Tech Won't Save Us - The Untold History of Silicon Valley w/ Malcolm Harris

Episode Date: February 16, 2023

Paris Marx is joined by Malcolm Harris to discuss the sordid history of Silicon Valley, including the long influence of eugenics at Stanford, how Silicon Valley profited from the United States’ wars throughout the 20th century, and why the libertarian narrative of tech hide a much darker reality.Malcolm Harris is the author of Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World. You can follow Malcolm on Twitter at @BigMeanInternet.Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter, and support the show on Patreon.The podcast is produced by Eric Wickham and part of the Harbinger Media Network.Also mentioned in this episode:You can read an excerpt of Malcolm’s book in The Atlantic.Support the show

If I can get people to think Silicon Valley and think nuclear missiles and the Cold War and massacres in Vietnam instead of Silicon Valley, the Grateful Dead, and early computers, I think that will be a very large success. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Malcolm Harris. Malcolm is the author of a new book called Palo Alto, A History of California, Capitalism, and the World. Malcolm was on the show last year to talk about Stuart Brand, but now he's back to talk about his new book, which is a really in-depth history of Palo Alto, as the title of the book suggests, but it also goes through these much deeper relationships that span throughout California, throughout the United States, and throughout the world as we look at these capitalist forces that are shaping the development of the global capitalist economy

and how Palo Alto is a central node in what is occurring through, you know, the past couple hundred years as all of this is expanding. I think this is a really fascinating book because it gives us a different picture of the history of Silicon Valley than certainly the one that we're often kind of conventionally presented. But even when we talk about these critical histories, it doesn't draw all of the threads that Malcolm's book does, which I think are really important to understand when we think about the full impact of the tech industry and this area of the world, especially as these trends that we see throughout this history continue to reemerge time and time again.

And knowing that history can be very instructive then to how we react to what is actually going on in the present as these tech figures take a more conservative turn, as they are increasing their relationships with government and the military. And as we recognize that, you know, these potential kind of countercultural and anti-government narratives of the past are probably not as accurate and as truthful as they've made out to be. Now, recognizing that this is a long conversation, I'm going to keep this introduction short. But that's just to say that, you know, I think this is a really great and insightful conversation. And if you enjoy it, I highly recommend going to pick up Malcolm's book because I do think it gives a

really important picture of this history and one that a lot of listeners of the show are really going to enjoy. And I think we'll learn a lot from. So with that said, if you like this conversation, make sure to leave a five-star review on Apple podcasts or Spotify. You can also share the show on social media or with any friends or colleagues who you think would learn from it. And if you want to make sure I can keep having these critical conversations with guests like Malcolm on the history of the tech industry and what we can learn from it, you can join supporters like Kate in Aliso Viejo, California, Chris from St. Pölten in Austria, and Matt from Newcastle by going to patreon.com slash techwon'tsaveus where you can become a supporter. Thanks so much and enjoy this week's conversation.

Malcolm, welcome back to Tech Won't Save Us. Thanks so much for having me back. Absolutely. I'm very excited to chat. We previously had a great conversation about Stuart Brand and his role in the tech industry and whether that has been inflated or not. And I'm sure he'll come up again in this conversation. But, you know, you have a new book out called Palo Alto, a history of California capitalism and the world. Let's be real. It's a big one. You know, it's a big book. It's a chunky book, but it's also very fascinating. And it has a lot of details

about the history of, you know, the tech industry, about Palo Alto, about California from colonization through to today, and what kind of impacts that has had on the world that we have, the world that we live in, the tech industry that we're familiar with, and how maybe some of the narratives that we have about the tech industry are not as accurate as they should be. And there's a bit more that we should probably know about the impacts that it has on our world. So I'm excited to dig into all this with you. We certainly won't get to every detail of the book because it's huge, but I think we're going to have a really good conversation. And I wanted to start with this. You know, as I said, this is a huge, a very comprehensive book that ties together a lot of threads to the history of the United States, California, and particularly,

you know, as the title suggests, Palo Alto. And they are intimately linked to the modern power and dominance of the tech industry. Why did you feel that this was a story that needed to be told? And why did you want to take it on? Well, I definitely did not want to take it on. Insofar as there's pressure, I think, on my generation or cohort of writers for the public to sort of cannibalize your own history, right? What's the most traumatic event in your past and then sell that. And I'd been doing this for 10 plus years and felt really lucky that I haven't been forced to do that. Even though my first book was kids these days, and it's about young people, millennials,

I kept myself out of the book. And I've been pretty lucky doing that in general. At the same time, this wave of youth suicides that I was a kid for in Palo Alto has been national news since that time, more or less, and has really stuck with me, obviously, as the kind of story you would tell in that kind of situation. But at the same time, I really didn't want to do it. And I was talking with a friend of mine, the writer Ann Boyer, and I was telling her that what I really didn't want to do for the next book was do this memoir-y history of Palo Alto and go back through this trauma. And she said, well, that means you have to do it. If that's what's feeling like, what comes to mind for your next project is not this. Maybe you need to press on that a little bit more. And she's one of the greatest living writers.

You know, you take that advice seriously. And I did. And that started the project. But the project moved, I think, as you saw, far away from that original idea in some ways. Totally. You can see aspects of your experience in there. But it's not like a through line for the book. It's not something that comes up frequently or anything

like that. Like it's very much more a history of this region, this state, this, you know, set of forces and what capitalism has done to us in the world and all these sorts of things. One of the things that really stands out in the book, you know, obviously it's looking at Palo Alto, but obviously California more broadly is how California is kind of a longstanding site for capitalist expansion, financial speculation. A lot of these forces that come to shape much more of the world as they kind of take hold in California. Do you want to talk a little bit about why that seemed important to draw out? Well, first of all, to set the scope of the history, right, you got to start it somewhere. And Anglo-American colonization in the mid 19th century gives you a really like hard start point.

And there's a lot of debate among theorists and historians about when capitalism starts. There's a lot of different versions of that story. But when capitalism becomes a global system is not really up for debate, right? Everyone pretty much agrees with when that happens. And it's in the 19th century with this closing of the chain through the Pacific Ocean, right? The incorporation of California, Australia, Japan, and China into the capitalist system secures it as a full world system for the first time. And California as sort of the last link in that chain or one of the last links to the chain then becomes first in terms of, well, where's capitalist society taking root from the beginning in terms of its colonization into the world system? It's in California right here. And so you see technology from the beginning advancing very, very fast in California, but also education advancing very, very fast in California and development advancing very, very fast in California. Not in spite of being this last link of the chain, but because it's this last link of the chain in global capitalism.

Yeah. Adopting the move fast and break things motto very early. Oh yeah. Where they're, you know, breaking the water system very quickly by pumping it full of mercury and they fuck things up so fast that they have to create a legal system to stop themselves from destroying the land completely before they make it very valuable. Yeah. Someone does have to live there at the end of the day. They really want to live there at the end of the day. It's a very desirable place to live. Yeah. No, it's a fascinating place to start it. And I think it does give you a good kind of jumping off point for the other things that you explore in the book. And then you talk about,

you know, education being developed really early there and making a lot of advances and that being a really key part of how this system is created, how California comes to be such an important player in all of these things that are going on. And obviously, a through line through that is Stanford University, which is obviously established in Palo Alto. Today, you know, it's most well known for being a university that births so much of the tech founder class, not to mention many other tech workers. But it also has a long and, you know, not always upstanding history. How does Stanford get started? And what does that modern narrative about the university downplay that we should probably be more aware of?

