ACFM - ACFM Microdose: Californian Capitalism w/ Malcolm Harris

Episode Date: August 2, 2023

Ahead of an ACFM Trip about the internet, Keir Milburn is joined by Malcolm Harris to talk about the unique political history of his hometown of Palo Alto, the intellectual laboratory for a century of American hegemony. The Kids These Days author tells a story that connects the founding of California, the violent removal of its […]

This episode of ACFM was made possible by your donations, just like everything else we do at Navarra Media. If you can, please consider donating one hour's wage per month, or whatever you can afford, and help us build people-powered media. Just go to navara.media forward slash support to set up a regular donation of any size. We couldn't do it without you. So thank you. This is acid man. Hello and welcome to ACFM, the home with a weird left. My name's Kear Milbin.

And for this very special microdose, I'm joined by author Malcolm Harris to talk about his spectacularly new book, Palo Alto, A History of California, Capitalism and the World. And just to explain that title, one of the theses put forward in the book is that what Malcolm calls the Palo Alto system is basically hegemonic. It's like the leading edge of capitalism. You could even say it's conquered the world. Hi, Malcolm. Thanks so much for coming on. Hey, Garrett. Thanks so much for chat with me again. So, Marco, you grew up in Palo Alto. I'm wondering if you briefly just want to introduce yourself and talk a little bit about the motivations for writing the book. Yeah, so I spent

years 8 to 18 in Palo Alto, California. And so when I was looking at what to do for my third book project, I was talking with friend of mine about, you know, what I was going to write about. And I told her, the one book I really don't want to write about is a history of Palo Alto, California, told through this vantage point about the teenage suicides that happened there when I was a young person. There's this national story about these series of suicides that happened in Palo Alto, California, among young people, sort of concurrent with when I was a young person there and then do a whole history of Palo Alto, the place. book I totally did not want to write. It was the obvious one to pitch because it's the most important historical sequence related to my personal life. And for those of us without graduate degrees who want to write serious work, a good

way to access the authority that is to tell your most traumatic childhood story and then whatever history related to that. And she told me that that meant that I had to write it, that that was obviously the book I was going to write and she was right. That is what I ended up doing. Although it ended up being much less memoir-y and about me than I originally imagined it, thank God. Yeah, I mean, you're, I'm not saying you're absent from the book, but you really don't center yourself.

I found the book really, really readable, although it is 700 pages, Mark, and that's a hefty tomb. Well, readable 700 pages, though, I hear. It is a readable 700 pages. There's no doubt about it. It just, you know, takes longer to read. But it is sort of, yeah, it is quite a gripping read. And I think part of the reason it's a good read is because you sort of tell, you tell the story of the Palo Alto system, quite a serious story,

primarily through a series of like biographical or biographies of particular individuals. And perhaps at a certain point you're telling the stories of particular companies, the company becomes the sort of focus. But there's a thing that you keep coming back to all the way through, which is this idea that like capitalism is a system. of forces and not men, something you return to over and over again, and you're quite explicit, you say, you know, if this particular individual hadn't done this particular thing, made this particular company or this combine or, you know, and made this product, somebody else would have

come along and done something pretty similar, basically. So there's this, really, there's this, this mix of, like, you know, biographical personal individual stories and this, this idea of a system of impersonal forces, in which, you know, people are almost animated by these, the impersonal forces of capital. You know, that makes it a really interesting and entertaining read, but I think it's not just about exposition, you know, there's, I think there's something, there's something more to, to that about this, this, this relationship between impersonal forces and, like, contingencies of individual stories or of objective chance as well that comes in. I want to get into that a little bit of this relationship between impersonal forces acting on almost a global scale

or sometimes in a local scale with global consequences and like this sort of the role of contingency and chance and one way perhaps to get into that is that there's a I'm thinking of the death of Layland Stanford Jr plays a really big role he sort of almost this death sort of haunts the rest of the story in a way so perhaps if you could recount that story a little bit and as a way into sort of discussing these wider issues. Yeah, that's a great entry point. A lot of people don't know that Stanford University, which is a worldwide famous institution, I don't even have to introduce it to UK listeners, probably, is not named for Leland Stanford Senior, who was this oligarch of the 19th century West,

who stood for capital in California as the head of the railroad, it becomes governor of the state, senator of the state important guy, even though he himself is not very talented in anything in particular. It's actually named for Leland Stanford Jr., who is his son who dies as a young teenager, but who at the point of his death had been raised already to this real promising point where he was clear that he was going to set up to rule not just California, not just America, but the world, that this is going to be the guy who was going to take America into the 20th century. And his death as a young teenager is the only child of the Stanford couple who are extremely rich

