Malcolm Harris on Palo Alto and the Project of Silicon Valley

Audio of this conversation is available via your favorite podcast service.

In his review of Malcolm Harris’s book, PALO ALTO: A HISTORY OF CALIFORNIA, CAPITALISM, AND THE WORLD, the author Jonathan Lethem says he first met Harris in 2011 in Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park during Occupy Wall Street.

He tracks Harris’s trajectory after Occupy, during which time Harris became a journalist writing for outlets such as The New Inquiry, Jacobin, The Nation and The New Republic. Lethem says Harris became a sort of generational spokesperson with his 2017 book Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials, which was then followed in 2020 with a collection of essays that Lethem says positioned Harris as “a theorist of a robust, nonsectarian 21st-century Marxism.”

Harris's latest book is a history of Palo Alto, which looks at the project of Silicon Valley through that lens.

What follows is a lightly edited transcript of the discussion.

Justin Hendrix:

Malcolm, thank you so much for speaking to me. You start this book in a very personal place. You talk a little bit about your childhood, about the experience that you had living there in Palo Alto, and about the tragedy that befell some of your classmates and other young people in your community. Why did you start there?

Malcolm Harris:

Well, Palo Alto is a personal place for me. My parents met there and then I grew up there from age eight to 18. The reason I decided to write this book is because it's the one I didn't want to write. I was talking with a friend of mine and thinking about what book I was going to pitch for my third project, and I said, "The one thing I really don't want to write about is Palo Alto and the suicides," because when I grew up in Palo Alto, we had an exceptionally high youth suicide rate that has continued into the present. And that was a defining phenomenon of my childhood and for writers in my cohort, that's what you... Especially by your third book, if you haven't sold the defining trauma of your childhood yet, then you better get on it, especially if you want to write a history book and you don't have a history PhD, which I did and don't.

And so that was the way I pitched the book originally was as this memoiristic history focused on these suicides on my classmates and the dozens of young people in Palo Alto who've died by suicide. But as I started writing the book, it was clear that I wasn't really interested in doing that project very much, that my personal stories just didn't line up against this history in the way that I wanted to, that the juxtaposition wasn't working narratively and the writing wasn't as good. I just wasn't as good at it. Way more history, straight history turned out that I wanted to tell.

And so I used that launching point still in the introduction and I come back to it in the conclusion, but through the 600 plus pages that make up the book, I'm not a character in there and it's not about my history.

Justin Hendrix:

So you used it as a way to get into, I guess the fabric of the place, the vibe of the place to some extent, the emotional cognitive load of being from Palo Alto and then you pick apart the history and find a tale.

Malcolm Harris:

Yeah, and I wanted to do that, not just because that's what you do in an intro, but because I think everyone starts from where they are. And I think that is the introduction to the book, the proper introduction to the book is starting from the writer's position at this intersection of history and biography. And what I try to do is look down that historical line of what historical processes am I the product of? And you can do that, I found, I think mostly not through exploring yourselves and your own psychology or biography, but the historical processes that determine the production of someone like you.

Justin Hendrix:

We'll move on from the intro in just a second, but I do want to just ask you to recount this one experience that you had that seems to have been formative, which is the visit of a substitute teacher who pierced the bubble.

Malcolm Harris:

This is a story from fourth grade, and this is actually just a couple of years after I'd moved to Palo Alto, so I hadn't even been there long. Moving to Palo Alto from the East Coast was a move toward what I understood as normalcy at the time. It was all these single family suburban homes in a way that I hadn't seen before and hadn't lived in before and is all beautiful and sunny. And so California seemed like I was moving to the place from the television shows.

Two years later, I had this substitute teacher come into to class in fourth grade, and instead of doing what she was supposed to do and the schedule that was assigned, she gathered up all these 10 year olds and started telling us, trying to tell us about Palo Alto and how Palo Alto was a bubble and how the rest of the world wasn't like this place. And that really stuck with me, especially when my teacher came back and said that, "Don't worry, we got rid of that scary substitute, she won't be coming back." And that sequence stuck in my brain in a way that I guess few days from fourth grade due 20 plus years later. And so I used that anecdote in the beginning of this book as part of this haunting disjuncture between how a place seems and what's really going on.

