Upstream - A History of California, Capitalism, and the World with Malcolm Harris

Episode Date: May 23, 2023

We’ve been taught to think of staggering economic inequality, the disposability of nonwhite  labor populations, hyper-exploitation, and minority rule as bugs within the capitalist system — things to be corrected by capitalist technology and innovation — but in fact, all of these things are anything but bugs — they are features of this system, baked deep into it at its very core. And, in many respects, the birthplace of modern, global capitalism, with its exclusion of racialized others, its rabid anti-labor ideology, its universalized immiseration, and its unrelenting push for hyperproductivity, is a place that might surprise you at first: California. Specifically? Silicon Valley. Even more specifically? Palo Alto.  In his book, Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World, author Malcolm Harris traces a very bold line from early Californian history, with its brutal enslavement of Indigenous peoples, its railroad and agricultural barons, the codification of corporations as people, and the founding of Stanford University — the intellectual heart of modern capitalism — all the way to our modern tech-dystopia, marked by permanently unstable and low wage gig jobs, unimaginably harsh housing markets, and one of the deepest divides between the working and owning classes that this country has ever seen. And it all comes back, over and over again, to Palo Alto.  Thank you to Dead Kennedys for the intermission music. Upstream's theme music was composed by Robert Raymond. This episode of Upstream was made possible with support from listeners like you. Upstream is a labor of love — we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Please consider chipping in a one-time or recurring donation at www.upstreampodcast.org/support If your organization wants to sponsor one of our upcoming documentaries, we have a number of sponsorship packages available. Find out more at upstreampodcast.org/sponsorship For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.    

Before we get started, please, if you can, go to Apple Podcasts and rate, subscribe, and leave us a review there. You can also leave us a rating on Spotify now. This really helps us get in front of more eyes and into more ears. We don't have a marketing budget or anything like that for Upstream, so we really do rely on listeners like you to help grow our audience and spread the word. Also, please visit upstreampodcast.org forward slash support to support us with a reoccurring monthly or one-time donation. This helps keep this podcast free and sustainable, so please, if you can, go there to donate. Thank you. There's pretty good consensus about when capitalism itself becomes a world system, and that's in this mid-19th century with the incorporation of the Pacific and with this sort

of closing the clasp of the belt of capitalism around the earth. And so that means the incorporation of California into this unified world system of production and distribution. And so much of that has to do with just Californians' relation geographically, right? So it's relation to the Pacific, it's relation to Mexico, Central America, and South America means it's at the center of so many different labor flows from the very beginning, from the very, very beginning. You're listening to Upstream. Upstream. Upstream.

Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. A podcast of documentaries and conversations that invites you to unlearn everything you thought you knew about economics. I'm Della Duncan. And I'm Robert Raymond. We've been taught to think of staggering economic inequality, the disposability of non-white labor populations, hyper-exploitation, and minority rule as bugs within the capitalist system, things to be corrected by capitalist technology and innovation.

But in fact, all of these things are anything but bugs. They are features of the system, baked deep into it at its very core. And in many respects, the birthplace of modern global capitalism, with its exclusion of racialized others, its rabid anti-labor ideology, its universalized immiseration, and its unrelenting push for hyper-productivity, is a place that might surprise you at first. California. Specifically, Silicon Valley. Even more specifically, Palo Alto. In his book, Palo Alto, A History of California, Capitalism, and the World, author Malcolm Harris traces a very bold line from early Californian history with its brutal

enslavement of indigenous peoples, its railroad and agricultural barons, the codification of corporations as people, and the founding of Stanford University, the intellectual heart of modern capitalism. All the way to our modern tech dystopia, marked by permanently unstable and low-wage gig jobs, unimaginably harsh housing markets, and one of the deepest divides between the working and owning classes that this country has ever seen. And it all comes back over and over again to Palo Alto. Here's Robert in conversation with Malcolm Harris. Hey Malcolm, it's great to have you on Upstream. And I'm wondering if to start, you could just maybe briefly introduce yourself

and talk a little bit about why you decided to write a book about a very particular city, Palo Alto. Sure. My name is Malcolm Harris. I'm a freelance writer and author. This is my third book. The first one was Kids These Days, Human Capital and the Making of Millennials. The second was Shit is Fucked Up and Bullshit, History Since the end of history, 2011 to 2020. And now it's Palo Alto, a history of California capitalism and the world. And I grew up in Palo Alto from ages 8 to 18. So that was like a big part of my rememberable childhood experience. I wrote the book for money, as one does.

rememberable childhood experience. I wrote the book for money, as one does, but why this book instead of a different book, I think one of the reasons is as someone without a terminal degree, one of the ways you access the authority to do serious historical work is if you have a personal tie to the historical object, and then you work that in. And I did sort of a bait and switch where I pitched it as the book as a like Joan Didion-esque personal romp through history, and then pulled out all the personal stuff. So now it's just a 700 page history book. Well, there is some personal stuff there, specifically at the top. And so yeah, you grew up in Palo Alto. And I'm wondering, yeah, I'd love to maybe start a little bit more with that personal side. I grew up in the South Bay. So maybe 3040 minutes from Palo Alto. But I think there are a lot of parallels in what I