and need to force that wealth into the future through some vehicle. They lose their only vehicle through the death of this child and instead set up the university in his stead. It starts out as more of a museum than university, and it quickly escapes. their control, both of the couple, Leland and Jane Stanford, and it becomes this abstract force very quickly in the 20th century. But it really is Leland Stanford Jr., you know, the capitalist persona, then distributed across this settler class in the West. And the one I focus on more than anyone who is a member of the first class of Leland Stanford Jr. University in the class of 1895

is Herbert Hoover, who becomes president of the United States in addition to being a very important capitalist and a world leader. And one of the theses of the book sort of the way I, I'm not sure how much I, no, I think I do use the line in the book even that Herbert Hoover becomes Leland Stanford Jr. and becomes like the most they could have hoped for, from that spot. And he comes to stand for the school, but also the class, the settler class in the West and the Stanford's wealth and brings that in the future and builds the school himself,

like literally builds the school with the wealth that he's taking out of South Africa or taking out of China or taking out of Burma, the silver and gold and coal that he's helping dig out of the ground as an imperialist hireling as a mining engineer that it was trained at Stanford's mining engineering program, brings that money back and builds the university, builds the foundation for the school,

builds the literal student center, builds the Hoover Institution as we come to know it today. So you see how it's not just the question of some individuals' intentions or desires or compulsions even, but how the historical forces find themselves, vehicles through individuals. But that question of the, you know, abstract determined historical forces and individual efforts and contingencies, you know, that's so much what we're dealing with doing materialist history, as well as materialist practice, right? Like, we're constantly

trying to figure out what role our agency has in the world and what we can change in a system that we know is in some ways determined by larger forces in many ways. I mean, it's a very big question that, isn't it? A lot of been written the relationship between contingency and agency and structure. But yeah, go on. Sorry. There's this great scene in this book called the octopus, which is based on this a real set of stories from the settler age in California. And there's this almost surreal scene that I keep coming back to in the book. I reference it over and over again, where Frank Norris, who's the author and is a progressive writer, has his sort of representative character in the book, the narrator, is this naive socialist poet who decides

that he's going to confront the head of the railroad, who stands for Leland Stanford as well as that whole class of guys. And in this real surreal scene, he finds himself, you know, just sort of barging into the guy's office, or not even barging in, he's allowed into the office. They're like, yeah, right away, here, sit down with our CEO. Tell him what you think. And he finds that the CEO is not only the railroad executive, not only knows who he is, but is familiar with his, like, socialist poetry and has sort of a critical view of it, even. And is, like, a reasonable guy who will talk to him. But when he confronts him and says, like, you got to stop the railroad. You got to stop all this stuff you're doing. He says, look, man, like, I can't stop

it. I can lose. You can want me to lose. I can go bankrupt. But then someone else is going to come in do it and like the railroads build themselves and the wheat fields harvest themselves and when you're dealing with these systems you're not dealing with men you're dealing with forces and so it's the socialist who's given the materialist critique by this capitalist executive which is something that you actually see in real life happen all the time right we see if you go confront the CEO of anything they're going to tell you basically that same thing and so that conflict is very interesting. There's another great scene in the book where Leland Stanford Senior is, you know,

basically you tell this story that Leland Stanford Senior and Jane Stanford have to leave Knob Hill. So Nob Hill is like the rich area of San Francisco up on the hill there. And they sort of, they basically keep getting confronted by angry workers, basically, confronted almost by, you know, being forced to recognize class, basically, class struggle. And so what do they do? They leave to go to the suburbs, the Palo Alto. And what does he do there that he sets up at a horse breeding farm?

And I think it's just this really nice image that I have of, you know, what's going on at that horse breeding farm? Well, basically, that's almost the sort of the beginning of this entry of this story about eugenics and racial hierarchies. You know, the breeding of horses, we need to breed, we need to breed human capital eventually we get, is the word it gets introduced. And of course, Layland Stanford Jr. is going to be the first iteration of this person who's hot house to be this great, great leader. But it sets up this nice, sort of an image, in fact, of like the rich running away, trying to escape from being confronted by the realities of class struggle. Absolutely. They want to get somewhere else where they can basically, you know, try to engineer a different. mode of thinking about about history or even perhaps to follow what we've been saying

perhaps class struggle and sort of like eugenics and racial hierarchies are two ways in which you can try to think about the the way that history conditions your agency to go back to the way in a way that's what eugenics is saying well look you know we can't we're not freely acting agents because we have these sorts of genetic inheritances in some sort of way any which way I'm talking too much but I just like that image of of Stunford, you know, trying to escape from the reality of class struggle to somewhere where you can erect a different mode of thinking, which is this eugenics. And like the idea of eugenics is something that runs through the book really, really strongly,

