who wish to go settle in Palo Alto and take part in the final Gold Rush
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- Anonymous User
- 01-02-24
Logical left-leaning view. On point
Fantastic information. The history and analysis covered in this book is second to none. I’ve already recommended it to 10 people, some of which are madly in love with Capitalist. Here’s to making them rethink and recalibrate their orientation.
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- Louie Z
- 05-31-23
Historically thorough
Detailed, well, researched history, delivered from a clearly stated point of view. The author makes no bones about his left word bias, but does not let his context interfere with reporting facts. I consider this book to be an excellent source of information for someone who does not mind getting into the weeds of detail.
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3 people found this helpful
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- luke iseman
- 05-30-23
bold, extensively sourced theory of capitalism…
with Palo Alto as the example / major practicioner. i feel like i have a dozen more boons to read from Harrison’s sources before i can even get my head around how much of his theory seems sound.
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- hooglanda
- 04-14-23
twist at the end
I enjoyed the history in the book. maybe I wasn't listening closely enough to the disdain of capitalism throughout but I was honestly a little shocked by the twist in the last chapter and its recommendations
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- Christopher R. Kuhns
- 05-30-23
Palo Alto as a likely proxy for ails of capitalism
gold mining was just the beginning for pillaging the planet for resources. Palo alto raised the art of taking more to a science and shows how we may have nothing left for an encore.. interesting slant on a glowing history of brutal composition.
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- Donal M. Silvestri
- 05-09-23
capitalism from there to here
An eye opening narrative. This should be a required course in college civics.
Wonderful
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- A. Holmes
- 01-08-25
well written and informative
i like that the narrator reads footnotes throughout narration. i learned a lot. very well researched
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- Robert Harris
- 06-08-23
An view of Capitalism through Northern Cali
The Book is starts at the beginning of California with the removal of Native American Tribes and ends with the PayPal mafia. It’s an insightful exploration about innovation, greed, and power.
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2 people found this helpful