There's a long answer to that question. But it starts really with the death of Leland Stanford Jr., the unexpected death of Leland Stanford Jr. as a young teenager. His parents had really put a lot into him. They were preparing him to really lead the world. Even though Leland Stanford Jr. as a young teenager. His parents had really put a lot into him. They were preparing him to really lead the world. Even though Leland Stanford Sr. was kind of an unimpressive guy, they were raising Leland Stanford Jr. to be much more impressive. He seemed to be well on his way when he dies unexpectedly. And at that point, his parents shift their intentions from creating a very big museum, mostly. And his father's been working on a horse track, the Stanford Stock Farm, famously. But after the death of Leland Stanford Jr., and then also the death of Leland Stanford Sr., resources are redirected towards university as we sort of come to understand it, Stanford University, under the leadership of David Starr Jordan, who's the first president of the school.

And what do you think about, you know, that narrative that we have about Stanford today and how, you know, I guess it's not completely uncommon throughout society, but also in California and around the tech industry more generally for histories to kind of fade away, right? We don't look back at what has happened in the past. We look toward the future and, you know, all the great things that we're going to achieve because of our technological developments and things like that. You know, how is that kind of narrative about Stanford today, about this place where, you know where all of these brilliant people are birthed and come out of, how does that reflect? How is it different from, how is it similar to the early kind of days of Stanford and what it was seeking to achieve as this university was being established? You can see some real direct through lines in terms of the, if you think of the Stanford graduate

as a character, as an archetypical character of someone who's like interested in the most advanced technologies but also the most advanced sector of the economy is interested in finance and the american project and the relation of these things that's from like the first class at stanford university the very beginning from the beginning of planning one of the ways that they're going to make the school distinguished, right? You're going to jump from some random suburban school in California, which no one cares about, to a top level university, which seemed unlikely at the time and now we realize has accomplished. But one of the ways that they started planning to do that was to specialize in subjects that they thought were going to be more important

for the nation and that were going to be important for the economy. The very beginning of the school, that's mining engineering. So they're training the best mining engineers. They really focus on promoting their mining engineering program with the idea that they were going to produce great mining engineers who would go into the world and become prominent people and that the idea that they were going to produce great mining engineers who would go into the world and become prominent people and that the respect that they acquired would redound on the university. And this is an incredibly successful plan, starting with a member of the first class and a member of the first mining engineering class, which is Herbert Hoover, who then becomes president of the United States and really sets the mold for the Stanford man into the future. And I think into the present, if you read this book, you'll read a fair bit about Herbert

Hoover. And one of the reasons I couldn't stop writing about him is just because there's so many parallels to our current tech oligarch class, not just in terms of their role in the economy and politics, but in the real specific narratives they tell about themselves, the real specific stories about who they are in the world and their importance and why they're important and stuff like that. Yeah, he was certainly a character that I was surprised to see come up. I hadn't expected to see Herbert Hoover come up in the book

and also to be like such a character who comes up again and again, as you were explaining, you know, how these things tend to work out and how he's constantly entering back into the picture as these kinds of forces and things develop, you know, through time, through the 20th century, basically.

So yeah, I thought that was really interesting and we'll probably come back to him a bit. But there's a piece of this that I do want to return to as we, you know, before we move away from this early period in Stanford, is one of the original focuses is something called bionomics, which, you know, I think is fair to say is close to eugenics, if not exactly that. And, you know, you talk a lot through the book about how there's this kind of recurring theme of wanting to pick out and try to cultivate kind of the top performing people, the high IQ kind of people, and to ensure that they are associated with Stanford University and that we're kind of further promoting that through the university's mission, through the

people that it seeks out, through the people that it brings on board. Do you want to talk to us a bit about that and how that plays into the university's history as well? Yeah. So David Starr Jordan comes from Indiana University and he's a huge believer in eugenics. He's one of the leading national and international eugenic organizations. He's like a prominent voice in eugenics, which is a politically ambiguous position at the time. Do people know or don't know that, that, you know, this was a thought to be progressive, right? You're going to improve humanity. And so there were a lot of different political valences for this position. Jordan is famously an anti-imperialist. He's an anti-imperialist because he's a racist. It's a complicated position, but it's important to go through these as they become coherent ideas.

He puts forward, and with some colleagues, a number of them recruited also through the Indiana program, which is a husbandry program, very agricultural-focused, which is a lot of where eugenics is coming from, he builds this subject that they call bionomics, which is sort of the controlled study of life, which has all these assumptions about evolution and evolution's direction that we would understand as eugenic. But they understood as basically the science of life, that bionomics exceeds biology, exceeds economics by like combining these ideas that evolution encodes economics into all living things, basically. Right. Like competition and hierarchy specifically are the root of existence of all things. And I think like this is not a long lasting discipline that they develop at Stanford. But I think if you like drill down on some of the things that people still believe there and some of the ideologies that are still coming out of there, and you look at the premises of bionomics as they're laid out by like Jordan and Kellogg and some of these early guys, they're pretty close.

Like, I think it's still the ideology of a bunch of Silicon Valley fundamentally. Absolutely. Because one of the things that kind of occurred to me or that I was thinking of as I was reading through the book, and it was not only this kind of early use of eugenics when the university was getting started, but also how there are moments in history when this thinking really kind of reemerges again and again at the university and, you know, through the industry more broadly that was developing around it. And I was thinking about how, you know, we seem to be in another one of those moments today where we have, you know,

ideologies like long-termism out there and we have, you know, the tech billionaires and some of the tech class kind of promoting a pronatalism that is really focused on ensuring that they're picking their best kind of embryos and all this kind of stuff to create the best possible offspring and how they want their offspring to then do the same thing so they can like keep kind of leveling them up. And it's like these kinds of ideas seem to come back again and again, especially as you're focused on cultivating this kind of engineering talent, this particularly kind of talented individuals that is such a focus of Stanford and I would say of this industry more generally. Yeah. And it's really continuous. And that's what I wanted to lay out is that you've

got, you know, Lewis Terman, who was recruited by Jordan out of Indiana and who makes IQ and the study of IQ a real core subject of Stanford and a core speciality of the area. He's testing Bill Shockley Jr. When Bill Shockley Jr. is a child, Bill Shockley's dad is a mining engineering lecturer at Stanford and his mom had been a mining engineer student at Stanford. And then Bill Shockley Jr. not only invents the point contact transistor or co-invents, but becomes one of the most hardcore racists of the post-war era in America and the proponent of neo-eugenics and the use of genetic racial hierarchy until towards the end of the 20th hierarchy and until like, you know, the, towards the end of the 20th century.