I think. Yeah. And it's not just, you know, any class struggle or, you know, it's important to historicize it because we're talking about the 1870s. You know, this is the area of the Paris commune. This is the area of like proletarians, the proletarians being formed as a class both in itself and for itself, that it finds itself very quickly in conflict with the capitalists who have called it into existence. And so the workers that are showing up outside Stanford's house on Nob Hill

are not just any workers, right? They're the working men's party who are the California representatives of the first international. And unfortunately, they are focusing their grievance primarily on the importation of Chinese workers and the effects that that has on their labor market position. And so in California, the Kearneyites, as they're called after their leader, are demanding the expulsion, the exclusion of Chinese workers, which they achieve in the next decade in the 1880s. But this is this like real first like bursts of class struggle in this period in the 1870s, after, like, Leland Stanford personally is calling the proletariat into existence with these railroad projects, and they are personally showing up outside his door,

you see how these historical forces and their relationships to concrete characters go both ways, right? Like, you need someone to bring those forces forward, but then also those forces will start confronting you as an individual. And we see this throughout the book where capitalists incur the consequences of their own actions very individually, very personally. And the workers constantly are showing up outside their door, outside their factories, and confronting them by name throughout this history. So, yeah, it's something we can trace through. And I didn't know when I began what 19th century class struggle around Palo Alto.

looks like. I didn't imagine that this really, I knew there was a, you know, 20th century history of political struggle in the Bay, obviously, but I really didn't know about this early period. And it's fantastically interesting to me that the formation of Palo Alto in the first place is formed out of a conflict between the first international and capital in the West. Like, that's incredible. Yeah, kind of perfect. in lots of ways. Well, and it bookends this historical period just amazingly.

Like, I got so lucky in some ways that you really get, like, if you tell the story of Palo Alto, you get to start with its foundation in this emergence of class struggle. Yeah, and even before that, the story that you tell is one of the colonization of California and the removal of the existing populations to a large degree. And that's another theme that comes through really, really strongly is the role of the inescapability of like the colonial project. Because, you know, people such as Herbert Hoover, et cetera, and others go off around the globe to participate and aid other countries' imperial projects. Yeah, and it's such, it's modern history and it's all modern history. And it's really important for people to understand that this history of settlement that I'm talking about in Alta-Calibald.

California by Anglo-Americans is a history of under 200 years at this point. And so I've had some response of some like capitalists saying like, oh, why are you bringing up this ancient history about the colonization and the genocide of 150,000 people or 30,000 people? Why are you bringing up this ancient history? And I have to say it's not ancient at all. We're talking about the 1870s. In fact, this is precisely modern history.

It's exactly our era. This is, in fact, what triggers our era. And so to understand that this is contemporary history, this is modern history, is one of the key objectives of the book. I mean, and the other thing that comes through is not just that this constant recurrence of the use of racial hierarchies to basically make a sort of a white cross-class alliance, basically, which is continually sort of mobilized. in various ways in latter years, most often through things such as referendums and so forth on laws when they're needed by what particular fraction of capital is animating it at that moment. So there's that sort of, you know, in some places it's so obvious that the racial hierarchies are in order to break up working class unity, etc. And of course, there's wages

for whiteness on one side. And there's paths to whiteness for certain ethnicities, such as the changing status of the Italian population in terms of whiteness, et cetera, and all these sorts of things. You've got that really interesting story going on. But what goes on at Stanford University, or the story you erect about Stanford University is just how absolutely central the whole conception of eugenics is to the intellectual project of Stanford University right from its beginning. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that. Yeah, well, not just its intellectual project, but it's social project and its political project. So the first, president of Stanford University is this guy, David Starr Jordan, and he's the president of

Indiana University, which is a state university in the Midwest at this point. And the Stanford's, when they're starting this university, they're these West Coast oligarchs, and they want the best, you know, the Elon Musk of their day, and they're going to start a university. And so they go down the Ivy League asking, you know, the president of Harbor, the president of Columbia, do you want to quit your job and be president of my new university in California? I'll pay you twice as much or whatever and they all say fuck off because that's a ridiculous offer and no one wanted to live in California because this was the middle of nowhere certainly intellectually the middle of nowhere not near the centers of culture in America at all just some rich guys playground

basically but they're able to convince David Starr Jordan who's a sort of modern thinker in the same way that they are which is to say he believed in gender integrated education for one thing, which was not negligible difference. The Ivy Leagues were not gender integrated. And so he was a man of science, considering himself a man of science, et cetera, not some egghead or whatever. And he was an ichthyologist trained in the study of fish and fishes. But his real interest was eugenics and the propagation of the Anglo-Saxon race.

and he thought that America and the West in particular was the real the crucible that would form the new white man and that, you know, Europe was too lazy and the colonies were, you know, bad for the development of strong white men. And he had all these theories about why different places weren't suitable to the creation of strong white men. But California and the West and America, that's where it was going to happen. And so he was a great pick for this school. And after the death of Jane Stanford in which he may or may not have been directly involved, he was definitely involved in the cover-up of her murder by poison. My guess is that he was involved in more than just the cover-up of her murder by poison because the two of them were in direct conflict at the time. he really takes over the school and directs it into the 20th century and focuses on the school on eugenics and this study of this new subject that he calls bionomics.