experienced growing up, but I think around the same time, we're probably around the same age. So I found the personal stuff pretty fascinating and relatable. And there is an opening line in your book where you say that Palo Alto is haunted. And you talk about like a large historical crime that can never be set right. And I know that's a pretty profound and deep and packed with a lot of meaning in there. And I'm wondering if maybe you could try to unpack that a little bit, just sort of explaining what you mean by that. Yeah. So the history I'm dealing with, just the whole period of history of Anglo-American Alta California is just not that long. And the book seems long, but that's because I can do it

straight through without having to take any decade-long skips or whatever. So I start with the genocidal colonization of Alta California by Anglo-Americans in the mid-19th century. And one of the things that I really found out when doing this work is that that's just so recent, right? We're talking about like five generations ago. And so the idea that like Palo Alto is strange and that this history is ongoing were related in my research. And it shed some light on my personal experience in my childhood, as well as like many other people's experience I've found, because it turns out this perception or this feeling that Palo Alto is a strange place and that there's something going on that the people who live there

don't quite know about or can't put their finger on is very, very common. And going back to like, you know, William James at the beginning of the 20th century, talking about Palo Alto giving him the creeps when he visits. And he uses those words, Palo Alto gives me the creeps. Palo Alto gives me the creeps too. It's a lot of people, it's a creepy place. And so they're trying to explain and figure out what it is about that place that is creepy and where the relations in the past exist that can sort of clarify that. Even things like the buildings, the industrial buildings look like they're hiding behind bushes. And that turns out to be the case. They are intentionally hiding whatever industry has been in the area behind setbacks and zoning restrictions to disguise it for as long as it's been there. And like that leads to a feeling of creepiness,

you know? So you mentioned that like in doing the research and thinking about this book, you quickly realized what a short sort of historical span of time you're dealing with here. And I realized that myself when, for example, Upstream has done some work with the Amamutsen Ohlone people, just exploring some of the struggles that they're currently facing in and around Gilroy, this particular site called Juristak. They are trying to bulldoze it basically and create like a giant gravel pit at this very, very sacred site. And when I was doing some research for that, I also realized just how, yeah, short time span, just a few generations ago, all of the horrible sort of genocidal violence of early California, how recent

that was, and in many ways, this is ongoing, of course. But I'm wondering if we can sort of start there. Can you describe the process by which capitalism emerged in California in sort of the mid 19th century? It's a history of genocide and enslavement and enclosure and forced proletarianization, particularly with non-white labor populations that are generally regarded as disposable. And just to sort of maybe prompt you here, I have a quote from your book. You write, California did not see capitalist economics evolve step by step out of feudal property relations. Capital hit California like a meteor. Alien tendrils surging from the crash site. Yeah, so I'm wondering if you could just

respond to that and any thoughts you have on that. Yeah, so unlike many places in the world where you see capitalism emerging directly out of these feudal labor relationships that, due to various situational pressures, transform into capitalist hierarchies, whether that's revolutionary tensions or progressive tensions that transform it, which both happen. But in California, Anglo-American capitalism doesn't evolve organically out of the Spanish feudal system. Instead, that system is wiped off the face of the state or what becomes the state pretty quickly. And those property rights are rejected. And the Mexican ownership that is the remnant of Spanish colonization is pushed out of Alta California by the Anglo-American colonizers very, very quickly, like almost without a bullet

being fired, right? And that really shows how thin that colonization was in the first place. And that at this point, you've still got the majority population is 150,000 California indigenous people who still live in the area, right? It's not like Spanish colonization wiped out the population. In fact, the mission system wasn't even able to absorb their labor fully. And so people, indigenous people in California at the time of Anglo-American colonization still maintained a lot of traditional relations to the land and to production. And so you have a situation where feudalism triumph over the areas is incomplete in the first place.

But when capitalists come in, they really want this clean slate in terms of social relations. And the only way you get that is through genocide. And so they commission these militias, and it's this real synthesis of grassroots vigilantism, predatory stealing land from the people who live there and killing them, synthesized with this growing state power that was able to finance and organize these groups and legitimize them, and a federal power that ultimately reimburses the state for their genocide costs during this period. And because this happens around the Civil War, there's way too little attention to it in terms of our national story and national understanding. And we tend to write the colonization of North America into one story that happened a really long time ago,

as opposed to one that happened five generations ago in California, which it is. It's a separate story and has to be understood that way. And the kind of system that those militant settlers were producing was not the sort of small farmer, I'm going to get a spot and be a human and raise my family and support them from this piece of land I got in California. It was much more advanced capitalist from the beginning. So if you're a settler, you're thinking about that place of land as timber reserves that you can lease to the timber company that's going to pay you some rent for your piece of California, or someone's going to pay you for the water rights or the mining rights, and that you get a passive income flow from that. And that's what settling meant to those settlers at the time. And that was certainly the promise to be made at the beginning was not that you could be a hardworking farmer with your little patch of land, but that you could get

speculatively rich by hearing about California before other people had heard about it. Yeah, it's really interesting because we just released our previous episode was a documentary and a good portion of it we go through this sort of history of enclosures in Europe and England and explore and trace sort of capitalism as it emerged there. And I was simultaneously reading your book as we were writing the script for that documentary. And it was really interesting hearing about how the process of capitalism emerging sort of happened in California in a different way. And yeah, so I appreciate you outlining that. And of course, yes, capitalism didn't emerge into being in California. But in your book, you do argue that capitalism didn't really become a totalizing sort of global phenomenon until it sort of learned a