Justin Hendrix:

This book is bookended perhaps with discussion of the indigenous peoples who called the area of California that we call Palo Alto home. Tell us a little bit about that? Where did things start prior to settlement?

Malcolm Harris:

So I start the book in the mid 19th century. So Alto, California has been settled by the Spanish at that point. You have the mission system, but it's mostly a coastal phenomenon and in the way that we would think about it or categorize it, it would be a futile system. This wasn't a capitalist system. It wasn't able to absorb the labor of the native population in the way that we'll see other systems be able to do in the future. But where I start my story is the colonization of Alto, California by the Anglo-Americans in the second half of the 19th century through the 20th century into the 21st century as this continual period of settlement and occupation.

And so you have a population at that point still of tens of thousands of native people in California. They're the largest population in the area as part of this settlement of the area, which takes place during the 1850s, early 1860s. You also have some of the worst colonial massacres of American history going on during this period in California, and you have settlers joining militias, what they called militias, but were really murder squads going out and clearing Indians from land and being rewarded for that service with land and with money provided by the state government that is then backed by the federal government.

And so you have the synthesis of grassroots murder militias, a bunch of guys getting out and lynching their way to prosperity with the US federal government. And it's that synthesis, the Anglo-American colonization at Alto, California comes out of.

Justin Hendrix:

There are a bunch of different themes that come in and come out and come back throughout this book. One of them is the prosecution of whiteness in California, whiteness as a ordering concept. And it starts there, I suppose, with exactly the types of events that you just described, but you come back to that in many different ways and hit it at different points along the history.

Malcolm Harris:

Yeah, as well does America, right? So California is really a lab for whiteness during this period, and we think of whiteness as some phenomenon of antiquity or the 17th century maybe, but it's totally being formed here in the 19th and 20th century where you have people from all over the world coming to California and at the same time the authorities and scientific authorities and governmental authorities, et cetera, developing codes of whiteness and segregated labor markets, not based just on this new term of whiteness and then that's being developed in this way, but based on immigration status, based on language facility, based on gender, based on what particular country you're coming from. And all of this is being experimented with and figured out from the early 20th century where you've got Italian and Portuguese outside of the bonds of whiteness, boundaries of whiteness to the early agricultural cartels of the 20th century that brings southern Europeans into whiteness along with Russians, Armenians, Syrians and excludes Japanese, Chinese, east Indian.

And there's a legal history as well as an economic history here where you've got Supreme Court cases determining is a person from Western, Northwestern, east India, an Aryan person, does that make them a white person? Supreme Court says no. Is a Japanese person white because eugenicists had certain ideas about the whiteness of Japanese within East Asia? Supreme Court says no. Is a Syrian person white because they don't fit into any of the neat racial categorizations thus far and economically they're playing the same role as other white people? Yes. So these are decisions that are being made in California during this period.

Justin Hendrix:

Along the way as well, I guess one of the other recurring characters or recurring themes is the role of Stanford, which you do set out in its earliest form as being very interested in, well, eugenics, in the creation of best in class versions of the species, being very interested in that science bionomics, obsession with race and IQ, trying to pump out the best. Can you talk a little bit about the Stanford family and the genesis of the university and what that political project was about?

Malcolm Harris:

So Palo Alto starts as the outlet for the ruling class finds itself in the midst of self-induced class tensions of the 1870s. So Leland Stanford is the oligarch of the West. His job is to stand in front of railroad capital and play the role of railroad Barron. He really didn't do much other than that. He was a front man, but he did that role pretty good. And as a result, he's credited personally at the time with bringing in Chinese workers to complete the railroad, which upsets the racial and labor dynamics of the West at that point. And so the Working Men's party, which is an anti-Chinese, pro-white labor affiliate of the International at that point in the 1870s is demonstrating outside Leland Stanford's house in San Francisco all the time. And everyone knows where his house is, at the top of the hill, Nob Hill, which some of your readers might know in San Francisco, short for Nabob Hill.