And bionomics, even though it's not taught anymore, is something we would, I think people instantly recognize the premises of the discipline, which is that evolutionary competition can illustrate not just the history of but everything to do with society and existence. So it's basically like evolutionary psychology, right? Sure, you can explain dating, you can explain racial relations, you can explain international relations, everything is about evolutionary competition

and the domination of the fittest, et cetera, et cetera. And they teach this out of the school and it becomes one of the most important keys to the university and its success around the world. And they focus on how they could produce a new kind of American man, in particular, women as well. But the main project was to produce the new American man who would be able to secure America into this 20th century. And at first, for Jordan, this means anti-imperialism because he doesn't want brown people in the polity, doesn't want the Philippines, doesn't want Puerto Rico, wants to keep these spaces out of America because they were just going to, degenerate the country.

And it also meant pacifism because he had this idea that war was in the age of gunpowder dysgenic. That no longer does bravery help individuals survive through a war and help their country win a war, you know, when you're on horseback leading with a sword or whatever. That now that in the age of trench warfare and guns, he had this great line that the clown can shoot down the hero. And so you'd just be wasting the genetic future. the brave genetic future of America in these wars in the future.

And so we had to do pacifism. And this is the Palo Alto line until World War I when it becomes clear that the German bionomicists who had a slightly different idea about evolution were going to try and dominate the world marshaly. Instead of proving eugenics through peace, they were going to prove eugenics through war and conquer the world.

And one of the, one of Jordan's bionomicists is actually a liaison to the German high command in the early days of World War I before the United States enters the war. And he comes back and writes this book, this long article for the Atlantic, which is turned into a pamphlet called Headquarters Knights, where he talks about he as a bionomicist hanging out with these German guys who had these other evolutionary ideas about how they were going to dominate the world. And so what he takes back to Palo Alto and shares with Jordan and what they established the school for going forward is this idea of we're going to have to find ways to win wars from afar. We're going to have to protect our best genetics and at the same time find ways for those men to be involved in winning wars.

And that means scientific and technological development as a military tool. And this becomes very, very important for winning World War II for the United States and Californian, young Californian men become key to that effort through the discovery of radar and the creation of operations research. But then you get into the modern era very, very quickly from this early eugenics plan at the turn in the 20th century in Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, very quickly we're in, you know, World War II, we're in the post-war era, we're in Silicon Valley, right? It's a hop-skipping a jump from one to the other.

When we get into the history of Silicon Valley, you're presenting a different story to other ones that you might have come across. And so there's some stories which aren't included. There's a familiar story that we know, which talks about people. like Stuart Brand, et cetera, you know, this sort of this purported inheritance that the first birth of the personal computer and then the internet carries from the counterculture of the 1960s and these sorts of things. I understand why you haven't told that particular story. I haven't included a character such as Stuart Brown, but could you talk us through your thinking in that?

Yeah, people are often, especially I think your listeners, I think in particular, are familiar with this story of the Californian ideology is the famous essay. Maybe they know it through Adam Curtis, who's been, I think, one of the more prominent voices on this story, which is that the hippies invented the computer. And it's there's the negative and positive version. And I think your listeners are probably more familiar with the negative version, which is sort of the Californian ideology version, which is that these feckless hippies, counterculture acid heads thought everything was connected and that they needed their

personal liberation at the same time and they had this really like contradictory convoluted political anti-political thought because they were addled on drugs and feckless cowards and etc etc hedonist pleasure-seeking hippies whatever and through their carelessness they created the personal computer and the internet, which has led us to the current neoliberal era through their thoughtless love for technology, et cetera. And this is not a story I tell in the book even to refute it. Because the more and more I went through the actual history, the less and less that story seemed relevant to anything that I was finding. And people like Stuart Brand, have done a really good job putting themselves at the center of this history, even though