few tricks in California. And can you talk a little bit about what you mean by that? Like, what components of capitalism were honed in California, broadly speaking? Like what did capital learn and accomplish here? And maybe, you know, if you feel like drawing on some specific examples to help illustrate and color that, that could be helpful. Sure. I mean, the key thing is the link to the Pacific, right? So like you said, there's a long debate and many examples

about where and how capitalism emerges as a system and where you can draw that line and say, this is capitalism and that's not capitalism. And so you've got like Ellen Meekin-Woods saying, you know, this emerges out of British agricultural relations. You've got Banerjee talks about commercial relations in East India. We've got the Italians got a version. I just read a version that involves the colonization of Newfoundland and its fishing systems. So there are a lot of different accounts of where the first sort of capitalist practice pops up. And it's centuries before my story, but there's pretty good consensus about when capitalism itself becomes a world system. And that's in this mid-19th century with the incorporation of the Pacific and with this sort of closing the clasp of the belt of

capitalism around the earth. And so that means the incorporation of California, but not just California, also Australia, Japan, China, into this unified world system of production and distribution. And so from the very beginning, it's California's relationship to the Chinese proletariat, to Chinese workers, that is as important to the state and its future or the region and its future as anything else, like period, at least as important to the state and its future or the region and its future as anything else, like period, at least as important as its relationship to the East Coast of the United States. And we see that into today. And I think 100 years from now, it'll be a lot easier to see California and the West Coast as something other than just an extension of the United States westward, which it's really not.

It begins as an overseas colony for the United States. And I think it's important to see it that way, that if you wanted to get to California from the East Coast, if you had the money, you'd take a boat down to the Gulf of Mexico, take it to Central America, walk across Central America and take a boat up the west side of the continent. And that's how you'd get to California. So someone like Leland Stanford, who is in a good financial position when he first comes out, thanks to his parents, takes that route. It's an overseas colony.

In fact, it's like you got to go pretty far. And even if you don't have money, if you're going overland at this period before the existence of the transcontinental, you're going through other nations. You're going through unconquered territory in North America. And so either way, it's, you know, you have to leave the United States to get to California one way or the other. It's an overseas colony in a way that, you know, Algeria is or South Africa is during the period. And I think it's important to see that in that context and the development of the kind of capitalism that you get out of this period in the end of the 19th century and into the 20th century of imperial monopoly capital for the first

time, a different kind of relation that's emerging. And California plays a very, very important role, and Californians play a very, very important role. CB Well, you brought up Leland Stanford. And so speaking of the early Californians, early California settlers, rather, I'm wondering, so in your book, you highlight a cast of characters that make repeat appearances, sort of a cast of characters that make repeat appearances. But you also have a very important and interesting analysis when it comes to focusing on individuals acting within the capitalist system. And I'd actually like to read a quote here by Jonathan Latham in his review of your book on the nation, which I read in preparation for this interview, and I thought was really excellent. And this is a quote from Jonathan, not from the book.

A system like capitalism finds the villains it needs. Many of these guys were simply in the right place at the right time and sufficiently willing to function as exalted cogs in the machine of various genocides, conspiracies, corporations, weapons research projects, and coups. A few might truly have been ingenious scoundrels, but most of them played parts that could easily have been taken up by others, had fate, or rather, the irresistible systemic necessities of capital accrual, commons enclosure, and empire making making dealt the cards a little differently. Okay, so sorry, it was a little bit of a longer quote, but I thought it was a really important

sort of caveat because you mentioned this multiple times in your book about how capital works through individuals. And so with that context, though, I'm wondering if you can talk to us a little bit about Leland Stanford. I am not that interested in him as an individual, honestly, but more so the role he played in California, what he symbolizes, and how the forces that built the West weren't really intending to meet any actual needs in society like these you mentioned these like railroad tracks leading nowhere but rather like the pursuit of profit right this unquenchable thirst for profit I'm wondering if you could talk about that yeah Leland Stanford is the guy who really got my head into to thinking about the characters that way because he's such a great example of

someone who is like a very little substance as a as an individual like especially the best evidence for this comes from his co-workers who the other like oligarchs who hang out with him there's a group of four of them they called themselves the associates and they're the guys who transformed their various Sacramento shops into this railroad empire through financial chicanery and political connections and subcontracting bullshit and land development companies building where they knew the railroad was going to go, and as well as huge subsidies from the federal government. was going to go, and as well as huge subsidies from the federal government.

And this group puts Leland out in front, and he becomes the real embodiment of capital in the West, not because he is the smartest one or the leader of them or the hardest working, but rather because he's none of these things. He's the least competent. He's the least smart. He's the least hardworking. And that makes for a good spokesman. these things. He's the least competent. He's the least smart. He's the least hardworking. And that makes for a good spokesman. If anyone gets in trouble, it's going to be Leland first. And that's where they sort of set him up. And it's a historical kind of curiosity that he ends up more or less getting away with it. And the federal investigation into the railroad combine doesn't

come till later. And instead, he, at the crucial point, is like Lincoln's West Coast advisor, right? He comes to lead the Republican Party in the West during the Civil War, which happens to be a really good time to lead the Republican Party. He'd become elevated, right? And he becomes elevated through a number of happenstances. And yet still through this entire period is like hedging. When they first build the first roads that's going to lead to the railroad, they immediately try to sell it off and are unsuccessful and only get stuck with the whole project because they're unable to sell off their stake in it earlier. And he's very reminiscent of today's sort of venture capitalist guys.