And Stanford does what a lot of rich guys do when they face these class tensions that they have themselves induced, which is moves his family to the suburbs, but the suburbs doesn't exist yet. So he has to create Palo Alto as a suburb to escape to. And in that suburb, he builds the largest horse stock farm in the country because he has this interest in horses that he's developed in Sacramento earlier. And at the stock farm he decides he's going to, with his head trainer, Charles Marvin, reinvent the trotting horse, the carriage horse, and the horse is playing this really crucial role as a piece of technology in America at this point. It hasn't been supplanted by the engine, which means in agriculture, transportation, military, any field where you've got technology working, it's driven by horses, horses are driving the country and Leland Stanford says, "I'm going to increase the quality, the value of these horses across the country and there are 13 million horses, and if I can raise their value by a 100 bucks each, that's $1.3 billion by inflation, that's like $30 plus billion."

So it's very tech bro logic about, "I'm going to scale these new horses that I'm going to make and I'm going to transform American industry." The system they come up with, which they called the Palo Alto system, involves shortening the reproduction cycle of these champion horses by racing them as fast as they can, as young as they can in defiance of folk wisdom in the horse trade, which held that you got to train horses up to their speed, and instead they draw inspiration from the new young children's education movement in Germany, which is establishing these new institutions called kindergartens, and they decide they're going to create the first kindergarten, West of the Rockies, but it's going to be for horses. And they build a kindergarten track to train these young horses to go faster than young horses have ever been trained to go.

And they succeed in doing this and they create some of the fastest young horses in the world, though horses are quickly supplanted by engines as the engines of America. The intangibles of that production process that Palo Alto system weed themselves into the DNA of Stanford as it becomes a university. And Stanford's first president is this guy, David Starr Jordan, who's brought in from Indiana University. None of the Ivy League presidents would take this job for this California rich guy who wants to start his new school. They're not going to abandon their job at Harvard or Columbia to go work at Elon Musk's new university or whatever, which is basically what this was.

So they get this guy from Indiana University who is David Starr Jordan, who's a leading eugenicist in the world. And so his interest doesn't just gel with the horses and the hippology project that's going on at the Stanford Stock Farm, though he is himself an ichthyologist by training, he studies fishes, but he takes it further with this eugenic agenda that Stanford himself didn't quite really have to that degree, and he didn't have the scientific chops to develop. He was just interested in these horses. But in that interest in the horses and the development of improved genes and the state functions of eugenics exceed their origins and this founding through David Starr Jordan and Stanford as an institution, early Stanford becomes really devoted to not just the scholarship of eugenics, but the practice of eugenics.

Justin Hendrix:

You have a funny line here where you say, "The Stanfords were sophisticated modern thinkers of the late 19th century, which means they thought they could talk to ghosts." Who were these people? What was this family about?

Malcolm Harris:

So Leland Stanford Sr. was this... If we think of a railroad baron, he was that guy, big suit and the puffy beard and does whatever he wants with the watch chain. He becomes Governor of California for a term, he becomes a Senator, an early Senator national for California term as a result of his role as the head of the railroad through which he becomes the head of the Republican Party in the West. And as a result of the Civil War, he becomes a nationally important political economic figure.

At the same time, he's kind of a goofball, right? So no one really respects him or his abilities. He doesn't play any important role in politics. He just has his pet concerns, which come to include horses. And so he's a great prototype for the Stanford man because he is this really important economic political figure. And at the same time, he's more or less a stuffed shirt and he just plays an intellectual in the newspapers. His wife is Jane Stanford, who comes from the same upper middle class striving milieu in New York that he comes from. And she's the one who's normally credited with the spiritualism and the talk to ghosts and the ghosts that they are trying to contact is their only son, Leland Stanford Jr, when they raise him as a small child to become part of the next generation of the American ruling class into the 20th century.

He has this totally off the walls early childhood where they're taking him with them as they explore all the greatest things that the world has to offer. And so he writes these childhood letters about like, "Oh yeah, we had coffee with the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire and we checked out his jewel room and it was really cool. And then we went to the Rothschild's Vineyard and checked out the wine," and he goes on this just crazy tour of Europe. He gets personally blessed by the Pope and his parents are training him to be a future ruler of America. And he's like designing training couplings in his notebooks. He wants to be an engineer. You can really see the future of what becomes Stanford in this kid.

