In treatments of Silicon Valley’s technology industry, a shift (sometimes called the “techlash”) has occurred over the past decade from a more boosterish tone during the Obama presidency to a more critical approach in recent years. But many of the books written about Silicon Valley are studies of one company or individual, or just a few of them – John Carreyrou’s Bad Blood, on the fraudulent blood-testing company Theranos; or Sebastian Mallaby’s The Power Law, an upbeat account of the region’s venture capitalists. Few studies shed much light on the profound oddity of Palo Alto itself, nor do they locate Silicon Valley’s contemporary status in historical context, through the kind of critical analysis employed by the late historian Mike Davis in his landmark history of Los Angeles, City of Quartz (1990).
Harris’s Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World sets out to do precisely this: the publisher’s press release announces that the book does “for Silicon Valley what Mike Davis did for LA”. To that end, Harris ranges across the academic and popular literature to chart the region’s history from the precolonial era to the present day – with occasional detours, as the ambitious subtitle suggests, through related developments in northern California and the world.
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