But I got thinking about this because when I was doing my research, I was just shocked about how little historical work there really is about Leland Stanford. This is a guy who was one of the founding fathers of California. He was governor. He was one of the first senators, national senators. He's the business leader. He starts Stanford University. He's an entrepreneur in various fields as well as a self-fashioned inventor and with crazy ideology about co-ops and that he's trying to foist on the country in various ways. He likes to be a think-fluencer type.

And yet he's very sort of like under-biographied. And I asked a friend of mine who actually had done his graduate degree in history at Stanford and works on the 19th century. And I was asking, it's my buddy Brandon Adams, who's a great historian. And I asked him, why isn't there more material about Leland Stanford? This is like one of the, seems like one of the most important men of the 19th century. And like important men in the 19th century get big biographies. And he has a couple out there, but like not nearly as much as someone like Steve Jobs,

you know, who's much more recent. And I was just couldn't quite understand why someone who seemed so historically important was kind of undercovered. And Brandon told me, well, it's because people don't think he's very smart, more or less. And the associates, like his associates say as much at the time. And there are plenty of quotes being like, fucking Leland Stanford, this guy's a dumb ass. He never made any money. He just had money made for him. They're all sort of mad that he gets away with doing his job that they assigned to him so that they couldn't be held accountable for all the money that they were making. And then end up resenting him from it because he goes by the governor for the rest of his life and is very

pompous and thinks he's achieved all these things. But even his best buddies don't like him. And that is an interesting step to talk about Palo Alto. And he, of course, founds Palo Alto personally, names Palo Alto personally, creates this town that becomes so important, at least in my telling, to the world over the next 100 plus years. And yet it's so clear when you look at him as a person that it's a function of social phenomena because it's totally not a function of his unique abilities or creativity or whatever. Even when he does come up with something like the trotting horse farm in Palo Alto, he doesn't end up getting much credit for it historically because people are not very impressed with the way he comes up with these things. And so it's not like

he is a failure, but at the same time, there's an understanding that his successes were not products of his unique being. Yeah, absolutely. And you do a really interesting job sort of drawing that thread throughout the book, applying it to all sorts of different individuals who've grown up to be these sort of like titans of Silicon Valley. And we'll get into some of those figures, I think, a little bit later. But one thing that I thought was really interesting was like you talk about how so Leland Stanford was originally living in San Francisco when he was doing a lot of this work in California, and he ended up getting kind of like, pushed out. And that's how Palo Alto was formed. He was pushed out because there was a

lot of like resentment from the working classes against him and what he represented. And you talk about how there is like, you know, the class war and class antagonism and class tension was a lot more palpable and noticeable back in those days. And so this guy I was he living on the top of Knob Hill is that Knob Hill yeah which was Nabob Hill at the time. Nabob Hill oh I didn't know that. Oh yeah that's where the name comes from they were the Nabobs on Nabob Hill. I uh me and my partner are looking to move to the east bay or San Francisco right now and we just looked at a place on Knob Hill and I was was thinking about this story. I'm wondering if you could tell us a little bit about, just briefly, what happened with Stanford

leaving San Francisco to go and found Palo Alto? And why is that kind of symbolic? Yeah. What's happening at the time in the 1870s is there's an emergence of class tension in cities all around the world. And because you have workers being proletarianized very quickly and their position in this new regime is being reduced as fast as capitalists are able to reduce it. And in the West, in California, that was especially fast through the transcontinental railroad and the result of the trans, not just the transcontinental railroad, but the importation of Chinese workers to finish the transcontinental Railroad and the result of the, not just the Transcontinental Railroad, but the importation of Chinese workers to finish the Transcontinental Railroad, as well as their settled in California doing manufacturing work, as well as the connection

of the railroad to the East Coast and East Coast manufacturing, and as well as labor sources, meant that the position of white working men in California declined very, very quickly from a settler position where they could charge extortionate amounts of wages and live pretty well, and perhaps even jump class positions into this new settler capitalist group, to being laborers, to being wage laborers in a way that they did not imagine themselves. And especially the white wage laborers who formed in San Francisco, the Working Man's Association, which was an affiliate of the First International, but a particularly reactionary one as they were mostly focused on the removal of Chinese workers.

But that's one of the problems with living at the top of Nabob Hill is that everyone knows where you live, on the top of the nice hill in the nice house. And the Workingmen's Association would organize demonstrations outside the Stanford home in San Francisco and yell up at the window, we know you're up there, get rid of those Chinese workers or we're going to come get you. And so Leland Stanford does what many rich people around the world do and what they

continue to do, which is he takes his family and to escape the class tensions that he's created, moves them to the suburbs where he can surround himself with his direct employees as opposed to just members of the working class who might be antagonistic toward him, surrounds himself with his direct employees, as opposed to just members of the working class who might be antagonistic toward him, surrounds himself with servants. And so it's that move that creates Palo Alto, because that's the suburb that Leland Stanford founds to move his family to, to get away from these sort of class tensions that are erupting in the city. And I think that's a pretty amazing origin story for the town, specifically the idea that the First International and the tensions around the First International is what lead to the creation of this California suburb.

