I meet Malcolm Harris, voice of millennials and anti-capitalist crusader, at a Brooklyn coffee shop, suggested by his publicist for a book-tour interview. He goes for a guava croissant along with his $3.75 drip. He hints this is not an endorsement of a bourgeoisie micro-luxury, but an ironic jab at the media tycoons of Condé Nast who are picking up the tab.
Harris, a spry 34, is generating considerable buzz with his book, Palo Alto. He knows the town and the tech industry it sits at the heart of well. He grew up there, was schooled there, and even learned journalism at Palo Alto High School under Esther Wojcicki, mother of the (recently retired) YouTube CEO Susan and former mother-in-law of Sergey Brin. His antitrust lawyer father took on Microsoft in a major trademark case in the mid-aughts. But as an author, Harris is less into forging a first draft of history than using research to promote his preexisting point of view. “It’s not a work of journalism,” he says of his book. “It's a Marxist history.”
Whatever you call it, Palo Alto is epic—an unrelenting 700-page indictment of capitalism, California, and the town that railroad baron Leland Stanford named in 1876 to honor a tall tree that still stands, and soon after made the home of his new university, which still dominates the region. Some might view Harris’ book as a companion piece to another doorstop-sized chunk of tech rejection, Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. But Harris thinks Zuboff’s book overemphasized the surveillance part and went too easy on the capitalism. “It doesn’t really get to the global political economy,” he says.
Harris’s book gets there, in spades. In his sprawling, colloquial narrative, history isn’t a sloppy progression but a nefarious plot serving capitalism’s theft of people’s labor and dignity. His touchstone is the system by which Leland Stanford bred racehorses, which combined genetics with a novel emphasis on pushing horses to run faster at an earlier age than was the custom. (Kind of like Move Fast and Take Things.) Harris applies this “Palo Alto System” as a metaphor throughout, branding everything from venture capital to Tiger Woods’ training methods as inhumane descendents of Stanford’s original sin. Of course, one might argue that, having been nurtured in the town’s famed school system and its tech community, Harris—a deft wordsmith and an effective marketer—is himself a product of the Palo Alto System.
Harris has no problems digging up more villains than a thousand Marvel-verses. There’s Stanford, of course, and the first president of the university he founded, David Starr Jordan, who allegedly murdered Stanford’s widow. (At least that’s what Harris thinks.) The university’s early psychology pioneer Lewis Terman not only promoted eugenics-based IQ tests, we learn, but also slept with his students. Harris even attacks well-meaning leftists like congressman/activist Allard Lowenstein for working too deeply inside the system. (Harris heaps scorn on the Grateful Dead wing of the protest movement; he’s the guy at the SDS meeting who screams at the stoners in the back of the room.) More recent scoundrels include Silicon Valley’s vaunted founders. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs are smelly “jerks,” he says, but “more meaningful as personifications of impersonal social forces.”
Harris has a genuine supervillain, though, in William Shockley, the Nobel-winning physicist. Shockley, father of the transistor, Stanford professor, and founder of a Silicon Valley semiconductor company, was a racist bully who fully deserves Harris’ one-word summation: asshole.
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Hold on, I say to Harris, wasn’t Shockley such an outlier that his nastiness led eight of his brilliant engineers to abandon him and start their own company, Fairchild, and from there populate the Valley with other upstarts like Intel? Wouldn’t that mean that the modern system of VCs funding startups—and ultimately, companies like Apple and Google— was based on a counterreaction to the white-supremecist ethos that Harris finds tucked away in every corner of his hometown? Harris pushes back on that theory. “They made chips for bombs!” he says of the “traitorous eight.”
But for all his verbiage, Harris falls short when it comes to proposing remedies for the wage exploitation, racism, ecological carnage, and suicides he sees rippling outward from Palo Alto. He doesn’t provide a prescription for ending capitalism, short of waiting for its horrors to reach a point when ragtag survivors will finally pull the plug on it. He does have an idea how to fix Palo Alto, though.
Brightening as he speaks of the concept, he wants Stanford to return its 8,000-acre campus to the 614 people recognized as remaining members of the Ohlone, which once indigenously prowled that very turf. It’s a tall order, he admits. But giving back the campus, all of it—the football stadium, the Hoover Tower, the palm trees, the hospital, the Memorial Church, the classrooms, the buildings named after Gates and other capitalists who donated some of their ill-gotten gains to the university—is “low hanging fruit,” he tells me. I opined that this was fruit even higher than the tallest branch of the Palo Alto tree. Even Harris admits that the university is unlikely to embrace his idea.
I’m actually in agreement with a lot of Harris’ critiques of systems that reward harmful market power (and of course I am with him in condemning shameful behavior toward people who are from indigenous communities, Black, or Asian). While proponents of the status quo claim that Silicon Valley is the engine of wealth creation, income inequality is worse than ever, with the Bay Area a case in point. But my preferred solution is to constrain capitalism rather than employ Karl Marx’s playbook. I realize that significant change is difficult when the most destructive forces have the money and power to thwart reform.