Right. But the, he, you can draw him directly back to the beginning, not just like you can connect him to Hoover, but like Hoover's wife and his mom were friends and like discussed their pregnancies together. You know, like it's, it's very, very, very continuous and not on accident. Right. They're testing young Bill Shockley jun.'s intelligence because they have a plan for him, a plan that he goes on to execute. It's not a coincidence. It's a strategy. histories. I haven't dug into them to the degree that you have, but all these connections that I just didn't realize were there, but, you know, are so rich and so fruitful and so telling about where the industry goes and how all of these things sort of develop. And, you know, before

we move on from this topic, I think one other thing that I want to throw at you is you mentioned Leland Stamford's, you know, horse farm or whatever you want to call it, one of the things that you draw out of that example is he develops what's called the Palo Alto system to breed these horses. And you later kind of link that development and that kind of ethos through to the development of human capital at the university and in this industry more generally. Do you want to talk a bit about how that kind of influenced the approach to education and how they're trying to, you know, I guess, cultivate the best possible minds that are coming from these institutions? Yeah.

So people know the Palo Alto Stock Farm. Everyone knows the Palo Alto Stock Farm, basically, whether they know it or not, because that's where Muybridge was recording the first motion pictures, right? And that was financed by Stanford. And we sort of lose the forest for the tree of the Muybridge motion photographs when we're thinking about this project, because that seems like obviously the most important part. But that was just a little part of this much broader effort to scientifically improve the horse that Stanford's

making. But the way that they went about doing this was very bionomicist before the concept, which is that at the time, selling trotting horses, you sell them not based on their performance necessarily, but you're trying to sell semen seed from horses that will yield great racers. And to do that, to know which seed yields great racers, you have to develop two generations of horses, which is very slow. And so this is not a very capitalist-friendly industry, is the trotting horse racing production industry. But at the same time, horses that pulled stuff were like the most important commodity in America at the time, right? These are engines for all intents and purposes.

And for all intents and purposes meant agriculture, military, transportation, crucial. And the great epizootic, I think it's the 1870s, where all the nation's horses got infected with flu, and it totally fucked up the whole country. Like really, really bad, like half of Boston burns down because you can't do fire engines without horses, and the horses were too sick. And so Stanford, you know, like a good tech thinker is like, you know, if I could improve the value of every horse by $100, there are 13 million horses. That's $1.3 billion, you know, and that's... Your typical startup pitch, right?

Like, legit. But he doesn't need investment because he's incredibly wealthy. And so he sets up this stock farm, sets up intentionally, you know, the greatest stock farm in the world from nothing. And he hires this trainer, Charles Marvin, and tells them, we're going to go at it alone. We're going to do it our own way. Instead of waiting till the horses are older to start training them to race really fast, we're going to start training them as soon as they're born. We're going to start racing

colts. And the ones that show us that they're fast, we're going to focus more and more attention and resources on them. And we're going to build the fastest, youngest horses in the world. And they do. And they do this very quickly. And it's funny that it becomes very quickly, not just an inspiration for other horse breeders who are kind of like mad that this rich asshole has totally transformed their whole sport, but have to admit that he did do it. But also for education reformers who are looking at the training of young horses and saying like, we need to do this for kids. The kindergarten movement is happening at the same time in Germany and is coming to

the United States. And one of the reformers cites the Stanford stock farm and says, you know, this kind of resources early is what we need for children. And so the Stanford's ends up supporting not just their, what they called their kindergarten track, which was the first kindergarten in California was a kindergarten track for these horses. So like a shrunk down track for little horses. Then they also go on to support the first kindergarten for humans as well. And so it's very quickly you make this jump between horse stock capital to human capital. And as horses get replaced pretty quickly, I mean very quickly in the 20th century with motor power, you see this

transition from focusing on horses to focusing on people and the power of invention and how do you inculcate the youngest, fastest inventors, the youngest, fastest technicians and engineers. And again, they make this transition very quickly so that by the time Herbert Hoover is out of school, you know, he's in the first class at Stanford. And by the time he graduates and is out for a couple of years, they're promoting him. He's promoting himself, but David Starr Jordan is promoting him as well as the youngest, highest paid worker in the world, which is like a sort of a bizarre distinction, right? Like who's to say how young you are, what's highest paid, but it's great marketing. It's like directly Palo Alto system marketing.

Yeah, this is what we achieve. If you come to Stanford, or more so if you're able to make it into Stanford and be one of the, you know, people that we select to be part of this kind of group, right? I want to move us forward a little bit now, because, you know, we've been talking about this early period. And, you know, one thing that often comes up when we talk about the history of Silicon Valley, of the tech industry, of Palo Alto is the relationship to the military, right? And how a lot of this industry does kind of emerge in World War II or around that period as there's a lot of public funding going into the

Bay Area, going into these various institutions, going into companies that are being set up that are going to be really key to the war effort and then later through to the Cold War and things like that, right? So there's a recognition that there is a relationship between the tech industry and the military. But in the book, you draw this out much further, and you make the links much more intimately, I think, than is often kind of presented in a lot of these histories. So how do you see the role of the military and military funding, not just in Stanford, but in creating what becomes this kind of high technology industry that is so central to, I guess, the growth of this industry, the influence that this region of the world ultimately has?

Yeah. And to look at that, you also have to look at the role of military spending in the United States in the 20th century, right? Because it becomes key, not just to the Palo Alto economy, but to the national and the global economy, which is then headquartered in Palo Alto. And so Palo Alto becomes this key to the global economy through weapons and weapons contracts. Like it starts earlier, right? You can go back to the radio age where they're developing weapons and they're thinking about communication systems. In the interwar era, Varian is the one that you really think of as the first military technology company, which is making this Klystron that's

supposed to be for jamming enemy radar so that you can stop basically German planes from bombing the United States. This is the worry of the Varian brothers, who are these like hippie inventors, basically, who are not quite Stanford material in that they are like a little too hippie. And one of them is a pilot. And so he's, you know, flying around, flying from South America up to the United States. And he's realizing basically that if the United States goes to war with fascists and they're leftists, the, the variants are, are lefty guys. And so they know

that America is going to end up in a war with the fascists. They know that the war is coming, that unless they're able to do something that Hitler's going to have basically free range to bomb America, that they're going to turn the United States into Guernica. And so the brothers start tinkering real fast to come up with some device that's going to allow them to see at night and prevent the enemies from seeing at night. And this is how the Klystron gets built. They say it's for a landing system at night, but that's not really what it's for. It's for this military strategy. You have that basically going on at the same time as Hewlett Packard, which is another big one at the time, which again, not directly a military contractor. A lot of these companies

don't like being contractors directly for the military because that's a lot of work. Instead, they can sell their stuff to the contractors off the shelf. So that's how HP really excelled, that they would supply the testing instruments that the contractors need to fulfill the contracts, which made them sort of a contractor by default. So when they go into World War II, David Packard is held back to operate HP, even though it's not a military contractor because the military industrial complex needs their parts. This sets up a showdown between Packard and the government office that's in charge of checking on the war profiteers, basically, stopping war profiteers. And because it's a startup tech company that has really high margins, but still needs to flip all its money, all its revenue back into production, they're in this really tough spot because profit regulations are going to make it so they can't keep growing as a concern. And so there's this really great scene where David Packard, who is this 6'5", former Stanford football player, selected as part of this, very clearly as part of this eugenic project at Stanford, shows down with a government bureaucrat who's come to complain to HP.