I know they did not teach me that part in high school. You're listening to an Upstream Conversation with Malcolm Harris, You're listening to an Upstream Conversation with Malcolm Harris, author of Palo Alto, A History of California, Capitalism, and the World. We'll be right back. I am Governor Cherry Brown I are a smile that never frowns Soon I will be present Counter power will sweep the way I will be clearer one day I will command all of you

Your kids are meditating Your kids are meditating California over Alice, over Alice California, over Alice Over Alice, California Over Alice, California Said fascists will control you We'll be right back. If you run by horses here, the hippies won't come back, you say Then no outdoor you will pay, then no outdoor you will pay

California over Alice, California over Alice Over Alice, California Uber Alice by Dead Kennedys. Now back to our conversation with Malcolm Harris. I am going to skip over or ask you to join me in skipping over a little bit the founding of Stanford University itself, not because it's not a fascinating story. And I think folks should definitely check out the book if they want to learn more about the founding of Stanford and some really insane stories about horse semen and strychnine poisonings. There's some good stuff in

there. Yeah, leave the true crime. There's some really good stuff. But I'm wondering just maybe from a bird's eye view, can you describe the role that Stanford played in specifically making the Bay Area a locus of sort of inequality and even more specifically, kind of like, I'm really fascinated about this, the emergence of like eugenics that really came out of Stanford in many ways and was popularized by the university and was really used as sort of the scientific layer, right? Like inserted into the sort of grotesque forms of racial capitalism in the 20th century. And just a side note there, like I use racial capitalism fully aware of the fact that there is no other kind of capitalism? Yeah. So the first president of Stanford University is a guy named David Starr Jordan,

and he's recruited out of the University of Indiana. The Stanfords, when they're forming their new Leland Stanford Junior University at the end of the 19th century, they go around trying to recruit the best university head they can. And so they go to the Ivy Leagues and try to lure the presidents of the Ivy Leagues out to California to go head up their new school. But this is not a particularly appealing offer to the top level administrators. And so they sort of got to go down the list till they get to David Starr Jordan, who's at the University of Indiana. And like the Stanfords, David Starr Jordan is a modern thinker. He believes in progressive education. He believes in co-ed

education, which they also believe in, which sounds average, but you got to remember that the Ivy Leagues didn't fully gender integrate till like 100 years later. You still got Radcliffe students or whatever instead of Harvard students. So this was, they thought, a copacetic guy to come run their school. And he's younger, and he's got a scientifically respected role in the world. He's an ichthyologist by training. But what he's really interested in is this new subject that he calls bionomics. And bionomics is the application of eugenics, eugenic thinking to everything in society, that you can explain culture, you can explain economics, you can explain society,

you can explain everything through this evolutionary competitive struggle. And he has ideas and concerns about the future of the white race. And he comes to think that California and the West Coast is really where the white race is going to find its solution. That like Europe is too indulgent and he has all these ideas about like different parts of the world and how they are bringing the white man down in various ways. And this is a guy who's so invested in whiteness and the progression of whiteness that he's an anti-imperialist because he doesn't want former Spanish possessions in the same US polity. He doesn't want to deal with Filipinos in our country. He's such a racist that he doesn't want a world war. He's a pacifist because he

thinks that war has become dysgenic in the age of gunpowder. He has this really wonderful line I love where he says that now in the age of gunpowder, the clown can shoot down the hero. And so there's no evolutionary advantage to being brave in war anymore. That's just going to get you shot first. And so we had to stay out of wars until we could find ways to protect our own genes. And this leads very quickly into the 20th century military strategies. And this becomes a problem

that they have to find solutions to, particularly because Germany, though the members of the German high command around World War I shared a lot of evolutionary ideas with these California eugenicists, but they were much more martial about it. Instead of being anti-imperialists or anti-war as a result of their eugenic understanding, the Reich was obviously very pro-war and very expansionist. And so the California eugenicists,

very pro-war and very expansionist. And so the California eugenicists, through their interactions with these German eugenicists around World War I and before America gets involved in World War I, get really freaked out. And they realize like, oh God, we're going to have to find ways to fight and win wars that are eugenic instead of dysgenic. We need to find ways to do war that protect the genes, the good genes of the white men going forward, and isn't just going to wipe out our bravest guys to leave their wives, you know, childless at home, young widows, that that would be totally counterproductive. And so this is really where the tech field as something that becomes very important at Stanford, tech field as something that becomes very important at Stanford, particularly with the radio age, but also with IQ testing technologies.

These are strategies for making war eugenic. And David Starr Jordan recruits a bunch of other faculty from University of Indiana. And one of the people he brings along is a guy named Lewis Terman, who is a psychologist and equally interested in these sort of bionomic ideas. And he's the one who takes this test from France and changes it around a little bit in ways that were explicitly warned against by the French developer of the test and comes up with what he calls the Stanford-Binet IQ test. Binet is the French guy who actually came up with it. And then Stanford is where it got revised into a personal IQ test that then is applied to soldiers, applied for the first time,

one of the first times to soldiers as they're enlisted in World War I. And the goal there is to move the highest scoring soldiers away from the front such that they can fight the war through their scientific advancements as opposed to through their own military struggle. And something about this really clicked when I did the math and discovered that Lewis Terman's son, who he had, of course, tested as a genius, Fred Terman, turned 18 just as the draft age got lower to 18 for World War I.

