Is Silicon Valley Beyond Redemption?

Consider a proposal: Stanford should give its more than 8,000 acres to the Muwekma Ohlone, the land’s original people. After all, the university would still have $36 billion in the bank. (U.S. colleges and universities have amassed enormous wealth—more than $800 billion in endowment assets, according to a recent survey of 678 institutions.) Even more outrageously endowed is the surrounding region of Silicon Valley, which is Malcolm Harris’s real target when he makes this suggestion at the end of his new book, Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World. It’s precisely Stanford’s land, Harris explains, that has “nurtured the Silicon Valley extraction machine,” one he believes is wreaking havoc on the planet and immiserating so many of its people.

Deeply researched and richly detailed, is a prehistory of today’s all-too-familiar Valley of oligarchs and Big Brother brogrammers who seem to taint everything they touch, including , , and democracy. At the same time, it distills and expresses a stark newvalue that he sees as a constant—technology has been hopelessly poisoned by the drive for profit. “Competition and domination, exploitation and exclusion, minority rule and class hate: These aren’t problems capitalist technology will solve,” Harris, who is a self-proclaimed Marxist, writes. “. In the proper language, they are features, not bugs.”