The history of Silicon Valley, from railroads to microchips, is a story of disruption and destruction, told for the first time in this comprehensive, jaw-dropping narrative. “Extraordinary.” ―Greg Grandin, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The End of the Myth Palo Alto’s weather is temperate, its people are educated and enterprising, its corporations are spiritually and materially ambitious and demonstrably world-changing. Palo Alto is also a haunted toxic waste dump built on stolen Indian burial grounds, and an integral part of the capitalist world system. In Palo Alto , the first comprehensive, global history of Silicon Valley, Malcolm Harris examines how and why Northern California evolved in the particular, consequential way it did, tracing the ideologies, technologies, and policies that have been engineered there over the course of 150 years of Anglo settler colonialism, from IQ tests to the "tragedy of the commons," racial genetics, and "broken windows" theory. The Internet and computers, too. It's a story about how a small American suburb became a powerful engine for economic growth and war, and how it came to lead the world into a surprisingly disastrous 21st century. Palo Alto is an urgent and visionary history of the way we live now, one that ends with a clear-eyed, radical proposition for how we might begin to change course. Named One of the Year's Best Books by Vulture • The New Republic • Dazed • Wired • Bloomberg • Esquire • Salon • The Next Big Idea Club “The most comprehensive — and incendiary — history of the place that we’re ever likely to get. A sweeping and unsparing critique, it’s also well written, frequently surprising and, because history tends to rhyme, increasingly urgent. You may never think about Stanford, iconic tech companies like Hewlett Packard or, indeed, the Valley itself the same way again. I won’t.”  ― LOS ANGELES TIMES, 10 Best Tech Books of 2023 “A panoramic, deeply researched, and fundamentally truth-seeking history…Required reading.” ― WIRED, Best Books of 2023 “A sweeping biography of a place where efficiency and profitability dominated long before the tech industry as we know it ever existed,  Palo Alto  is an astute unraveling of how we got here…Entirely engaging.”― VULTURE, Best Books of 2023 One of THE NEW YORK TIMES’s Most Anticipated Books of 2023 One of SALON’s Best Books of 2023 One of BLOOMBERG's Best Books of 2023 One of THE NEXT BIG IDEA CLUB's Must-Read Books of 2023 One of VULTURE's, LA TIMES, ESQUIRE, NYLON, ALTA, THE MILLIONS’ and LITERARY HUB's Most Anticipated Books of 2023 “ Palo Alto  is a bold and ambitious work of history that provides a great deal of insight into the world today.” ― DAZED, Best Books of 2023 “Harris is a very 21st-century writer. He’s funny, he’s offhand, he’s casual. He makes all this stuff very, very accessible. And it’s a great Trojan horse, actually, if you want to have your parents read a little bit of radical history.”― SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE “Malcolm Harris's singular and brilliant PALO ALTO is a geologic survey of the bedrock of the imperial violence that lies beneath the surface of some of the country's wealthiest ZIP Codes.  The formations it follows stretch outward across the globe, to Asia, Europe, across the Americas and to the rest of the United States.  In the end, the book provides not so much an account of strict cause and effect—the familiar history of the robber barons and tech tycoons—but a core sample of the thorough-going greed and pillage at the heart of American history: the expropriation, the violence, and the guilt that seep upward through the soil of neoliberalism's most fruitful plain.”― Walter Johnson, Winthrop Professor of History and African American Studies at Harvard University and author of The Broken Heart of America " Extraordinary . In lucid, personal, often funny, and always insightful prose, Malcolm Harris finds the driving thrust of reaction not in capitalism’s left-behind regions but in its vanguard: California, and specifically Silicon Valley.  We have not yet felt the full force of the shit storm that the titans of tech have been conjuring. We soon will.  If you want to understand what’s coming, you need to read this book ." ― Greg Grandin, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The End of Myth “Malcolm Harris can be a very funny writer, but he isn’t kidding around when he called his latest book…[Harris] is an engaging writer, and the theme works so staggeringly well that “Palo Alto” holds attention and holds together. The results are frightening. Palo Alto isn’t just a town that touches our collective history; it’s one that has grabbed on to it, slaps it around, and won’t let go until it squeezes every last breath and penny out of us.”― THE INTERCEPT “Harris’s earlier book Kids These Days was a broad cultural history of millennials, zeroing in on the unfair economic stereotypes that have dogged the generation. Now, he tells an ambitious sto