But while we struggle to improve conditions for those not lucky enough to afford Palo Alto’s Craftsman homes, can’t we at least acknowledge that some of the technological benefits that have sprung from the system, tainted as it is by over-rewarded founders and exploited workers, have made our lives easier and richer? Even the scary technology of the moment, generative AI, has potential to perform amazing services for all walks of life.
Harris will have none of this. In a typical passage in Palo Alto he writes, “There’s no emerging artificial superintelligence that will automatically arbitrate the thoughts and claims of people. There is just capitalism, an impersonal system that acts through people toward the increasing accumulation of capital, the amassing of exploiting value.” Iconic words from the guy whose previous book was called Shit is Fucked Up and Bullshit.
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Before we break, I ask Harris if he has a favorite gadget or service. Is there something that has emerged from the evil Palo Alto System that has brought him joy? He sheepishly pulls out his Android phone and shows me Recorder, a Google app for capturing and transcribing conversations in real time. He shows me how it captures a dialog and even identifies different speakers.
My first impulse is to agree that this is an unalloyed marvel. But then I recall a Google gambit of some years ago. In 2007, the company released a service whereby dialing 1-800-GOOG-411 from a cell phone or even a landline would connect you to free voice-based directory assistance that helped you find local businesses. While this ad-free service seemed like a miraculous freebie, it was actually a way for Google to capture millions of human voice interactions to train its algorithms. Users weren’t getting something from Google—they were giving something to Google. Once the company had what it needed, it discontinued the service. I imagine that the Recorder transcription app might be doing the same kind of thing for Google right now—exploiting our labors in the guise of helping us out. Still, despite its agenda, the service seems damn useful. So much so that it’s impressed even the most unforgiving of anti-capitalists. As does the guava croissant. “Pretty good!” says the Marxist.
Time Travel
Harris rejects the popular narrative that the hippies started a computer revolution. But as he knows from reading my book Hackers (which he generously cites in Palo Alto), some pioneers of the personal computer had their roots firmly embedded in the anti-war movement. I wrote extensively about one of them, Homebrew Computer Club moderator Lee Felsenstein, who also designed the famous Osborne computer, the first portable.
Lee dropped out of Berkeley in 1967, and began alternating between electronics jobs and work in the movement. In 1968, he joined the underground Berkeley Barb as the newspaper’s “military editor.” Joining the company of such other writers as Sergeant Pepper and Jefferson Fuck Poland, Lee wrote a series of articles evaluating demonstrations—not on the basis of issues, but on organization, structure, confirmation to an elegant system …
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He insisted that demonstrations should be executed as cleanly as logic circuits defined by the precise schematics he still revered. He praised demonstrators when they smashed “the right windows” (banks, not small businesses). He advocated attack only to draw the enemy out. He called the bombing of a draft board “refreshing.” His column called “Military Editor’s Household Hints” advised: “Remember to turn your stored dynamite every two weeks in hot weather. This will prevent the nitroglycerin from sticking …”
Felsenstein had his effect. During the trial of the Oakland Seven, defense attorney Malcolm Burnstein said, “We shouldn’t have these defendants here … it should have been Lee Felsenstein.”
Ask Me One Thing
Simon asks, “Which of the FAANG companies do you think is most at risk of being caught on the back foot by new and emerging tech?”
Great question, Simon. A lot has been made of Google being jarred by Microsoft’s quick embrace of OpenAI’s technology. (And by the way, the FAANG acronym needs an M in there—Microsoft’s market cap trails only Apple’s among tech firms.) But Google has been working on these and other exotic technologies for years. Speaking of Apple, one may question why its Siri assistant can’t converse as eloquently as those new chatbots from OpenAI and others. But I don’t think that will affect the company’s business much. The long-term threat to Apple is that augmented reality devices will replace the need for screens, like the ones in iPhones and Macs—and that’s exactly why Tim Cook and company are exploring AR glasses.
Meta, though it does have a considerable investment in AI, has a unique problem among the tech elite: No matter how good generative AI is, the company’s core mission is to connect people, not to connect people to well-versed robots. So that’s a problem.
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But since you use the “N” in your grouping, let me throw out this curveball. Maybe the entire entertainment industry will be disrupted when AI makes it possible for anyone to generate things like fantastic movie-length videos from prompts or an engine that translates words to visual scenes. Google already has an experiment along these lines. In the long term, one might even imagine that you could cast these productions with representations of living human actors (assuming they will license their images). This might be bad news for Netflix, unless the company gets ahead of that curve.
You can submit questions to mail@wired.com. Write ASK LEVY in the subject line.
End Times Chronicle
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Last but Not Least
Paging Malcom Harris! Capitalism is now diving to the bottom of the sea to exploit the earth.
A “surprising” study tells us to forget what’s in foods and just avoid the processed ones. Gee, I thought those tater tots were healthy.
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Maybe the biggest lie of all is that lie detectors can work.
WIRED asked ChatGPT to write our policy about how we will use generative AI tools. Sorry, that was a lie that got past the detector! Actually, our editor in chief has laid out our thoughtful policy, which does not include outsourcing original content to robots.