Palo Alto Quotes

“Silicon Valley has never been interested in slow and steady growth—an early winning appearance is key to the Palo Alto System.”
― Malcolm Harris, Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World

“How can you know what you want or feel or think—who you are—if you don't know which way history's marionette strings are tugging? [...] People aren't puppets, and to pull a person is to create the conditions for rebellion. Maybe we're more like butterflies, pinned live and wriggling onto history's collage.

If, as I have been convinced, the point of life and the meaning of freedom is to make something with what the world makes of you, then it's necessary to locate those places where history reaches through your self and sticks you to the board.”
― Malcolm Harris, Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World

“I should be very much pleased if you could find me something good (meaty) on economic conditions in California, of course at my expense. California is very important for me because nowhere else has the upheaval most shamelessly caused by capitalist centralization taken place with such speed.”
― Malcolm Harris, Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World

“A detailed 2020 investigation found that Amazon’s warehouse workers have a serious-injury rate nearly twice the warehouse industry average.”
― Malcolm Harris, Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World

“The junior Bush’s administration was full of unresolved conflicts of interest, but the officials didn’t need quid pro quo corruption to make sure their buddies prospered—that was an unavoidable consequence of their declared policy agenda. Hell, that was an unavoidable consequence of the Democrats’ declared policy agenda, too.”
― Malcolm Harris, Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World

“The issue wasn’t just that capitalists were thriving while their workers suffered; with output growth stalled, it was all about the split. Capitalists were winning because their workers were losing, a reality well camouflaged by the whiz-bang excitement Silicon Valley produced.”
― Malcolm Harris, Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World

“This was the era of young men with “potential,” especially in California, but potential to do what? For whom? As Yoneda’s example shows, potential meant more than courage, intelligence, and a winning smile—he had all three, and they earned him grief from authorities on two shores. It’s worth retracing our steps to the Palo Alto System, in which potential counts for everything—but only a specific kind of potential. A colt that won’t pull a cart is no good to the system, no matter how fast. And a colt that organizes all the horses to strike? That’s no potential at all.”
― Malcolm Harris, Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World

“The “Chinese question” found its answer at the national level, in the debate over a California-led plan for Chinese exclusion. In reconstructing the United States, California was emerging as the regional swing vote, just as the state’s enfranchised settlers became single-issue voters. The transcontinental railroad solidified the state’s membership in the Union, which was far from a given considering how often the territory had changed hands in the previous few decades as well as its continual political instability and foreign interference in Mexico, not to mention the temporary sundering of the United States itself. California’s Unionist majority helped repair that split, cutting off the Confederacy’s western tendency. But Unionist didn’t necessarily mean faithfully devoted to principles of abolition democracy and the spirit of the slave revolution. The race-based exclusion of Chinese from the country flew in the face of Reconstruction and the black-led attempt to create a pluralist, racially equal nation. But that seeming contradiction was no contradiction at all for California’s white Jacksonians, because they maintained a consistent position in favor of free white labor and free white labor only. As for the regionally aligned party duopoly, California’s vote swung against the South during the war, but it could swing back. Federal civil rights legislation meant to force the ex-Confederate states to integrate also applied to settler California’s relations with the Chinese, which left the southern and western delegations looking for a solution to their linked nonwhite labor problems. If former slaves and their children were able to escape not just their commodity status but also their working role in the regional economy, southern planters threatened to bring in Chinese laborers to replace them, just as planters had in the West Indies. That would blow the exclusion plan out of the water, which gave California an incentive to compromise with the South. These two racist blocs came to an agreement that permanently set the direction of the modern American project: They agreed to cede the South to the Confederate redeemers and exclude the Chinese.”
― Malcolm Harris, Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World

“The children of California shall be our children,” Leland Stanford told his wife, Jane, when they decided to build Palo Alto.”
― Malcolm Harris, Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World

“stirred up nationalist sentiment among Anglo settlers in Alta California, implying (but not declaring) that he was”
― Malcolm Harris, Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World

“bifurcated”
― Malcolm Harris, Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World

“For some Indians, white people who didn’t guard their horses well enough became another natural resource.”
― Malcolm Harris, Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World

“I’m a product of my environment, and I’m shot through with its symptoms.”
― Malcolm Harris, Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World

“We can be haunted by a loss or a traumatic event or even by that dumb thing we said that one time.”
― Malcolm Harris, Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World

“a generic formula: Anglos rule; all natives are Indians; all land and water is just gold waiting to happen. Geopolitics took on the character of the gold rush, as European colonial powers engaged in competitive scrambles for colonial territory in sub-Saharan Africa and”
― Malcolm Harris, Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World