And he just yells at him and says, I'm going to run this company and get whatever profits I damn well, please. Fuck you. You know, he's a right wing conservative. He's in the line of Herbert Hoover. And the government backs off. And I think this is a like key moment in the history of Silicon Valley, which is that and the government's largely going along with it. I think the HB example is just fascinating because, you know, as you write in the book, like that company just constantly reemerges at these moments where there are particularly important kind of developments that are happening in the relationship between what I guess, capitalism, the government,

the military, you know, all of these forces that you're kind of describing within the book. But I want to kind of further talk about this military point, right? Because as we're moving through, you know, the 1960s and 70s out of the war period, there's still a lot of kind of military work going on, right? You know, we often talk about the Cold War and how that was really beneficial to the high-tech industry and ensuring that a lot of funding was still coming into these companies. But I think one of the things that

often isn't discussed there is how, even though it's a quote-unquote Cold War, there's still the Korean War, there's still the Vietnam War, there's still a lot of hot wars that are going on there that the United States is intimately involved in, is funding, is sending troops toward. And that results in these companies within Silicon Valley, around Palo Alto, getting a lot of contracts from the military to provide missiles, to provide other types of weapons. And that kind of influences their politics, how the industry is approaching these things, how the industry is making its money and growing. Can you talk a bit about that relationship and that period within the development of this industry? Yeah, I mean, Silicon Valley, right? So the first generation of silicon chip, making chips out of silicon was important because the chips were hardier, which means you could use them in avionics operations, which is in electronics that fly around. And the reason you were using them in avionics to fly around was mostly to drop bombs

on people. And then you'd also have missiles that had chips in them as well. And so the first generation of silicon chips that really gets produced out of Silicon Valley almost entirely goes into Minuteman-1 missiles. And the Minuteman-1 missile was to threaten the entire world with its total destruction, right? These are nuclear missiles designed for mutually assured destruction. This is the signature product of Palo Alto in the period. This is how Silicon Valley begins. And because none of those missiles ultimately blew up Leningrad, we think about this as very peaceful, where we think about ARPANET. And it's like ARPANET was built to withstand a nuclear attack,

but actually it provided the internet, and it was a defensive technology or whatever. It's like us getting hit with things. Yeah. But the people who were buying all the silicon chips were the ones who were sticking them in missiles. And if you think about a missile, you think it's big, exploding, big metal object or whatever. You don't think about it in terms of its composition by value. But if you think about the composition by value, missiles are a big, dumb container for chips. And it's the chips that are the really expensive, important part. And that's what Silicon Valley was providing. And so you start the Cold War era with Silicon Valley providing this crucial ingredient for the secret sauce for the American post-war era, which was miscellaneism, right? We're going to like, we will blow up the entire

world. And so that's Palo Alto's promise. And that's, this is equations that Shockley had been doing during the war, right? He was like, well, if this technology keeps increasing in the way that I imagine it will, you can imagine one person having the power to destroy the entire world. And that could really work out great for us, you know? And it does in some ways. Less great if you, you know you live in Korea or Vietnam. And so this plan of build a bunch of computer chips, what became computer chips, at that point just chips, build a bunch of chips, put them in explosives, drop them on Asia, was the plan, right? That was the plan to

re-secure American domination in the wake of the anti-colonial struggle after World War II. So you have the Maoists win in China, the right-wing forces throughout the now decolonized world after the defeat of Germany, but particularly Japan. Now you have anti-colonial forces insurgent. You can't recolonize. The Dutch are not going to be able to recolonize Indonesia after they've been kicked out and the Japanese have been kicked out. And so the question of how is America, but really capitalism, how is a class system going to secure control over the world post-World War II, over an unequal world post-World War II, at a time when equality is on the march. And Palo Alto really becomes the answer, and Palo Alto's technology really becomes the answer to that question, which is something they've been thinking about since the David Starr Jordan era of like, well, if anyone can use a gun

to shoot down the general, how are we going to have elite people control the world anymore? How can elite power be maintained? And it's important to remember that these people had a conception of human hierarchy as essential, right? This is better people are better. And if you create some sort of world system where everyone's equal, that's unnatural and wrong. And it must be imposed by authoritarians on the world, is the only way to have equality. And so you have to fight for natural inequality. And they work through these ideas and they incorporate new genetic science into it to the point where they've got a sort of reinvented racism, reinvented global hierarchy of races for the close of the 20th century. And now we see the 21st century, right?

This is what it was for. And you see the connection of someone like Peter Thiel, who's at Stanford in the 90s, picking up on the stuff from Shockley, picking up on the Ehrlich, the environmental racists, we call them now or whatever, and bringing that now into the 21st century. We'll come back to Peter Th thiel but i want to reverse a bit more and stay in this in this period that we're that we're talking about right because i feel like you know you're describing these narratives right these people who are interested in hierarchy who are very much wedded to the military-industrial complex this is not just where their profits come from but they also kind of believe in this broader project that is

being pushed forward. And in many of the tech histories that we're familiar with and the narratives around the tech industry, it has a very kind of anti-establishment framing, right? That comes out of this period in the late 60s and through the 70s, where there's kind of a backlash to this linkage, I guess, between the tech industry and the military, where there are some people who are pushing back on that, right? There are some people who are presenting the narrative that actually technology is going to allow us to take down these hierarchies, right? Steve Jobs and the Apple computer, for example, this is one of the ways that he promotes it. You know, the personal computer is going to empower you as an individual. So now we can

take down these kind of corporate hierarchies, these hierarchies that existed. And this becomes a particularly important narrative for the tech industry, for personal computers, for digital technologies as these things blow up through the 80s and 90s and into the 2000s, right? Obviously, as I said when we started off, we had a previous conversation about Stuart Brand and whether he deserves the position in this history that he's often given. And he doesn't come up in your book at all. And you actually push back against this kind of telling of this moment in history and what it actually means for the tech industry. So can you go into that a little bit and unpack

it for us? Yeah, I would say it's maybe even the prevalent story of that period, right? Is that like the counterculture and the tech industry emerge out of some connected yearning for individual independence out of a world that was too authoritarian and whatever. There are different versions of this, right? There's the like tech booster-ish one where they're very psyched about themselves. They're like, we transformed America, man. Things were a bummer and not cool. And like, also we're rich. Way to go us.