And then when he is a young teenager, he suddenly dies and this destroys his parents. They travel around the world looking for, the story goes, ways to contact him, some way to deal with his memory, and they come back and decide that they're going to build a university and that this university will educate what they call the children of California. What they mean is the settlers of California. They'll spread the privileges that they were going to bestow on their single son onto the settler class of the West. And that's where Stanford University becomes, and they've got a different agenda for what that is going to be. Leland has a different particular agenda and then Jane has a particular agenda, but it's really David Starr Jordan's agenda that wins out. And he may or may not have murdered Jane Stanford to get that agenda instantiated. That's the true crime element of the story, an element of the book. So if readers are into that, they should definitely check it out because it does have some true crime stuff in there.

Justin Hendrix:

By the early part of the 20th century, we enter what you call the age of synergy. So there are a lot of inventions already coming out of this university. And in Palo Alto in particular. By the 1930s, we've got folks like William Hewlett, David Packard, apparently meeting on the football field there at Stanford. I guess the beginnings of the Stanford thing are already happening.

Malcolm Harris:

To be clear, let me give credit to Vaclav Smil who is the one who says Age of Synergy. I just took it from him. I would hate to think readers, listeners think I'm asserting ownership over that one, though it's a good phrase. But yeah, then you really move into the Radio Age with the invention of the vacuum tube triode, which is invented not at Stanford, but around at Federal Telegraph, which is affiliated with draws on the talent pool at Stanford and is in some ways the first real Stanford startup is Federal Telegraph. And there this guy, Lee de Forest, ends up inventing this thing called the vacuum triode, which becomes the basis for the Radio Age as well as precursor to the transistor, which becomes the defining object of Silicon Valley, obviously.

But so the origins of these things are earlier in the Radio Age and in the production of these vacuum tube triodes, which again are essentially the same thing at a technical level as the transistors that would be invented to replace them. Just way more limited and fragile.

Justin Hendrix:

And you start, I guess, tracking out the technical sophistication, the growing technical sophistication of the area. Federal Telegraph seems like it's the proto version of the Silicon Valley firm or a technology that has a... There's something in that, that signals what's to come.

Malcolm Harris:

This relation to Stanford where the Stanford faculty is collaborating with Federal Telegraph, where the Stanford leadership is backing and sometimes personally investing in Federal Telegraph and finding ways to find synergies between the company and the institution, especially because it's in this high technology area that the university found so important. Part of the strategy for early Stanford was to invest themselves in high technology areas where they could produce graduates and distinguish the university by producing a disproportionate number of graduates in these high-tech fields that would go on to be prominent and increase the prominence of the university. And so this was part of that project and it was a very successful project, and we see it beginning in the Interwar era, or even the pre-war era with the intelligence testing and such.

Justin Hendrix:

That is another of course theme that comes back again and again is the role of war, the military and the investment of the federal government in communications technology, radar, radio engineering, et cetera. Speak to that a little bit about how that just laced into what's happening there?

Malcolm Harris:

Yeah, because when we talk about the Radio Age, radar is in some ways the killer app of the Radio Age and of the vacuum triode because that made bombing and air conflict feasible and it made at the same time the US mainland defensible during World War II for fear of strategic bombing from the Germans. The radar technology, which is exemplified, I would say in the Klystron that is developed again through this partnership between the university and high-tech graduates and high-tech firms that their graduates work at is invented at Stanford. And this is the tool that is really the key to what they called avionics, which is electronics put in airplanes and electronics put in airplanes is the thing that really makes airplanes more than just an entertainment device.

Before the klystron and before the age of avionics, before planes had ways to radio to the ground to get transportation instructions, to get maps, et cetera, to get real-time information, they were good basically for showing off to the public. But once you put electronics inside these planes, electronics that was developed around and through Stanford, they become weapons, they become transportation. The same way that the horse was key to the 19th century, the airplane becomes key to the 20th century, and so much of that is due to the avionics research and development that happens around Stanford for sure.

Justin Hendrix:

And I suppose that leads us to the semiconductor.

