{"id":26265,"date":"2023-05-02T12:08:31","date_gmt":"2023-05-02T19:08:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/?p=26265"},"modified":"2023-05-02T12:08:32","modified_gmt":"2023-05-02T19:08:32","slug":"the-ugly-side-of-silicon-valley","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/2023\/05\/02\/the-ugly-side-of-silicon-valley\/","title":{"rendered":"The ugly side of Silicon Valley"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

A new book puts the history of Stanford, Palo Alto, and the tech industry in a very critical, and very relevant, perspective.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

By TIM REDMOND<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

MAY 1, 2023 (48Hills.org)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I first learned about Malcolm Harris\u2019 new book, Palo Alto, when I read a review by Gary Kamiya in The New York Times<\/a>. Kamiya trashes the book, deriding it for being what it is: A Marxist interpretation of the birth of Silicon Valley:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

\u201cPalo Alto\u201d is nominally a history, but it is really a work of grand theory, in this case a familiar one: Marxism. Karl Marx\u2019s long shadow darkens every page. For Harris, as for Marx, capitalism is the root of all societal evil, an amoral \u201csuperintelligence\u201d that relentlessly turns those caught in its thralls into either moneymaking machines or oppressed victims. \u201cCapital by its nature<\/em> dominates labor,\u201d Harris writes, \u201cand if it fails to accomplish that, it ceases to exist.\u201d It is inherently racist: \u201cThe human-capital production system was hostile to everyone except certain white men, as eugenicists designed it.\u201d It is a totalizing system that represses human agency and offers no escape: We are \u201clike butterflies, pinned live and wriggling onto history\u2019s collage.\u201d Harris finds hope in such rare outbursts of wing-flapping as the brief heyday of the Black Panther Party, which he asserts was the most important American political group of its time. If enough butterflies flap their wings, they could shatter \u201chistory\u2019s display case.\u201dBut what should replace this capitalist horror show once it\u2019s been shattered? Harris never tells us.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Umm \u2026 most of what Kamiya complains about strikes as pretty much true. Capitalism\u2014at least the modern, post-Reagan, late-stage capitalism that now dominates the United States\u2014is indeed the source of much of the nation\u2019s problems. Capital does by its nature dominate labor, and the system has always been inherently racist. The Black Panther Party was hugely important.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

(Kamiya also dismisses Marx because of the failure of the Soviet Union, which is an old, and odd, approach: It\u2019s entirely possible to study and appreciate Marx\u2019s analysis as brilliantly descriptive of the failures of capitalism without being devoted to his specific proscriptive ideas; we are a long way from 1848. Besides, the Soviet Union under Lenin and especially Stalin bore no resemblance to anything Marx and Engels, who believed in the withering away of the state, could ever have imagined.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And if Malcolm Harris can answer Kamiya\u2019s question about what precise system replaces late-stage capitalism and how exactly it will work then he\u2019s smarter than me, and smarter than almost anyone I know: Those of us on the economic left have lots of visions and ideas, but nobody has the perfect magic potion, probably because there isn\u2019t one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So I went and bought the book. I\u2019m very glad I did.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Palo Alto is a big, sweeping epic, 677 pages including footnotes, and it covers a lot of the history of Northern California. There\u2019s more about the details of the interactions and conflicts between difference sectors of the New Left in the 1960s than I needed, but that doesn\u2019t detract from the overall message:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Silicon Valley, and particularly Stanford University, played a key role in the post-War Military Industrial Complex, in creating the massive economic inequality that plagues the nation today, and in promoting the neo-liberal model that ended the New Deal in the 1980s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I spoke to Harris by Zoom this week. The interview has been edited (a bit) for space and clarity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

48HILLS <\/strong> You early on refer to the post-war Silicon Valley engineers as \u201cshock troops for economic enclosure.\u201d When I think about the word \u201cenclosure\u201d I go back to the early days of mercantile capitalism in Europe, when people were literally enclosing public land with fences so they could graze their sheep and nobody else could use it, and that was one of the building blocks of what we now see as capitalism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MALCOLM HARRIS<\/strong> Yes, on the technological or intellectual property level that\u2019s totally something you see coming out of Stanford as the archetypical cold war university where you go from the big science era of public research to the privatization and the commercialization of science that happens in the cold war era. Stanford takes a huge role in that with the research park and the whole silicon industry that comes out of that, not to mention the Stanford professors who are working for this nonprofit institution at the same time encouraged to for-profit ventures \u2026 taking these publicly researched findings and directly privatize them. When you see that bridge from the Roosevelt era to the Reagan era, Palo Alto played a big role in that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

48HILLS <\/strong>And a lot of that is the political and economic legacy of Herbert Hoover. Hoover wrecked the economy and was replaced by Roosevelt, but then he landed at Stanford and the Hoover Institution became a big part of this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MALCOLM HARRIS<\/strong> The Hoover Institution goes from being the war library, which it has been previously, to become the citadel of anticommunism, and it really serves as the shady back room for the Republican Party and the conservative movement. One of the main theses of the book is that Hoover outlasts Roosevelt.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Malcolm Harris has produced an exceptional work of history and theory. Photo courtesy of Hatchett Books.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

48HILLS<\/strong>\u00a0A lot of the theme from your book is this idea of the privatization of public space, physically and intellectually, but also this idea that the private sector is better than the public sector.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MALCOLM HARRIS<\/strong> Yes, in the globalization of the labor flow and the performance of global labor arbitrage, moving jobs wherever they were cheaper, always.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