You know, we are vindicated by our success. And there are a lot of books like that. And then there's the critical version, which is sort of the Californian ideology one, where it's like, this was neoliberalism. That like the new left, and they say the new left, even though they shouldn't, the new left liked technology and liked individualism. And they didn't realize that they'd opened Pandora's box and that they were creating, you know, Reaganism and the neoliberal America. I think both of those are basically wrong, right? That like they're conflating two things that ought not to be conflated. And that like the counterculture, if we think of the counterculture as like people who liked the

Rolling Stones and took acid, that was not just not a left-wing group or whatever, but one that really defied any sort of political characterization, except in an aesthetic sense, right? So there were plenty of conservative students who were pro-war who also liked the stones and liked drugs, right? It wasn't like that counterculture. It wasn't dazed and confused. And even dazed and confused wasn't dazed and confused, right? They're still jocks and dazed and confused and they're mean. So this conflation of the counterculture and like the internet and the beginning of tech is I think the predominant narrative. But what was really going on was a global conflict over who was going

to rule the world, right? And like the Cold War was the important thing that was going on at the time. And they were combatants in it. They didn't like to think of themselves as Cold War was the important thing that was going on at the time. And they were combatants in it. They didn't like to think of themselves as Cold War combatants, but they were. And they were on what I think of as the wrong side. And not just on accident, but on purpose. And so someone like Stuart Brand was a pro-American, anti-communist throughout his life, right? And so were a lot of people in that milieu. Not all of them, but a fair number

of them and enough of them that I think it characterized it. And so when I think of Steve Jobs, the characteristic image of Steve Jobs for me isn't Steve Jobs in the 70s wearing flip-flops or whatever. It's Steve Jobs in the 80s wearing a bow tie. That's when I think Steve Jobs. I think Steve Jobs in the 80s wearing a bow tie. And that's when I think Steve Jobs, I think Steve Jobs in the 80s wearing a bow tie. And he never claimed to be like a leftist or something. He was a, he ran a company, literally a capitalist. It seems notable that a lot of these people kind of, you know, have that aesthetic of the counterculture

and then are often using it to try to turn out a business that is kind of using the narrative of the counterculture and pushing back against like existing corporate hierarchies and stuff to then build their own, right? Stuart Brand was always trying to turn out a business with the various things he was doing, you know, in the hippie movement or whatever. And Steve Jobs does the same thing, right? It's like, you know, IBM is like the old kind of computer company, the old hierarchical

corporation. Apple, we're the new kind of individualistic, the old hierarchical corporation. Apple, we're the new kind of individualistic company that's empowering you as the individual that's taken down these hierarchies. But we're eventually building what's going to become the biggest company in the world by market cap. Yeah. And that's partly advertising, right? It's significantly advertising. You look at that and then you look at who was investing in Apple, right? And not just like Xerox at the beginning. There's a very, very important investment by Xerox, not just of finances, but in a sharing technology.

But then also you have, you know, like foreign authoritarians investing in Apple, like in the 80s, not just now, but like it was a site for capitalists to bet on the future and to bet on a very particular kind of future, the kind that Steve Jobs wanted, which was an unregulated, what we think of as like neoliberal future. That was always what Apple was a bet on. And it was a bet that a lot of those powerful people made too, right? A lot of those people bought in, not just on Apple, but in Silicon Valley generally. And so you see the like microchip era after the success of Fairchild, which again, Sherman Fairchild is an inheritor of one of the main positions in IBM, which is what

we're talking about, right? One of these big blue, the characteristically non-Silicon Valley company. It's like, all right, well, his dad founded that. And then he goes to Silicon Valley and found Fairchild Semiconductor in part. So it's not disconnected from these other companies. And then you have after that, you've got Wall Street comes in and funds a whole other generation of semiconductor companies very quickly after Fairchild once they see it's a success. So from the beginning, there's overlap between... And the new left knows this. The new left is incredibly intellectual, very scholarly when it comes to some of this stuff.

And they're producing their own, the Stanford left called them red papers, right? Not white papers, but red papers. military and the investment into capital and the like overlapping directorates and just like hugely complex, detailed, cool infographics, you know, like lots and lots of information. And so the depiction of them as like clumsily, thoughtlessly stumbling into the wrong world is incorrect, right? It gets the story wrong. It's they lost, right? They lost the big war. Although got to give them a little credit for contributing in a small way to the victory of the NLF in the Vietnam War and the defeat of the United States. Sometimes we have a hard time, especially our cohort, thinking about an anti-war movement means like stop the war.

But for them, the anti-war movement meant win the war on the Vietnamese side, right? They were winning against America very clearly. And so that defeat of America was a victory for the new left straight up. And we should see it that way. But then ultimately, they're defeated in a struggle for control of the United States, right? Partly in a violent struggle with security forces. And so I try and detail how that overlaps with Palo Alto in the history. But there's a lot of back and forth, right? There's a lot of bombing. So like Bank of America gets bombed constantly. Hewlett Packard gets bombed pretty regularly. Stanford gets bombed, especially in its electronics facilities, like targeting the electronics facilities. And computers across the country get bombed by the new left. And so to think of like in the California ideology, that essay says the new left was pro-technology. And at the same time, they have them just straight up bombing computer centers across the country.

I think that's bad historiography. I did think that was like a fascinating example that you pulled out, right, of all of these bombings of the computers. But that shows us that, you know, these kinds of opposition to various technologies is very old, right? Like, it has constantly been happening. It's just that these are not the parts of the history that an industry like Silicon Valley wants us to hear, or certainly that capital more generally wants us to hear, right? They don't want us to know about the opposition to the forces that, you know, make them profits and expand capital and all of this sort of stuff. And so it's always great to kind of see those aspects of that history kind of reemerge for people to

learn about it once again, because it says, you know, sure, we're opposing these technologies in the present. And certainly that's still a very kind of marginalized, I think, part of the tech discussion. You know, there's still a lot of boosterism, still a lot of promotion of technology, still a lot of like, you know, we need to embrace this. This is the future. But there has always been opposition to technology. And in the past, it took much more kind of violent and direct forms than it takes today. Yeah. We talk about people, you know, tweeting angrily at Bezos or Musk. And like back in the day,

they would chase people around the peninsula. Like the stories about them bombing Bill Hewlett's house, for example, right? Like tech leaders today have it easy. They should remember that they have it easy. And maybe if they read this history, they'll think about sort of the historical forces they're messing with a little more seriously.

No wonder Elon Musk is scared of assassination coordinates uh getting out there i mean you saw they published maps right the new left publishes this great map how to say that says how to destroy an empire out of palo alto that has all these like locations pinpointed on their campus map or their town map basically that has all these military contractors and all the like political offices with a militant agenda and that was a struggle that they lost but it was a struggle that they fought overlooking that i don't think does us any favors might do some people some favors but not not me not you. It's fascinating. When someone going to make one of those in Google Maps for the modern, you know, their own overlay. This is fascinating. And I want to go back to Jobs for a minute, right?

Because obviously, as we've been talking about, the story that we get about Jobs is the 1970s. You know, he's the hippie kind of guy who goes into the computer industry and then kind of upends it and brings these new kind of ideas into the industry and, you know, kind of creates one of these companies that goes on to take off and kind of shepherd these ideas and these values into the industry and what kind of comes after it. But in the book, you write a lot about how, you know, as you've been saying, Jobs is not so much a break from that history, but is very much participating in it and is also doing something that these companies kind of need him to do by breaking the power of labor and changing the dynamics of labor in the industry that they are dependent on.

And that is kind of dragging down these older guard companies because they are dependent on these kind of traditional workforces that they've had for a long time. Can you talk about that aspect of it and how Jobs kind of delivers that to them and does that work for them? Yeah. The Palo Alto Research Center, founded by Xerox, is this famed computer research lab that really does and holds some of the main guys who do the development of what we understand as the personal computer.