Malcolm Harris:

Yeah, because the semiconductor then fulfills the need of increasingly complicated avionics. The problem with avionics in the vacuum tube era is that vacuum tubes are very fragile and flying around tends to break things that are fragile, especially early airplanes. And so putting fragile stuff in early airplanes is not a recipe for success. And then later, if you're thinking about missiles and space flight, you really can't do that with vacuum tubes. You need something that's stable, and that's where semiconductors come in and transistors made with semiconductors, which basically have the stability of dirt, but do the same thing, fulfill the same role as these vacuum transistors.

And so the first generation of silicon transistors that are produced in Silicon Valley at Fairchild Semiconductor all go into Minuteman One nuclear missiles because that's what they were for, right? Now avionics needs to go into outer space so that we can go into the Missile Age and that required silicon ships, that required an upgrade in the kind of transistors from the vacuum triode to these semiconductors.

Justin Hendrix:

So we've got all of these different themes that are recurring. We've got whiteness, we've got war, we've got conquest, and then we enter a different phase, middle of the 20th century. There's a strange confluence of questions around culture, psychedelics, drugs, this hippie libertarian mindset. And then of course, the civil rights movement and the way that it intersects with Stanford and Palo Alto and California more generally.

Malcolm Harris:

Yeah. The hippie story I try to avoid, and people might be surprised to see... If they're someone who reads Silicon Valley history or is interested in Silicon Valley history, they might be surprised that my version of that history is different than the conventional one. But you have the conventional narrative around Silicon Valley and the internet is either the hippies invented the internet and the computer or personal computer, and that's good, or the hippies invented the personal computer in the internet and that's bad. And so the first version is the John Markoff peace sign, the Grateful Dead leads to the internet version, and then the negative version is the Californian ideology, the hippies created neoliberalism version. And I don't tell either version of that story even to contrast them because I just think they're not very true. I just don't think it's very good historiography.

And so I leave that stuff out and the story I tell is about the Cold War, and that's a real continuation of the earlier story, which had to do with how do you maintain inequalities in a world that is universally connected? And that's the project of Palo Alto, not to connect everyone. The connection of everyone around the world is the premise of Alto, California after it's colonized by Anglo-Americans because it links this capitalist system across the Pacific for the first time, and you have a world system of production and distribution in circulation for the first time. That's the premise for capitalist California.

The question for Palo Alto is how once everyone is connected, do you maintain your role in an unequal world? How do you maintain your perch, your unequal position at a time when liberalism has circled the world and you've got anti-colonial movements and you've got world communist movement and you've got the struggle for global equality? How do you maintain the position of America? How do you maintain the position of white people in that world? And that's a much more interesting story to me than the story of hippies invented the internet because they thought the whole world was connected, man, or they saw a picture from NASA. That doesn't really have anything to do in my mind with what was really going on in the world and what was most important, which was this nuclear missile, which was the struggle over a world system.

Justin Hendrix:

And yet there is a bit of mention of LSD, cocaine. In general, some of these pieces do thread themselves through.

Malcolm Harris:

Absolutely, because they play really important roles. And so LSD, I absolutely go into LSD because it's very important. Well, it's somewhat important. I think it's a useful set of stories because you've got both ends. On one end, you've got people thinking from the beginning, from the very beginning of LSD, how do we use this to give it to knowledge workers in California so that they can be more productive? What doses should we give programmers of LSD so that they can program better? And that's this idea of microdosing is thought of as a contemporary idea that someone came up with in the 21st century, but the same guy, Willis Harmon, who invents it, invents it at the very beginning. This is from Palo Alto, and it's the idea of we're going to give it to workers to augment their work is there from the very beginning.

At the same time in the same place, you have studies going on at the Veteran's Hospital on Stanford campus about what happens if we give people LSD? Can we interrogate them better? Is it a good tool of torture, basically? And so you see LSD being used on both sides of this Cold War, which is if you're a knowledge producing coder and they're trying to upgrade your skills, what they're most interested in the ability to produce is weapons, right? They're interested in your role as a coder, as a tool of American Empire. And on the other end, they're looking at how it can be used as a weapon directly against enemy personnel.