48HILLS<\/strong> Another theme you talk about is Silicon Valley and colonialism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MALCOLM HARRIS<\/strong> I try to map out the full narrative. It starts with full military force in south Asia, the flubbing of the situation in China, Mao wins, you fight to a draw in Korea and lose in Vietnam, so clearly a ground war isn\u2019t going to work. So in this era, you see the United States linking up with post-colonial entities who could be swayed to the US economic agenda, and Silicon Valley played key roles in those, whether with the Shah of Iran or Marcos in the Philippines or the royal family of Saudi Arabia, or Idi Amin in Uganda, Silicon Valley has close relations with dictatorships. That continues to the present day; look at Silicon Valley\u2019s relationship with the gulf monarchies. It\u2019s very tight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

48HILLS<\/strong> This happened, you say, because fascism is closer to capitalism than communism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MALCOLM HARRIS<\/strong> You see tech companies going into Germany and Japan after World War Two and that\u2019s because of the situation created by the Nazis and the imperial Japanese government that had crushed the labor movement. These tech companies say, that\u2019s great for us, we love the crushed labor movement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

48HILLS<\/strong> One of the things I found very interesting is some of the sixties ethos, the Ken Kesey ethos, you say was less than useless to the left. There was a merging between the individualist elements of the sixties and the tech movement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MALCOLM HARRIS<\/strong> I don\u2019t think that\u2019s nearly as important as it\u2019s made out to be. The Grateful Dead were not the most important thing in the world, the Cold War was the most important thing in the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

48HILLS<\/strong> There were a lot of people in my generation who thought that taking LSD and going back to the land was more important than organizing labor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MALCOLM HARRIS<\/strong> The conflation between the counterculture and the new left is erroneous. The left was the left, they were relating to global communism. They were against The Man, but they were also in favor of Ho Chi Mihn. If you say the New Left was feckless and individualist, if that\u2019s how we think, then we can never improve on what they did and what they did was very sophisticated. \u2026 a lot of people spent the seventies and eighties and nineties doing minoritarian struggles wherever they were. The idea that we can write people off because Jerry Rubin became a real estate agent is not helpful.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

48HILLS <\/strong>Another idea you talk about, which is a very Silicon Valley thing, is shifting compensation from wages to stock options. That undermines the ability to do traditional labor organizing because your pay is linked to management. It also shifts the mindset of a generation that we\u2019re more interested in the stock market and growth than about economic inequality. The old labor movement was, to a certain extent, about redistribution, about taking some of the productivity wealth from the owners and returning it to labor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MALCOLM HARRIS<\/strong> One thing that\u2019s very interesting is that those were helpful outcomes of the stock option policy, but what it really was for Hewlett Packard when they started it was a free loan where they didn\u2019t have to surrender any control of the company. You got your employees to loan you back their pay, planning to cash out sometimes later. It costs the company nothing to do that, they don\u2019t have to pay interest on this loan. Because these employees aren\u2019t organized, it\u2019s as individuals, as one individual stockholder you have no power. That\u2019s still definitely the case as way to access capital and lower your labor costs. The story we tell is when the stock options succeed, and you make a lot of money, and it turns workers into management, but it\u2019s also a way of cheap labor. If it doesn\u2019t succeed, they don\u2019t have to pay you anything at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

48HILLS<\/strong> Talk about the role of Stanford and the post-war tech industry and the US military.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MALCOLM HARRIS<\/strong> Stanford really leads that relationship. This is another example of Hoover outlasting Roosevelt, the form of the government research that gets determined is through the military.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

48HILLS <\/strong>There are these great tech fortunes made, Bill Gates makes billions off Microsoft, then you think about the Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, philanthropist. But the model also fits into the tech industry model, instead of paying taxes to the government, and letting the elected representatives of the people decide how to spend it Bill Gates gets to decide what public priorities are.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MALCOLM HARRIS<\/strong> Jane Stanford was the one who got the tax exemption for Stanford University. The foundation of Palo Alto and Silicon Valley is a tax dodge, and an act of rich person philanthropy that ends up determining so much of the future of the nation, as opposed to the public interest. That story follows the whole history of the book.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

48HILLS:<\/strong>  Looking to the future, I see all this talk about decarbonization and electrification as climate solutions, but the \u201cdecarbonization bros\u201d as the New York Times calls them, are part of the Silicon Valley culture, and the electric grid is still mostly private.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MALCOLM HARRIS<\/strong>\u00a0I don\u2019t think capitalism can solve the problems that capitalism has created. Electric SUVs are not going to solve our problems, and neither are metal trees that do decarbonization. I don\u2019t see these as a way out for us now.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tim Redmond<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tim Redmond has been a political and investigative reporter in San Francisco for more than 30 years. He spent much of that time as executive editor of the Bay Guardian. He is the founder of 48hills.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A new book puts the history of Stanford, Palo Alto, and the tech industry in a very critical, and very relevant, perspective. By TIM REDMOND MAY 1, 2023 (48Hills.org) I first learned about Malcolm Harris\u2019 new book, Palo Alto, when I read a review by Gary Kamiya in The New York… Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[530,123],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26265"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26265"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26265\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26268,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26265\/revisions\/26268"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26265"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26265"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26265"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}