And they do this research for Xerox. In the 60s, develop what we think of as like a computer and show it to the world, coincidentally, called the Alto. And the main story of how the Alto, what happens to it, is this sort of triumphalist business story about Apple versus Xerox. The Xerox is this like old sclerotic company, and they can't figure out how to do innovation. Even though they hired all the best computer scientists in the world who invented a

computer in the 60s, a personal computer at your desk in the 60s, they couldn't build it, and they couldn't figure it out, and they fumbled it, and they just gave it up to a new generation. That's why they fucked up. And this is like a very important business history story, but it's also very core to Silicon Valley identity is like Xerox didn't know what they had, accidentally gave it to Apple. Apple took over because they were ready to do the future. And that is absolutely not what happened. What you actually have is Xerox making a pretty sizable investment, I think it's 100K maybe at the time, in Apple at this early, I think it's between Apple I,

Apple II, decisive moment in the history of Apple. And so the question is, why is Xerox investing in Apple? They don't need Apple's technical expertise. Wozniak's good, but they've got the best scientists in computing, you know, working at Xerox PARC. They've got this huge lab and they've got plenty of money. They can hire all the people they want. They're not going to Apple for Apple's technology, nor were they like, you know, needing Apple's production experience, right? They're Xerox. They're like Fortune whatever company. They're a huge, huge, huge company in terms of office devices and printing, of course. And they're also at Xerox PARC going to invent the laser printer, which sets up Xerox for a very long time. So the question is, why is Xerox investing in a company like Apple, and what do they want from them?

You could see them as just hedging against a future competitor, but that's not really what was going on. What was going on is Xerox was looking at Apple as a contract producer for the production Alto. They were saying, we aren't set up to produce consumer electronics. We're set up to produce office electronics, which includes all these huge labor contracts. We've got all these deals, this whole sales force. And so to integrate this new device, they would have to start from scratch in terms of production, not because they don't know how to build things, but because Apple could build things cheaper than they could because they weren't laden with all this overhead of running a large mid-century corporation and the large mid-century corporation's labor deal. So Apple was sort of a way to shake

off the New Deal era for large companies in America, not just Xerox, but other companies as well. And so Xerox is saying, if we could get Apple, you know, Apple's production is good, not because it's so advanced, but because it's so cheap. And the way Apple was doing production was in subcontracted basements throughout Silicon Valley, where underpaid, mostly immigrant workers were putting boards together in their basements or in basements where a bunch of people were working. So what we think of as like sweatshop production. And so that's what the big companies were interested in, in Apple at the beginning. And that's what led to this sort of technology trade that we think of as a mistake. And then you skip over the Filipino families that are in basements and the Vietnamese families that are in basements in the Bay Area,

many of them refugees from bombing campaigns that were executed out of Silicon Valley who are putting together these generation of devices, not only the devices themselves, but putting together the circuits for a new labor relation that's going to secure American domination in the fourth quarter of the 20th century and into the 21st. And so that's the key historical thing that's going on with the production of these computers. Not like John Perry Barlow writing Grateful Dead lyrics, and then also thinking about, wouldn't it be cool if we could all talk to each other? Like that's not the historical engine. The historical engine

is this like worldwide class struggle. I think that's an example of the really rich kind of connections that the book draws between all of these different forces and all of these different kind of happenings that are going on and how they come together in this industry, you know, around Palo Alto and the Bay Area and Silicon Valley and what have you. I imagine that, you know, once this takes place, that's basically what allows the kind of breaking of this old way of treating labor in the industry, in these companies that allows for a shift more toward, you know, moving production to cheaper places in the industry, in these companies that allows for a shift more toward, you know, moving production to cheaper places in the United States, but also offshoring and starting to move production away from the United States altogether as these things are developing, as these companies are using companies like Apple to ensure that they need to produce more cheaply. And that means

that they need to throw off all these workers that they used to have, that they used to be able to guarantee a good living to. Yeah, well, they are totally advanced in that. If you think about, first of all, where California is positioned in terms of the Pacific and the world in terms of where you've got offshoring of jobs going. But also this starts extremely early, especially with Silicon Valley. The jobs started leaving pretty immediately. And so we have this conversation now about the chip industry. Oh, we need to reshore the chip industry. We need to bring it back to American chip production because we sent those jobs abroad in the 80s or 90s or something. But that's not true. That's not what happened. The chip foundries

start getting shipped overseas to Taiwan, I think it was the first one, in 1961. And Atari, where Wozniak and Jobs sort of get their start, I guess more Jobs, Wozniak is then subcontracted famously to do breakout, are really advanced offshores you know you think of atari is like cute video game company but they were going to be unionized very early they were one of the first like big union campaigns i think it was the glaziers union was going to unionize the three atari factories and they immediately shut down to ship the jobs, and the union campaign collapsed at the third. And this set, you know, helped set the agenda for Silicon Valley labor relations into the future. And then, you know, we talk about gig economy now, but like way before that,

Silicon Valley was the core of the temp economy, right? They had more temp workers than anywhere else in the country. And so you say temp worker now in Silicon Valley, maybe an older person knows what you're talking about, but like a younger person is like, what's a temp? Is that like a gig worker? You know, they, they rebrand these things, but it's the same labor market innovation that's going on. And that has been just as important as the tech invasion itself. So you've got like Fairchild pumping out the first generation of planar circuits or whatever, their costs are 13 cents, 10 cents out of that 13 is labor. And that's where they're going to focus all of their energy as a company. They basically stop

innovating with their first product and just focus on hammering down those labor costs. And that's been the model for Silicon Valley in a lot of ways. I think it's particularly illustrative and important history to remember, especially as we're in this moment now where the companies are cutting and slashing and laying a bunch of people off and cutting benefits and saying that, you know, this is what we need to do in order to be more competitive, in order to increase our efficiency, that we need to be more like a startup again because we're kind of losing that competitive edge. And I think it's important to go back to these histories as you're outlining, especially in a moment like this, to be able to

say this is what they do constantly. They're always trying to find ways to push back on workers, to stop worker organizing, to limit the pay that workers receive, and that this is just kind of another example of this or, you know, just the latest example in this longer trend that this industry has carried out. Yeah. And a global struggle, right? Not just like a local labor market struggle, but a global struggle over the value of labor, right?

And the power of labor in the world. And so if I can get people to think Silicon Valley and think nuclear missiles and the Cold War and massacres in Vietnam, instead of Silicon Valley, the Grateful Dead and early computers, then I think that will be a very large success. No, absolutely. And so you talk about that piece of it, right? And we've talked a lot about jobs,

and you talk about Gates a lot in the book. But I think we can say this about many of, you know, the kind of individuals that we associate with Silicon Valley and the tech industry in that a lot of these histories and a lot of these narratives are focused around these particular people who are at the top of these companies or are kind of shaping how we think about this industry. But you say that actually when we think about what is actually going on in this industry or kind of forwarded this broader kind of force of capital that was moving through in this period. If someone like Elon Musk, for example, wasn't around in the early 2000s to try to push Tesla and electric cars, then someone else just would have did that. This is an argument that I make very frequently. So can you describe that importance of looking at the forces over the individuals a bit to us, and especially how this plays out in Silicon Valley and why it's important to understand this

rather than just looking at particular men in many cases who are held up as these great people in the Valley who've done these amazing things for us and actually say, these are not necessarily these kind of prophets that we treat them as, but actually there's something much deeper that's going on there. Yeah. I mean, first of all, you don't want to think the way that we do now about the great man history, partly because you start assigning historical forces to individual personalities, right? So you think of Steve Jobs as the prime mover of society as opposed to the reflection of a whole number of historical forces that he can't possibly begin to understand, right? It's like you're looking at the moon and thinking it's the sun.