So again, LSD, even when you look directly at LSD, all I can see is this Cold War, is this global struggle and it's a hot war, right? We've got these experiments going on also at US military bases around the world. And we don't know nearly as much about those experiments as we do about the ones that were conducted on US soil at US educational institutions under this name MKUltra, but we have reason to believe they were worse. These are happening on US military bases under very little supervision. So again, this is all part of the same narrative.

Justin Hendrix:

So still this focus on productivity, extracting the most out of the best and of producing a, I suppose, hypercharged result, increasing productivity at all costs.

Malcolm Harris:

And we can see that connection to the eugenic plan at the beginning of Stanford, at the roots of Stanford, which David Starr Jordan's real concern about war. David Starr Jordan, who's the first president of Stanford University recall and this big eugenicist is really worried about war in the age of gunpowder, that you're going to be sending the bravest boys out to the front and they're just going to get killed first in the trenches. The bravest guys are going to stand up first and get mowed down by a machine gun. He has this great phrase where he has in this age of gunpowder, "The clown can shoot down the hero."

And as a eugenicist, he's an anti-war guy because he's really worried that in these wars, the best Anglo-American men are going to get taken out. But with the realization that the Germans were going to... that they were drawing different conclusions from the same eugenic ideas, specifically that they were going to conquer the world militarily, they had to come up with some way to fight and win wars without risking your genes, without risking death. And the way they came up with it was science and technology and fighting wars from afar. And that starts with avionics, that starts with planes. Well, it starts with IQ tests. It starts with figuring out who's smart and removing them from the front lines. Then it goes to avionics, "We got to give those guys the tools to fly planes or build planes that can drop bombs from far away." And then it moves to missiles and to the transistors and to this nuclear missile that says, "Look, we don't even have to fight these wars. We're going to cock a gun and put it to the world's head and say, 'If anything happens to us, everyone dies.'"

And the tool of the engineer, the Stanford engineer is involved deeply in all of these strategies, all of these tactics over time. But it's the same question of how do you preserve your role, your unequal position in an equalizing world?

Justin Hendrix:

So you take us right up to, I suppose the more recent times, there are all these characters that come on the stage from Steve Jobs to Bill Gates, to Mark Zuckerberg and beyond. And I suppose the listener can go and pick up the book and go through the more recent history, which may be more familiar to them than the earlier history that you've discussed so far. But I want to spend a little bit of time talking about where we've got to and the role that you think now having looked back at Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, Stanford, its role in technology and developing this modern political economy, what it says to you about its role in defining the future?

I have this thesis that these days there really aren't that many mega narratives about where the future is headed. And arguably maybe China has a mega narrative about where the future is headed, which is of course very much based on technological ideas and ideas about the way that we can build a better society. And then there's the Silicon Valley version of it, which to some extent has been accepted and perpetuated by a large part of the Western world. Do you think that's right? Is Silicon Valley in charge of the future de facto?

Malcolm Harris:

Well, I don't think we can even... It's hard to even split the Chinese system and the American system. In some ways, I think you can. I think it's worth understanding the distinct political economic system that China's developed, that the People's Republic has developed. At the same time, we're looking at still 150 years later, 150 plus years later, an integrated world system that was some of the graffiti during the uprisings in Hong Kong was China and the US, two countries, one system, which is a joke of course, about Hong Kong and China. But I think it's a good one and I think it's revealing, and you can't talk about California, Alto, California in this period without talking about China from the very beginning, not more recently, not the 21st century, like 19th century. Those systems are totally intertwined. That's the whole history and part of my goal was to tell California history in a global context where China's development and the history of China is at least as important to the history of California as the history of New York is.

So with that said, I do think there are different narratives about the future. And I say Silicon Valley and part of Palo Alto's job in the 20th century and now in the 21st century is offering a vision of the future where inequalities persist, where this commitment to natural hierarchy keeps finding new way to reassert itself. And that is lined up with the perpetuation of the capitalist mode of production, which only can encounter limits as things to step over or find ways around which can never address limits as an actual limit. And we see that now as limits of the biosphere, existential limits of the biosphere are being treated like obstacles to get around that, "Oh, that just means we need to colonize Mars." And that's the kind of thinking and futurism that we get out of Silicon Valley. But we can go back to the very beginning of this project to the mid 19th century and see that logic playing out with hydraulic mining in Alto, California where they experience the destruction of the land under them.