How convenient. It's convenient, but it's also, it was very inconvenient for Louis Terman, right? So this idea of losing your best young people in the trenches in France was very personal for him. We're talking about his genes, right? He was protecting his ability to further his own good genes. And this is a strategy that becomes very important to the United States around Fred Terman in particular, which is kind of surprising. So as a result of his dad's interventions and stuff, Fred spends World War I on Stanford campus in ROTC training, whatever, the same place he'd basically lived his whole life. And then when World War II comes around, Fred Terman's ready and he does a really, really, really important job fighting that war from an air-conditioned bunker in,

I don't know if it's actually air-condition point yet. But, you know, from the safety of his classroom at Harvard where they're doing radar work. And his work becomes very, very, very important to the United States winning World War II. And that's part of a strategy, a eugenic strategy that had been planned, you know, by, among others, his father decades earlier. And the continuation of the David Starr Jordan plan. You do like a really incredible job in the book of outlining and illustrating with the history of California and specific examples of how capitalism is inherently racialized, like we alluded to earlier. And you've also written elsewhere that you don't use the formulation racial capitalism because it seems to suggest that there's another kind, which is why I had a little bit of a caveat

earlier on just to foreshadow a little bit to this question. You illustrate this whole concept pretty well in your exploration of capitalism in California, particularly with how, like we just mentioned, the crackpot science of eugenics, and also like labor regimes and laws all came out sort of together to ensure that the sort of the spoils of progress, as you put it, like accrued primarily to the wealthy white populations. Again, you really illustrated this super well in the book, seeing how capitalism is racialized and how that benefits the Anglo populations of settler colonists early on. And that kind of continues on in the history of California. And so I guess sort of on that note, I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about what you call the Palo Alto system,

If you could talk a little bit about what you call the Palo Alto system So when Leland Stanford moves his family to Palo Alto, what he builds there is a horse training facility. And it isn't just a horse training facility. It's the grandest horse training, raising and training facility in the world. And this is something like Leland Stanford, never really interested in trains, never really interested in politics that much truly. It's not until he gets to horses that he finds something that really clicks for him. And horses at the time are the engines of the United States. They're driving

transportation, they're driving agriculture, they're driving military. Anywhere you need power, you need horses. This isn't going to be true for much longer, but at the time, at the end of the 19th century, it's very much true, especially in California, where because the farms are technologically advanced relative to the rest of the country in California already, they're using three times as many horses per farm, three times as many draft animals per farm as average farms in the United States. And so horses and the technology of horses was something that Leland Stanford said, this is something I can transform. I'm a capitalist in a way that other people have not been capitalists before. Using science and data and my ability to scale this thing to unfathomable size and the latest studies about

how to do these things, I can reinvent the ancient technology of the horse, which drags stuff. I'm going to recreate horses. And it's this very, it's the original Silicon Valley disruption. And the way that he and Marvin, it's not clear who you can really give credit to. If you're going to give credit to the horse trainer or to the capitalist who's telling him what to do, capitalist likes to take credit, but we can also credit Charles Marvin who actually knew something about horses. But it's important to also value the hubris of someone like Sanford when he says, I'm going to reinvent horses. And he has this great calculation that he publishes where he says, like, I'm going to reinvent horses. And he has this great calculation that he publishes where he says, there are 13 million horses in the United States. If I can improve their value by a hundred

bucks each, that's $1.3 billion for this country, which is the equivalent now of tens of billions of dollars. And it's very classic disruptive logic. And the way he's going to disrupt production of horses is instead of waiting for a couple of years, raising horses for a couple of years to race them to their highest speed so as to protect their young, fragile joints, because when a horse busts a ligament, you have to put the horse down. And Stanford says, I can do this at a scale and with tools that no one else has done before. I can afford to waste horses.

And so I'm going to run them as fast as they can as young as possible. And because I believe in the science of genetics and eugenics that the ultimate shape of the adult is already present in the child because it's just the revealing of genetic potential. The fastest horses when they're one year old, the fastest colts are also going to be the fastest adult horses. Those are the ones whose genes are going to be worth the most. And using the system, he could shorten the production cycle for horses. He also drew inspiration from Germany, which we already talked about a little bit, which at the time was inventing, creating early childhood education. They just created this institution called the kindergarten.

And there weren't any kindergartens in California yet. Jane Stanford was going, Leland's wife was going to help found some. But before that, Leland Stanford created the first kindergarten for horses. And it was this shrunk down track for younger horses that had never been created before. track for younger horses that had never been created before. And he uses this, what they called the Palo Alto system to create the youngest, fastest horses in the world. And they do so successfully. And the whole like, you know, horse breeding industry sort of has to eat crow because this Elon Musk type came in and sort of showed them how to do it. Ultimately, he doesn't save America tens of billions of dollars because horses get replaced by steam engines pretty quickly at the time.

But this Palo Alto system and the intangible structures of values and that perspective still underlies the region and the regional economy into today. And if you go to Sand Hill Road and you mug some VC and you say, hey, you, what's the Palo Alto system? He wouldn't know. Nobody knows this history very well unless they happen to have read this book, but they might make something up. And if that guy were to make something up and tell you what the Palo Alto system was, as far as he understood, I think it would actually be pretty close to what Leland Stanford's Palo Alto system was, which is that you can use cutting edge technology, large amounts of capital to scale concepts and disrupt old industries immediately through the application

of data, the scientific method, and capital production logic. And they might not phrase it that way, but that's still what they're doing in a bunch of different ways. You write in the book, quote, there's no emerging artificial superintelligence that will automatically arbitrate the thoughts and claims of all people. There's just capitalism, an impersonal system that acts through people towards the increasing accumulation of capital, the amassing of exploited value. Forces, not men. That's what the Palo Alto system is made of. And the train is barreling down the tracks. So many good quotes to draw from here, but in order to sort of stay on track here, I'm going to scroll by a lot of them that I had plucked out. I know we got to like jump to the 20th century here. Right. Nevermind the 21st. So you spend a lot of time in the book talking about the military industrial research complex that breathes life into the tech industry. And you talk about how Silicon Valley is kind of really defined by this public private partnership system.