And that's what happens when you get sort of great man historiography. And that's so much of what Silicon Valley stuff is, even to today. If you want to publish a history of Silicon Valley, and I'm sure even though reviews of my book and stuff will just have five pictures who are actually wiring the boards, right? Like we were just aristocratic privileges or royal privilege even is passed through bloodlines, right? Directly. It's your kid who comes to embody your power through your name. It's not an impersonal system. But with the rise of Palo Alto, concurrently, you have the rise of this impersonal global system that's able to transition power within classes, not just within families. And so you have someone like Herbert Hoover. Herbert Hoover's an orphan, right? His parents die. He comes to Palo Alto in the place of Leland Stanford. Leland Stanford Jr., right, who's the child who dies. We've got parents without a child and a child without parents. And this is an impersonal system that's able to bring

them together and transition the Stanford wealth to Herbert Hoover, right? He becomes, he really becomes Leland Stanford Jr. Historically, like couldn't have hoped for more. He accomplishes everything that the son could have been imagined to have wanted to accomplish and more, right? He is that guy. And he's transferred those privileges and that power through an impersonal system. And you see, not just like general positions being transferred, but like that particular position, right? The position of Herbert Hoover, the position of Leland Stanford Jr. keep getting passed down the line. And it's pretty crazy how close even some of these, like if you look at the Draper family, right? That's like one of the biggest Silicon

Valley VC families. They can trace their line back to a personal friendship with Herbert Hoover, right? If you look at the Bechtel family, people outside of California might not know about Bechtel, which is one of the most important privately held companies in the world, but again, can draw their history back to personal friendships with Herbert Hoover. And so the way that these things can be passed down through a milieu and through institutions like the Hoover Institution, so that someone like Peter Thiel, historically, by the way, also son of a mining engineer, becomes a member of the board of overseers of the Hoover Institution. So he doesn't have to know Herbert Hoover or the Herbert

Hoover family to be an heir to that line, which I don't know how well these people know their own history and know that they are heirs to the Shockley-Hoover. I mean, the Shockley one is just amazing how clear that connection is to Hoover. I don't know. I've gotten some people think like the right wing, if they read this book, they're going to really hate it. They'll be really mad at me. And I think like some of them might be happy to learn some stuff about themselves. Absolutely. And you know, Teal is not someone who is kind of separate from those kind of thinkings around history. Like he's a bit more intellectual than some of these other folks in Silicon Valley who might have a bit more of an inkling of that.

I got to laugh how you pointed out how Peter Thiel never seems to talk about his grandparents. I've noted that before in the past. I actually cut that line in the final book because I found an account. Not only did I found an account of him talking about his grandparents at some party or whatever, he says that his German grandparents were communists who fled Germany, which I think is very... We need some more research on that. We need to hear more about how that line went down. But to be fair to Peter Thiel, I did pull that line because I have now heard rumors of him discussing his German grandparents. Try to be

accurate as possible with the book, you know. Yeah, of course. I do want to see additional research on those grandparents though now. Because I'm not buying that either. Peter Thiel has become very important in recent years, you know, whether it's going back to the PayPal mafia and the things that he was doing there and his most, the more recent power that he has amassed through politics and, you know, personal relationships with the far right and investing in them, of course, because he now has a lot of money to spend on campaigns and things like that. You know, Peter Teal has really become one of these figures who is very important to modern Silicon Valley, right? Especially, you know, in the past 20 years, he seems like a figure who is particularly linked to this legacy, as you're saying, who is someone who seems to emerge right out of it, who picks up

a lot of the same kind of lines that we're hearing through the 20th century from these eugenicists and racists and parrots them when he's at Stanford and at the Stanford Review and then throughout his career beyond that. In the book, you write about how Silicon Valley really went back to the defense industry, not that this link was ever really cut off, but after 9-11. And Peter Thiel is one of the people who is involved in that, starting Palantir and getting a lot of these major contracts. I feel like when we talk about Silicon Valley in this period, there is a massive desire to focus more on, say, Google or Elon Musk or these particular companies. But I feel like the role of Peter Thiel is kind of underplayed. And I think that's partially because at times he,

you know, has not really sought the limelight in the same way that some of these other companies and founders have done. How do you see Peter Thiel's role in the past couple decades of Silicon Valley and what it continues to become in this moment? I see him as a real heir to that Hoover, Shockley, Packard line. I mean, if you're him, I think you'd take as a compliment much more so than most of his peers, even though he's not the kind of like tech inventor that some of them are. Right. And I don't think he really claims to be the like code he figured out mostly is finance, but he you're right that he's someone not just who presents himself as more of an intellectual because he, lots of people in Silicon Valley present themselves lots of different ways.

But someone, I think, who has a better sense that history is real and that it's not just a function of individual people's personalities. And so he's someone who hedges a lot, right? He was in Facebook really early, right? But he also got out pretty early. And he has a habit of trying to think bigger and long-term and sort of conservatively while thinking bigger and long-term in some ways and bezos is similar right these are finance guys more than they are tech guys yeah bezos is a hedge fund guy it was a hedge fund guy teal was a hedge fund guy and so that's not coincidental that that's where they're focusing their attention right now and that the guys who focus their attention there are the ones who have excelled the most.

Whereas someone like Mark Zuckerberg, who's like Facebook as an anchor around his leg and he can never do anything ever again, Thiel didn't set himself up like that way and has refused consistently to set himself up that way, even with something like Palantir, and to strap himself to any one particular company or PayPal or any of these. So the question is, what is his project if it's not a company, right? And so that's why I think you've got to look towards this past and towards this bionomic ideology. And I think he's someone who really believes in the unnaturalness of equality, who believes in the naturalness of hierarchy, which is this bionomic idea, where he's taking that is very scary. And that's part of where I leave the book is he represents the future of Silicon Valley, I think. Yeah, I agree with you, right? And I think that you put it really well, because

he not only acts in this way by trying to pick out the people who he thinks are going to kind of represent what this future could be, whether it's through, you know, his fellowships and things like that, or bringing them into his organization from the Stanford Review, you know, kind of building a network in a really important way, you know, PayPal, Mafia, whatever you want to call it. But also how, as we were talking about, there's this particular narrative of the tech industry that has been dominant, that it was kind of anti-establishment, anti-government, even at the time when it was still had a very close connection to these forces of capitalism, still very close connection to the military industrial

complex, still getting a lot of public subsidies. And that was kind of treated as this is what the tech industry is, this kind of more libertarian paradise. Whereas Peter Thiel, I think always shows the through line of that kind of conservative ideology that you're outlining in the book that is always still there. And if it ever really died down or faded, you know, there's no question that it has reemerged in this period and that he is a really key figure in that. And if anything, you know, the other founders and, and tech folks, a lot of them are now kind of following his example and moving more toward him because he was, you know, maybe quote unquote, right the whole time. Yeah. I would add Larry Ellison also, um, who is someone who's not held up,

even though he is, uh, you know, he fills many Silicon Valley stereotypes and is not someone who like hides from the limelight or whatever. I think it's because Oracle is a less consumer oriented product. Maybe that people don't think about him in the same way. But he's just as important and just as influential, just as rich, too, and just as wacky conservative at this point. So, yeah, I mean, like, I talk about Thiel a fair amount. I talk about Ellison a fair amount. Ellison, who, you know, is a CIA contractor from the beginning. That's what Oracle is and the whole history of Oracle.