Leland Stanford, the first place where Leland Stanford gets his start as a politician is this small mining town. And soon after he leaves, the town itself slides down the mountain because the hydraulic miners have so destroyed the foundation, the earth and foundation of the town, the town itself is destroyed. And so that's what this system does to its own foundations constantly. And when it hits these limits, the only way it can solve that problem is by displacing those contradictions somewhere else. And so if hydraulic mining stops here, hydraulic mining commences somewhere else, or if hydraulic mining stops, then you find a new way of mining. And if mining can't find anything more to mine here, then we got to mine asteroids because it's an exhausting system.

And so we have to find a narrative about a system that is not exhausting, that's our only way forward. Unless you have an idea of humanity that successfully surpass the exhaustion of this planet, which I've seen no evidence for, then we have to be looking for a metabolism, a universal social metabolism that is not just non-exhausting at this point, but is restorative because our systems, the systems that underlie reason, that underlie every calculation that's ever been made are facing real peril, real existential peril.

Justin Hendrix:

I am literally interviewing you today on the day that the IPCC has come out with a report that essentially says that we got about a decade according to their estimation, to good things in order before profound consequences of climate change begin to set in. But before we maybe come back to how we might think about a really profound shift in the metabolism of the political economy, I want to just kind of ask you about some of the ideas of another name from Silicon Valley that perhaps doesn't appear in the book, Sam Altman. He's promising abundance, right? Artificial general intelligence will come along. This is the ultimate project of Silicon Valley, machines of loving grace that will eventually make much of human labor unnecessary, create a economic abundance, perhaps a physical abundance that we've never experienced before, and maybe even solve the climate problem along the way if it's smart enough to figure out fusion faster than human scientists can do. Is that the logical step that that would come from this tale that you've told?

Malcolm Harris:

Yeah. Sam Altman's a perfect example of the kind of figure that we've talked about, the Leland Stanford type figure who stands for social forces that are much bigger than him and seems to embody them, but is really a reflection of them more than some guiding force. So Sam Altman dropped out of Stanford as a sophomore to start a social media company that got crushed by Foursquare and has been failing up ever since. He made his real reputation as an investor on Stripe, which has also recently revealed that it hasn't made any money and now needs a bunch of infusion from investors.

So this guy's got no track record in terms of actual innovation of producing anything, and he comes back with this large language model software that the fundamentals of are very old and basically convinces the market and the public that he can spin gold at a straw, and now has to keep a smile on his face while everyone talks about how it's the future of the economy. It sounds exactly like crypto to me. I don't think there's any more there there than that, more or less. It's an entertainment product and when I see a company like Coca-Cola being like, "We're going to team up with OpenAI to do something," it sounds exactly like what we heard during the whole crypto boom in terms of companies going to go on the blockchain and use this technology for something and it's not clear.

It is not clear at all to me what this large language model software has to do with production. Even the jobs that they're saying that it will replace, it's not clear to me what any of those jobs have to do with production. So if you're automating bullshit jobs, if your technology is to automate jobs, what on earth are you doing? What does this have to do with anything? And so I see it as a primarily the kind of finance story spinning that Silicon Valley really specializes in, which isn't to say that's all Silicon Valley specializes in. I think there's a danger in confusing the speculative products of the Valley with their scamiest instantiations because I do think there's a real historical project going on here. It's just not the one that they say it is. It's this historical project of the American empire. But I think artificial general intelligence is a children's story. I think the people who believe in this stuff are fooling themselves.

Justin Hendrix:

You in the book addressing some ideas again from indigenous peoples, and I suppose this relates back to your search for that different intellectual and/or social political metabolism that might put us back on a sustainable path. Can you talk a little bit about that, how you arrived at that? Is that something that occurred in the writing of this book or something that's come more generally from your exploration of these ideas?