not only weren't they, but they had a like orthogonal relationship to the actual conflicts of the day. And so you get in the Californian ideology essay a line that conflates the new left with the counterculture and then says, and they were technophiles, right? And they loved technology. And I find it very, very difficult to reconcile that with the new left campaign to blow up every computer in the country, which like they conduct a widespread bombing campaign against computer centers throughout the country because they understood computers themselves, like the technology of computers as an imperialist weapon against Vietnam and their main portal to fighting the Vietnam War. from American college campuses was attacking these computing devices. And you really have a national and even international,

if you look into Canada, wave of attacks against data processing infrastructure throughout the country, wherever it was close to students and even the industry themselves. So IBM or Bank of America's computer systems were constantly attacked. So the conflation of, of the new left with the counterculture with technophilia only exists in some people's

like heads, right? This wasn't a real thing that happened. It's a retrospective sort of attempt to make someone like Stuart Brand right throughout this history, even though not only wasn't he part of the left ever, new left, old left, any left, he was an American jingoist, who was an anti-communist and was a strong anti-communist and always had been. from a young person, and, you know, if he hadn't consistently dropped out of Green Beret training or Army Ranger training, you know, if the military training hadn't been too tough for him, he would have been first boots on the ground in Vietnam committing war crimes. Like, that's what he aspired to do.

Same thing with Ken Kesey, when they invite Ken Kesey to speak at an anti-war demo because they're like, oh, yeah, this guy is, you know, he seems counterculture, but he's probably on our side. he's like admonishes the anti-war crowd for being ego-driven, which I find like pretty ridiculous. So these like counterculture heavyweights were not only not part of the new left, they opposed even the formulation of the new left, the formulation of left versus right or the global struggle between capital and communism. they oppose this whole concept. So to make them responsible and then somehow put the bill on the new left for the creation of neoliberalism, I think is kind of crazy. So if I can lead a sort of like critical reevaluation of the hippies invented the computer

story, both positive and negative too, because they love to give themselves credit for this stuff on both sides. and like they love this identification with the counterculture and the new left and the sort of anti-war or whatever because it's very makes Steve Jobs look great you know but if people want to like interrogate that that historiographical conclusion or whatever like that would be great I mean part of what I thought was going on in the book was that the times we live in now called for a very different history of Silicon Valley yeah because the direction of the internet has not gone in the direction of, you know, all these people who are sort of hippies, they've got a bit of a

liberal ideology, you know, those people are not their figureheads. The biggerheads now are people like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, for whom, you know, tracing the history of eugenics through the history of Palo Alto and Stanford, et cetera, seems much more opposite, basically. Yeah, and why are so many of them South Africans, right? What is that? What is the relationship between South Africa and California? What is the relationship between Israel and California? Like, What is a, you know, what are these 19th century mining colonies, you know, becoming, right? Why does this? And one way I like to talk about that is, uh, and link these histories is talk about the

wine industry and talking about where, where are the countries that produce like the greatest wine in the world? Well, we know about France, um, but outside of, uh, France and Europe, where are they? And you look at, okay, it's California, it's Chile, it's Argentina, it's South Africa, it's Australia what is linking all these things well they're mining colonies that at the time when the French wine industry was decimated by a bug that it got through intercontinental trade that had a bunch of capital sitting around from these mining operations and sunk it into the creation of wineries and wine operations in all these countries and that this structures the world in which we

live in today down to walking down the wine aisle at your whole foods or whatever and looking at where the wines are from that's a product of the relations of the same era and people have a hard time linking California as a place to these other places that share so much of its historical circumstances because we see it in this national history terms but one of my goals was to sort of wrench it out of that context. Yeah, I mean, one of the other lines that you use a lot is, um, the last is first. I, you know, because California is one of the last, one of the last places to be completely, well, to have the population removed.

So it's, you know, terra nullis, which is also something you'll find in other, and other countries that you've mentioned, uh, in terms of wine producers. Uh, but also like the one of the last countries to experience that intense, intense move towards capitalism and because it was the last it was perhaps one of the most intense yeah and that they instead of building from a feudal tradition or feudal class relations or a feudal class that exists that has to be transitioned into a capitalist class the Anglo-Americans come in and with the tools the dual tools of racialization and proletarianization like refuse to recognize any of those claims and just abolish the pre-existing feudal class in its entirety and have

a sort of as well as, you know, attempt an extermination of the dominant indigenous population, which because the colonization was so thin and coastal in Alta, California, were still the bulk of the population of the state, we're doing tens of thousands of people, were still lived in indigenous societies in California at the time and had to be removed from the land. But as a product of that, they start on a capitalist basis, on an advanced capitalist technological basis. And so from the beginning, you know, California's farms are more technologically intense than farms throughout the rest of the country and the rest of the world because they've got this capital and technological expertise sitting there at the end of the gold rush and it gets

reinvested by this local capitalist class. but it was really useful for me to start thinking about California at the beginning of its incorporation into the Anglo-American project as an overseas colony for the United States because it really is it's an overseas colony if you're lucky you get to you take a boat down you know from the east coast to Central America walk across Central America and take another boat up the other side and that's if you're lucky and if you're not lucky you got to go overland through a bunch of other territories, through a sovereign, controlled land that the United States did not control and could not guarantee safe passage through.