And, you know, I was thinking like one of the tropes that we hear a lot, I think, on the left is that, you know, the Matt Bors comic, the like was developed through public funding, sort of thinking of it, like crudely as a counter argument that like, well, no, we're not necessarily criticizing, not that you can't criticize capitalism, and what else are we going to do? We're all in capitalism, but like, sort of as a taking it further, like also, it's not capitalism, like the smartphone is not capitalism, but like I've really come to realize that that's a completely like incorrect argument. And you demonstrate this really well in the book, like public funding is a central component of capitalism. And we see that more than anywhere in like this, like I mentioned, the military industrial research complex in California. And yeah, I'm wondering if you can just maybe talk a little bit about I don't know if you have any like response to that anecdote, but like also just, you know, how capitalism specifically here in Silicon Valley is a process of public funding of state and private actors sort of colluding together to, among other things, bomb people and make a huge profit doing it? There's a common understanding about Silicon Valley that it sort of like scammed the federal government out of the like early Internet funding that the feds funded a bunch of technology research and development with the idea that it would be militarily effective, but that actually it wasn't really. But then they ended up founding the private

silicon industry, which ended up being really useful for the country. So that's good. And, you know, that's not only okay, but like actually might even be a good thing and a model for what we should do. And that's the like official business history. And it's a really like nice way to feel about the industry, right? Because it's sort of a charming story. But if you actually look at what happened to the entire first generation of silicon chips, they all went into minute man one nuclear missiles, like period. And the way that the industry likes to tell that story is like, oh yeah, we went to the moon. That's what the chips were for. They were for going to the moon, but they weren't for going for the moon. They were for putting a gun to the world's head and saying,

we're going to kill everyone in the world if anything happens to America. And there's a danger to thinking that Silicon Valley is just a scam, right? That's certainly an aspect of it. We have the Theranos and even the crypto and the open AI. Even I think that artificial intelligence stuff is on the scammier end of what we're looking at. But there's also a real substantial product here. There's a real substantial mission, and that is the American project. That's an American imperial project. And nuclear missiles were the key to the problem that Jordan had identified at the beginning, which is how do you win wars without losing any of your smart guys, right? How do we win wars without risking that our guys get shot? And being able to put a gun to the world's head and saying, you already know what this

is, look, we dropped these bombs and we can do it to you, was a powerful solution. It doesn't end up being a permanent solution because it's also a bluff and it's a bluff that gets called and beaten in Korea and Vietnam. and beaten in Korea and Vietnam, but we can see it as the evolution of this strategic question of how do you secure a place for the white settlers of California into this 20th century

where you've got a globalized world and the anti-colonial movements are on the march and the world communist movements on the march and they are finding it harder and harder to justify and maintain those positions of inequality. So reading your book, it came to really solidify in many ways, my understanding that like hyper exploitation and, you know, the racialized others contracting out work and outsourcing

and stuff. These are not new phenomena in Silicon Valley at all. It's how the modern computer industry was founded and how it originally grew and really demonstrating how inequality is not some kind of bug within the system, that it's a part of the system. And you do a really good job of describing how, in fact, I'll just quote you here, like, rather than expanding the pie, the new Silicon Valley labor regime was good for shifting rewards from labor toward the overlap in groups of bosses, managers, and stockholders. So one of the things that you talk about in very early

California history is these new ways of like proletarianization and hyper exploitation that sort of took form early in say like the building of the railroads or like the mining that was taking place down here where I'm from in the Quicksilver mines, mining for mercury. I'm wondering if you can like sort of trace a through line between that and like things like the gig economy, which are also based on hyper exploitation, and how the Silicon Valley model, or the Palo Alto system or components of it, however you want to frame it, are really predicated on this form of hyper exploitation. And that that is this sort of like one of the innovations that Silicon Valley, I mean, we talked about like computer chips and

the smartphone and stuff. But like, one of the central innovations I take from reading your book is that Silicon Valley created this form of hyper exploitation, which really has allowed it to amass all the wealth that it has. It's built off of the backs of workers that are treated horribly. Yeah. And so much of that has to do with just Californians relation geographically, right? So it's relation to the Pacific, it's relation to Mexico, Central America, and South America means it's at the center of so many different labor flows from the very beginning, from the very, very beginning. So in the Anglo-American period,

it has to be established as an Anglo-American period through the exclusion of French miners, Russian miners, Chinese miners, Chilean miners, Mexican miners from Sonora. There are a lot of people out there in the gold fields, and it's the Anglo-Americans who are able to unite and exclude others on that basis that creates California in the first place. So even before Leland Stanford is bringing in Chinese laborers, even before you've got the Chinese Exclusion Act and the importation of Japanese workers,

the increased importation of Mexican workers to do agricultural and mining labor, as well as a railroad track laying. From the beginning, this has been a strategy. And one thing I like to talk to people about looking at the more contemporary Silicon Valley in the post-World War II era is when do people think that the silicon chip industry starts being offshored? And usually people's answers is somewhere like the 80s, maybe the 90s, that this is some neoliberal thing that happens towards the end of the century. But it happens in 1961. It begins with the very beginning of the industry.