Malcolm Harris:

Well, I think it's important to remember that this book was written in the shadow of indigenous land and water struggles around the country. So this book is written in the shadow of Standing Rock. This book is written in the shadow of a number of pipeline and territorial struggles throughout the continent. And so politically, I think that represents the cutting edge of where we are right now, and those are the people who are taking responsibility for the future in the way I don't see other political formations with any plan to do, and people putting themselves on the line, not exclusively. When I look for developed political formations in this territory in North America right now, that's what I see. And so the conclusion of this story isn't coincidental, I don't think. If I was a critic who was analyzing this text, I think I would draw attention to that this book is produced in the shadow of these struggles.

At the same time, we're talking about a colonial history that is coextensive with this book. And so you still have territory in Alto, California that's controlled by indigenous people at the beginning of this story, and it's a relatively short historical story. And so I want to separate out the California story a little bit and trouble the universal story we have about colonization in this country that puts it way, way in the ancient past at the beginning of people setting foot on this continent or whatever, instead of the 19th century, very recent.

And so I talk about waves of migration to California in the 1960s still as settlement because that's really what it is, and thinking about it as a settler history and there's ongoing struggles right now in California by indigenous people in California for recognition, for territory, for a number of different political goals. I can speak most thoroughly I think to the Muwekma Ohlone people who are the ancestral title holders of much of the Bay Area, including the land that is Palo Alto. They're a politically organized group of people. I'm not referring to indigenous people as a race or in some general historical way. I'm talking about a politically organized tribe of 614 enrolled members, who have ancestral tie to the area that has been confirmed with genetic testing. All 614 of them have genetic ties to remains that were recovered from 2,000 years ago in the area. And this is a tribe that's now currently, I was with them two weeks ago on Capitol Hill, lobbying for the restoration of their federal recognition, which was mistakenly removed, and that's a forward-looking political project. They're looking to restore that recognition.

The tribe is resurgent in its numbers and I think ultimately we'll be looking to build a territorial base in the Bay Area to make sure that their tribal group, which has endured hundreds of years of some of the worst genocide on the continent, isn't ultimately pushed out of their ancestral lands by rent prices, right? By gentrification, which is what they're looking at. And so this is a current struggle. These are future struggles, future directed struggles, not just past opportunities for reparations or apology. Future ways in terms of dealing with how do we sustain this territory? How do we sustain this land? How do we sustain this world, which is ultimately what I'm concerned with in the face of a system that seems determined to destroy it very soon.

Justin Hendrix:

You mentioned that to some extent you had started writing this with a thought to maybe a personal evaluation or understanding your own story or the genesis of your own person in Palo Alto or in that context. It sounds like you have arrived at a place, you are now an actor in this struggle. What do you think is next for you? What will be the next project that you'll invest in to take this forward?

Malcolm Harris:

I'm proud to be involved in the recognition struggle for the Muwekma Ohlone, absolutely. I'm going to continue to be involved in that struggle until recognition is achieved with Chairwoman Charlene Nijme, who's leading that struggle now. So that's ongoing. I am proud to be part of that, and that definitely comes as an outcome of this project. So I like to think you're right there. At the same time, there's always more to do, more to learn in terms of my intellectual work. I think there's a lot of paths that emerge out of this book that I'll be walking further down, so I hope people pick it up and think about what comes next and maybe tell me what I should be looking at because it's a dialectical process too. It only ever exists in conversation with readers, so I'm going to need some help in whatever comes next.

Justin Hendrix:

Malcolm, do you hold out hope that people will perhaps come to the same conclusion that you have and substantial enough numbers that the path forward that Silicon Valley seems to have set for us for the world may encounter substantial opposition?

Malcolm Harris:

Yeah. The old pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will, except I find myself optimistic intellectually as well. It's a dare to struggle, dare to win. That's how I feel about it. And I think we not only can but must, and that must is more important than the can. And we got no choice but to struggle as if we can win. And so that's how I intend to struggle.

Justin Hendrix:

Well, Malcolm Harris, Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World. I'll encourage tech policy press listeners to go out and take a look. Thank you so much.

Malcolm Harris:

Thank you so much for having me, Justin.