And it was a very hectic travel, you know, convoluted even. If you think about like the distance between France and Algeria, which is being colonized at the same time in like literally the same years by France to Algeria, much closer, you know, overseas trek, overseas, over, you know, from one to the other. And so understanding it as America's colony in this period and really as an overseas colony allows you to understand the development of the California capitalist class as its own thing in this space and as a colonial capitalist class. And so I think that explains to go take it back to Teal and them in a different history of this place,

why you have so many South Africans who feel so comfortable in California and who end up in this business and find success there, and why you have so many Israelis who find so much success in the Bay Area and this feel comfortable there, right? These are societies that have real deep ties in their DNA. I mean, the other story I'd want to just bring out a little bit is the centrality of weapon manufacturing Palo Alto, which is not a story that people necessarily associate with Silicon Valley. And it fits very nice. It's a nice follow-on from this need to project force, you know, against anti-colonization movements all around the world, you know, if we're talking about the economic, et cetera.

Yeah, and from the beginning. And so from the, because the weapons industry in. Palo Alto goes back to very, very early Stanford University. And so something like the formulation of the IQ test, which happens at Stanford in the early 20th century, one of the first places it's used is testing and allocating soldiers for World War I, drafted soldiers. And this was like, we want to make sure that our smartest guys are back on the base, not getting shot in the trenches, and that the, like, the C students are the ones who are getting shot in the trenches. And they had to invent the concept of the C student for this purpose, right? They split all the soul.

They had these massive intelligence tests, group intelligence tests, which they developed for this purpose, and split them into five categories based on their fitness. And that's the same categories that we get for grading at Stanford University following this. So they had to create the C student in order to decide who was going to be up on the front, you know, which genes we could afford to lose. So from that beginning, you're developing military tools, but you're also developing avionics tools, so the turning the aircrafts. Palo is not known as a center of planes, even though it could have been. It was close. But it really is when it centers for plane electronics or what they call avionics, which is what transforms a plane from a toy

that you, you know, do you do demos of doing loop-de-loops or whatever, but like, without, radios or without radar and without the electronics that you're going to use in the cabin, you can't really do anything with it. And it's Palo Alto and this company called Federal Telegraph that is seeded out of Stanford University that develops the tools that become later in the post-World War II era, the transistor and the microchip. The vacuum triode is the tool that's invented in this in this early era which is basically the the light bulbs that you see made out of computer that computers are made out of in the early era and it's basically a very very very simple transistor made out of a what looks like a light bulb and then to follow that story on you know in the

post-war period you basically make the argument you can't really you can't separate the development of computing from basically um intercontinental ballistic missiles. You've got a nice line in there about them basically being a load of computers sat on top of a bomb, sat on top of a big solid state rocket, basically. Absolutely. When people think about a nuclear missile, they think about the missile itself, right? And you think about the research that goes into the development of nuclear weapons, et cetera, et cetera. And you think about if you're in an American context, where they're being produced, it's mostly out of Southern California, is where the rocketry industry is headquartered.

You don't think of it as a Palo Alto product in the same way that you'd think of the computer as a Palo Alto project. And that's partly thanks to some really good branding and like history marketing from out of Palo Alto. But the entire first generation of silicon chips are going into the Minuteman one nuclear missile, right? And Palo Alto's happy to tell a story about those chips

and going to the moon and NASA using them. And since they never actually fired any of those ICBMs and the first generation of nuclear missiles, Palo Alto doesn't have to take any negative credit for it, right? They didn't actually blow up the world. But they were prepared to, right? They took the contract to do it. And if you look at the composition by value of these weapons, it's the chips. It's these electronics, just like in the plane, it's the avionics.

It's the same thing that enable them to work, right? That's the real advancement, even just as much as the nuclear payload was the development of these electronics. And that's all coming out of Silicon Valley. And in fact, William Shockley, who's the guy who brings the silicon industry to Palo Alto after helping invent the transistor in the first place, is not only raised by, you know, raised by Stanford University mining engineers and tested as an object of these early intelligence tests at a Stanford University, he's one of the ones who comes up with this strategy for

a nuclear missile-based American domination, right? He's the one who comes up with mutually assured destruction, and the Pentagon sort of scratches out his name and writes an Air Force general's name and then publishes the policy. But this is coming directly out of Palo Alto, and it's foundational to the whole thing. And of course, Shockley is not only all of this, he is also the most prominent eugenicist, racist of his era. And so much of the history ties in such a surprisingly neat bow that you can go from him to like, oh, and his parents, by the way, were best friends with Herbert Hoover. You know, it's like it's two steps. The history we're talking about is so tight.

