? UNDER THE LAMPLIGHT-

Not so sunny in California: In his new book, Palo Alto, Malcolm Harris charts Silicon Valley’s history of exploitation and greed. Harris looks past the town’s sunny skies, educated entrepreneurial residents, and its companies that are transforming the world and exposes Palo Alto as a critical part of the global capitalist system that was constructed on stolen Native American burial sites. “We have a word for idyllic towns where the youth suicide rate is three times as high as it’s supposed to be: haunted,” Harris writes, by “the kinds of large historical crimes that, once committed, can never truly be set right.” He examines the Northern California town’s evolution during the 19th and 20th centuries and argues that it is defined by the “Palo Alto System,” a brutally exploitative type of capitalism that the region’s generations of b’naires have mastered.

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