Whereas someone like Elon Musk, I think it's one mention maybe in the whole book, like maybe one or two, just like he exists. There are some companies or whatever. I don't talk about cryptocurrency. So I tried to stay away from things that seem epiphenomenal to me. And the main thing about the social media age that seems really important is this relationship with the state and surveillance and the breakdown of privacy on the internet and the incorporation of these companies into the state effort, which happens pretty cleanly after 9-11. Of course, there is this whole military background, but the whole idea of a

counterculture, anti-authoritarian Silicon Valley culture or whatever is maintained through this period, even though behind the doors, there's not just collaboration with the Bush administration, but they provided the technological backbone for the war on terror that we later find out through Snowden and stuff. which we don't associate those two things, but we should in this case, that he with the tech industry and with people like Ellison really come up with the rules for the internet. And those are the rules that Facebook plays by. Those are the rules that TikTok and Snapchat, those are the rules that, and the rules that were set up was basically, you can do what you want as long as you give us access. And that deal between the corporate internet and the military and the surveillance intelligence services is sort of why the internet's so fucked, right?

Like that's what's set up the internet as a social space was this deal between the state and companies to spy on us and abuse us as customers. They shook hands. We did not. Yeah. But that gets left out of much of the narrativizing around it. But it's good to see you kind of bring it out in the book and make sure that we're drawing more attention to that and ensuring that we understand all those linkages and how they link back to these much longer trends that are going on in this industry. You know, this has been a fantastic conversation. I want to end with this question. At the end of the book, you know, after outlining all of these relationships, how these forces of capital have worked their way through California and the world, how that has empowered the tech industry

through these linkages with the military, and in many cases, you know, against the kind of benefit of the public or parts of the public, at least, you know, there were some who certainly benefited from all of these happenings and all of these things that happened through this history. After exploring this rich history and the consequences of these capitalist forces in Palo Alto and the wider world, you make a provocative proposal that to begin to rectify some of these harms, that Stanford should be handed back to indigenous peoples. How do you see this working? And what would you hope would come of something like that? It's a pretty modest proposal, right? In some ways, because Stanford has tons of land. They've

got 8,000 acres that they got from within Stanford. If you've ever been to Stanford University, it feels kind of like a ghost town, right? It's got a very, very low concentration of people. One of the things they find charming about it, whatever. They've got tons of land. And the reason they've been able to hold on to all this land this entire time is because the covenant with the founders was that it couldn't be sold. And so instead you had the school turning into a landlord where they're leasing land to all these tech companies, leasing land to, for example, Palo Alto High School, where I went to school, or leasing land to Sam Bankman Freed's parents, for example, is another one. But Stanford owns all that land, including a bunch that is not in active use or whatever.

At the same time, they have a land acknowledgement that acknowledges the ancestral claim to the land of the Muwekma Ohlone, who are a specific, organized, political, tribal band of Ohlone people. Not the general Ohlone people who are the aboriginal inhabitants of the Bay Area, but a very specific, politically organized group of Ohlone that are acknowledged. At the same time, the school has broken its covenant in the past. I talk about in order to transfer some land to the Department of Veterans to build a veterans hospital because the federal government only builds on land that they own. And so it's made an exception in the past for sovereign entities, even though the federal government doesn't recognize the Muwekma Ohlone that Stanford does and has transferred remains to the Muwekma in the past. And so you have the policy foundations, you have the premises, the precedents for this kind of land transfer that I think would be, I mean, just the act of transferring that

land would be a huge step for American history, right? Like bigger than any climate school that Stanford's going to do or any like donation that they're going to make or whatever to transfer that land and to say that if this world's going to last, right, we need to put it in the hands of people who are prepared to responsibly manage the land. And we are not able to do that. Now, we hear that colleges make crazy, unaccountable, lefty decisions all the time, right? They're all land acknowledging all over the place. I think Stanford, if you go into the land acknowledgement page, even has a link

about land back and how acknowledging land isn't sufficient, right? And so it's like, they know that this is the case they've got a group they can transfer it to it doesn't seem all that complicated to me and if you want like a people want to like pragmatic reform step to answer the huge series of problems like i've got one right there very easy and in the book i talk about it as like return all of the Stanford lands and return the $30 billion in endowment or whatever. You could have a smaller concession, who knows, to start this conversation of transferring land back. So to me, it seems really modest in terms of a reform proposal. Like if you want to be smaller than that, like in terms of the land that was stolen in California, you want it to be smaller than some acres, then you're not really serious.

At the same time, people treat the suggestion as a joke. They don't understand it as an actual policy solution because it seems impossible. And it may tend to be impossible, right? The like board of trustees of Stanford might feel that they cannot do this and they might be right. You know, if they try to do it, maybe there would be a court challenge from some alumni association that would remove them. Like who knows? The question is, do they have the ability to give this land back? And if they do, they should. And if they don't, then we need to deal with a system that is unable to solve its problems. And if we have a system that's unable to even begin to solve its problems, then I think we've got to look back to some of what they were saying in the 60s and some of what the new left understood about this, which is that we're not facing a situation where you need to convince the people who are in power to make the right decision, because that's not really what they're in power to do. That's

not how their power works, right? It's the decisions themselves that are in power, not the personnel. And so that calls for a different kind of struggle than one in which they have the ability to make those kind of reparative decisions. So I leave it open. You know, I would love to love to see it happen. But I think we're at that point where if this kind of institution can't make this kind of choice, then we need to stop trying to convince people. Absolutely.

No, I thought it was a great proposal to end off the book after outlining, you know, so much of this history, so much of what this university has been up to, the kinds of people who have, you know, gone through those doors and come out again and the influence that they've had,

you know, in a really kind of negative direction. So yeah, I thought it was fantastic and I'd love to see greater debate and challenge on this particular point to try to push the university in that direction. And with that said, I would also say, you know, thanks so much for giving me your time to discuss the book. I would highly recommend, obviously, pretty much anyone who listens to this podcast, I think would find a lot really fascinating in this book and exploring this history. You know, obviously, history is one of the things that we love to discuss on the show to get more into the history of the tech industry to learn more

about it. And this book just like delivers it in spades. Like, you know, it's all there, everything that you want to know. Thanks so much, Malcolm. Good luck with the release of the book. And thanks for taking the time to chat. Thanks again for having me back. Malcolm Harris is the author of Palo Alto, a history of California, capitalism and the world. It's out now. You can follow him on Twitter at Big Mean Internet. You can follow me at at Paris Marks and you can follow the show at Tech Won't Save Us. Tech Won't Save Us is produced by Eric Wickham and is part of the Harbinger Media Network. If you want to support the work that goes into making the show every week, you can go to patreon.com slash tech won't save us

become a supporter. Thanks for listening. Thank you.