And I thought I was going to have to do so many more, like, metaphorical jumps in the writing, which is a lot of the history of Palo Alto that you see, you'll take these metaphorical jumps about like, oh, the gold rush. You know what else is a gold rush? The internet and jump, whatever. But if you go straight through, which is not very long, you see that these things are all direct connections. There's not this jumping is, in fact, misleading. Yeah, no, no, totally. Yeah. And if we follow that story on about, you know, that, you know, the ICBMs, the Minuteman missiles being this, you know, really central part of why Silicon Valley becomes Silicon Valley rather than some other mineral valley. You know, what you get to then, it sort of makes a little bit of sense about why the Bay Area, why it becomes such a centre for, for the new left, for like radical movements, you know, you spend quite a bit of time talking about the Black Panther Party, etc, and how it grew up in Oakland and really, really interesting stuff about,

you know, almost erecting a sort of alternative to Stanford University in these local colleges and trying to develop a cadre for the class struggle rather than this cadre for the eugenic race war that Stanford seems to be trying to engineer. But in Stanford at the same time, you do get this, you know, you get a left-wing student counter movement. You know, perhaps what's not in the book is like,

Why does that develop in Stanford? Is it just a reflection of the things that are going on elsewhere? Or is it something actually to do with the internal contradictions of having a university based around this project, which basically has quite flimsy, such as eugenics, has pretty flimsy intellectual underpinnings? Yeah. Well, and I think it goes back even to the origins of the Palo Alto project that you see from the very beginning of Stanford University,

the creation of revolutionary left sex within the school. And so like M.N. Roy, who's very important to the global communist history, comes through Stanford University, meets Evelyn Trent, who becomes Evelyn Roy, his wife, at the school, and plays like a very important role in the foundation of the Mexican Communist Party. Like, you see, like, revolutionaries are in Palo Alto from the very beginning. And this is partly, like, the happenstance that David Starr-Jour, Jordan is an anti-imperialist, as we said. And so his area ends up providing shelter to anti-imperialists across the Pacific from the beginning. And it's sort of accidental. And he, like, tries to squelch this once he realizes it's kind of out of his control. And that these are like internationalist radicals that he is sort of summoned to town or allowed to like take up residence in Palo Alto.

But you see their presence the entire time. And I think it is partly to do with this contradiction of needing to create weapons for this class struggle and the contingency of that, you know, whenever you're exercising authority over a person, you're creating the conditions for them to resist your authority. And so you see this around the new left, around these computer centers that we talk about, that one of the projects of the public universities at this time was to train more and more people in the use of these computer tools. And there's this great quote where one of the head of the computers for the University of California system is talking to a reporter about all these bombings and these attacks on the computer centers. And the reporter is basically asking them, like, well, why don't you make sure that none of these crazy leftists have any access to these labs?

Like, how are these people getting access to these, you know, valuable, important, fragile machines in the first place? And the director is very straight up with them and says, like, look, these are the same people that we're trying to turn into the workers who can use these machines. And we can't really differentiate between the ones that we need to train to use these machines and the ones that are going to turn around and try to destroy them. And in fact, at Fresno State University, which suffered one of the biggest Molotov attacks by the third world student movement against their computer systems, the student who was ultimately convicted of the crime, had been trained as part of the computer skills training in the same computer lab.

And so you do see the contradictions that are imminent in these institutions. And at Stanford University as well, you see that with H. Bruce Franklin, who becomes one of the leaders of the movement and one of the peoples that I focus on is this, you know, he's a Stevenson Democrat, as they were called, you know, a liberal FDR type going into the 60s who at the English department is a very skilled English professor writing about Moby Dick and Hawthorne. and great Americanists. And he's really embraced by the department. He's this World War II vet with this working class background. And they, like, tenure him very quickly. They give him this position. And then 1968 happens.

And he radicalizes. And he radicalizes in the fight against Vietnam. And he knows personally that the saber rattling against the Soviet Union is false because he'd worked for the Strategic Air Command. They had trained him to know what these avionics systems. systems were and what they were used for and what they did. And so when they confront the weapons researchers at Stanford University and the weapons researchers say, oh, no, these are just, you know, defensive tools.

