Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World

⚡️ 10 Quotes from the book

“Palo Alto is nice. The weather is temperate; the people are educated, rich, healthy, innovative. Remnants of a hippie counterculture synthesized with high technology and big finance to produce the spiritually and materially ambitious heart of Silicon Valley.”

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“As I grew up, Palo Alto gradually offered its own explanation for why things were the way they were—why some people had big houses and others didn’t, why some people lived here and everyone else didn’t: They deserved it. Hard work and talent allowed some people to change the world single-handedly, and they earned whatever they got.”

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“One thing I learned about in Palo Alto was C. Wright Mills’s concept of the sociological imagination, which he describes as a tool people can use to 'understand what is happening in themselves as minute points of the intersections of biography and history within society.'”

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“Applied to children, the Palo Alto System suggested both positive and negative eugenic practices. Budding geniuses needed to be identified and elevated, while young degenerates needed to be corralled where they couldn’t dilute the national race or turn their underachievement into social problems.”

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“World War II shifted California’s national location as the country spread into the Pacific, linking the greater United States to the Asian continent. With a combination of invention, hype, government contracting, and stock jobbery, these men of the radio age cast the mold for more than a century’s worth of local tech entrepreneurs. And as the world entered two wars, they became something more.”

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“The core of the postwar economy was not to be a civilian version of wartime industrial manufacturing. It was headed up, up, and away, into the aerospace, communications, and electronics (ACE) sectors, and Terman was ahead of the trajectory.”

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“Just as it served growers during the interwar period, formal and informal labor segregation by race, gender, ethnicity, nationality, and immigration status boosted Silicon Valley’s profitability and kept the Bay Area growing while the nation’s other regional economies fell into recession.”

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“With its high profits and bifurcated labor force, California modeled capitalist discipline for the nation.”

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“Eventually, capital will withdraw from Palo Alto. Given its druthers, capital will use the place up until it’s no longer worth the trouble. Since capitalists like living in the Bay Area, by the time they’re finished with it they’re likely to have exhausted much of the rest of the planet.”

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“Palo Alto is a bubble. I do know that now, but it’s an important bubble for the twentieth century, and a thorough accounting of the town’s role explains a lot about California, the United States, and the capitalist world, where it has found itself elevated to the status of promised land.”

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