And this labor arbitrage opportunity has been one of the key technologies of California capitalists through the entire time. You can go back to Herbert Hoover, you can go back to Leland Stanford, any of these guys. One of the key insights that makes them who they are is that, look, we can get some workers from over here and some workers from over there and give some a little more better position than the other ones and make everyone work harder for longer, for less wages by making groups of workers compete against each other based on these racial lines. And we, I think, tend to think of whiteness as something that's established before California

joins the union, right? It's not a 19th century phenomenon or 20th century phenomenon, but it really does. So much of it gets formed in this non-melting pot of California, which is able to incorporate some groups of people from the world and turn them into white people and incorporate other people from the world and exclude them from being white. And this happens in the labor market by labor managers who are trying to structure these things, but also at the level of policy and also at the level of legal finding. And so you have Supreme Court cases coming out of California in the early 20th century where they're deciding, can a Japanese person be white? Can an

East Indian person be white? Is someone from Syria white? Is someone from Armenia white? And they're coming up with answers, right? They're saying yes. They're saying no. They're establishing the bounds of whiteness around these labor questions. And California has always found it very, very, very profitable to come up with these divisions. And they come up with a lot of them. And I tell them a lot of them are very ad hoc through the beginning of the California period. And it's not really until later in the 20th century where these categories are fully established, even at the legal level. thing positive into the future when we're thinking about Stanford, when we're thinking about Palo Alto, when we're thinking about Silicon Valley, California as a whole. And you really predicate that on the need to sort of kill Palo Alto. You actually write, how do you kill a place, a system?

What would it mean for Palo Alto, call it the coherent extrapolated volition of Palo Alto, to look at its role over the last 150 years of world history and decide that Stanford's suburb is less well-situated than most to steward the world into the rest of the 21st century. Time was money for California's Anglo settlers, and they forced that colonial axiom into place anywhere it had yet to become law. How does the Palo Alto system end without taking the rest of the transformed world down with it? And so you end the book trying to find an answer to that question, sort of this huge question, right? And I'm wondering if you can sort of walk us through your response to that, the response to your own question,

like what can we do about Palo Alto? How do we kill it? And how would you go about wrestling with those questions? Yeah, to answer that, I think we need to think about the social historical context in which I wrote this book, which is that we're in the middle of indigenous resurgence, specifically over control of land. And I think the vanguard of politics in the United States right now is indigenous-led struggles over the return of land and the obstruction of the continued exploitation of that land. So you have water and air defenders, people who are out there blocking pipelines and demanding the return of indigenous lands. And I think Palo Alto as a very particular place with this very recent history, like I said, five generations back, is in a place to lead on

this question in a way that they've misled in the past, let's say. And that Stanford itself, as the like originary institution of Palo Alto, has maintained 8,000 acres because the Stanford's original covenant with the school is that that land couldn't be sold. And have used that territory and the wealth built on top of it in really deleterious ways to the point where we face real ecological catastrophe in an imminent way, I think. And I think that that's an objective thing. I think it, but I understand it to be an objective case. like Stanford's new Doar Sustainability School named after John Doar, who's a famous capitalist, Silicon Valley capitalist, that's supposed to be coming up with solutions to the problems that this area has caused with the resources and the profits that they've made by causing those problems. But unsurprisingly, that strategy recapitulates a lot of those problems in the first place.

And so very quickly, we've seen criticisms of this sustainability school, that it's being run by the oil companies, and that it is actually laundering the positions of oil companies to the public and securing their role into the future. And my suggestion in the book is that a real way to try and start to solve those problems is to start returning that land. And Stanford recognizes the Muwekma Ohlone tribe, 614 enrolled members, as the ancestral title holders of the land. This is a political organization that is constituted.

It has tribal leadership, a tribal council, but it's a landless tribe, as many California tribes are. And right now, the tribe is fighting for the restoration of its federal recognition. It's a campaign that I'm part of. But ultimately, I think that the institutions of Silicon Valley, if they're at all serious about surviving, if they're all serious about making the world a place that we can still live in, in 100 and other 100 years, another 150 years, is going to have to return land. We're going to have to give it back to the last people who were able to maintain that land without destroying it, which again, was not very long ago. And it's a controversial position in some ways. Some people

have taken it very controversially, but I think it's very pragmatic. It's really low-hanging fruit. And we hear that private colleges do all sorts of unaccountably radical left-wing things all the time, right? I don't see why this couldn't be one of them. Except that I also do see, which is that these are impersonal systems. And if the leadership of Stanford tried to exercise the reason that would lead them to this kind of decision, I think they would run into some structural blocks pretty fast. So what I was trying to show with this concluding suggestion of the return of Stanford lands and endowment money, which is something like the tens of billions of dollars that Leland Stanford imagined the horse farm

producing back in the day, it really is that amount of money now, as a way to think about what actual reasonable progress could look like out of this place in contrast to what's happened. But also if they can't do that, then that also tells us something important. You've been listening to an Upstream Conversation with Malcolm Harris, author of Palo Alto, a history of California, capitalism, and the world. Thank you to Dead Kennedys for the intermission music and Carolyn Rader for the cover art. Upstream theme music was composed by Robert. To find links to any of the resources we've mentioned in this conversation, check the show notes.

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