You don't want to blow up this building. These aren't used for attacking Vietnam. It's Franklin, the English professor, who because of his military experience at the Strategic Air Command can say, that's bullshit. I know exactly what these technologies are used for. that's how you take down the enemy air defense systems so that you can bomb places. And this, you know, he's able to lead this attack on this computing center that becomes a real like centerpiece of the war movement, anti-war movement at Stanford.

And he is ultimately removed despite his tenure that his endorsement of armed struggle is ultimately more than the university can take. But yeah, it's the contradictions in the university and in the universities, larger project, right? The Palo Alto project for the 20th century that explode in this period. And they're able to recover, right? It's not that they can't find a solution to the 60s. We watch them find a solution. We watch Palo Alto in California in particular find that solution. We probably don't have time to talk about it today. But if readers want to check out the book and figure out what that solution is, like it's in there. And it's probably not quite the story

they've heard about the early ages of the computer and the internet, even though it has a lot to do with those projects. Yeah, no, absolutely. I wanted to, could you mention 60 yet, and I wanted just to sort of push that a little bit further, this idea that, like, you do have events which people get swept up in, and those events can push you in a left wing direction. And so you do mention, you know, Occupy Wall Street and those sort of movements of 2010, 2011 as one of these things that swept people up in. many ways. And, you know, basically with some of those, particularly around the Arab Spring, some of those revolutions were misattributed to the effects of the internet, etc. But one of the things I wanted to just sort of end on is this idea, is this question, actually, is this question, there's another person who makes an appearance, just a really

brief appearance, this Lee Feldstein. I can't quite remember how he appears in the book, but he's this guy who was really into computing. I think he was at Stanford. And then later on he was one of these people who was like definitely from the new left and who saw a potential in computing which was much more in line with this idea that you can have computing which is under democratic control i think he set up like the berkeley people's computer club or something like this really very early on you know um so there is this other line and you know the other stories that could have been told around richard stallman and free and open source software and all of the enthusiasm that created at one point that wasn't the internet we ended up with either was it

No. But my question is this, is that, you know, could there have been a different path for that whole personal computing, et cetera, and the internet? Or could there still be? Or is there the whole idea of like human augmentation via computing? Is it sort of tied up and tainted with like this eugenics program that we have to reject it all? I think it really is. I think I sighed on the ladder. And I think the, when we tell the story of the early internet around these organic, enthusiasm.

communities, we do ourselves a disservice. And I don't talk that much about those in the book, partly because I think they're a big part of the official history, but partly because I wanted to focus on different perspectives on that same era. And so people don't talk about the early computer network of the first laptops that allowed them to run Iran-Contra, right? That allowed the Oliver North to run a shadow government out of the you know out of his office with 10 guys in all around the world operating from encrypted laptops and you can't do that without that technology and that technology this is a perfect execution of that sort of minority rule function of that technology right that's why it's created and it's incredibly important and the role that it plays

as an answer to the 60s in the early 70s is very important, that the Internet becomes an answer not through the sort of neoliberal alienation, individualism of culture in some abstract way, where we go from our personal computers to our personal phones, et cetera, et cetera.

But through the suppression of freedom struggles, and the, like, moving of weapons around to the creation of massacre sites, wherever, you know, left-wing movements were still active anywhere in the world. And this was accomplished through signals tools that constituted the first Internet. You know, that's what the Internet was. And that's what it was really for. And that's what was really the most important thing that was going on in the world. It was not, you know, Jimmy's grateful dead internet fan group or whatever.

it was the Cold War. It was how do you get guns from Yemen, where they've been seized by the Israeli military to Angola, where you need to shoot them at communists, you know? And how do you coordinate that while preserving deniability for the democratic structures within the United States considering it's hugely illegal and ethically abominable? And yet it's the solution for how does the United States preserve its place in the world and win the cold? And win the old war. And that's through computers. That's through these devices, which come out of Palo Alto. There are spinoffs from the same Palo Alto Research Center, Xerox Park, that produce the official line that, right, the official computers that come out of this. And that's attributed to Steve Jobs

and Apple and the, you know, the individualism or whatever. But they're these same companies, same kind of spin-off institutions. They're creating the tools that the Reagan administration needs to fight communism around the world by whatever means necessary. And that's the history that I wanted to tell. And a great history is too. Look, I think we're going to have to leave it here because we could go on and on because there's so many good, yeah, it's so many good stories in there and so many good themes. All right.

Well, if the listeners demand a part two, we'll come back. Exactly, yeah, totally. And the only way they'll know what they've missed is by buying the book and reading it, all 700 pages. Available in the UK. test them. Yeah, available now. From River Run. Fantastic. Thanks so much, Malcolm. Thanks for coming on, and I'm sure we'll talk again soon. Absolutely. Thanks so much for having it. a month head to navara.media forward slash support or face the consequences.