The first comprehensive, global history of Silicon Valley, from railroad capitalists to microchip assemblers, showing how Northern California created the world as we know it
Palo Alto is nice. The weather is temperate, the people are educated, rich, healthy, enterprising. Remnants of a hippie counterculture have synthesized with high technology and big finance to produce the spiritually and materially ambitious heart of Silicon Valley, whose products are changing how we do everything from driving around to eating food. It is also a haunted toxic waste dump built on stolen Indian burial grounds, and an integral part of the capitalist world system.
I forced myself to not take any notes or highlights when reading this book, and ended up with three (3) highlights on a 700+ page book, which I consider a win.
Palo Alto was a really good book at some points, and felt like a chore at others. I think the images and narratives are well-identified and that the point is always very clear. The first chapters are a prime example of that, with showing how the early days of Stanford were first about breaking down young horses for higher performance, then abruptly switching to « and then they created a very high performance university » just after mentioning the string of youth suicides in Palo Alto in the previous decades. Unsubtle, but very good.
However, sometimes the narration just fell into Wikipedia territory. As a Wikipedia editor who doesn’t actually enjoy reading Wikipedia pages (I’m sorry! this is just how it is!), I often would skip a paragraph or two of lists of figures that just don’t mean anything to me. I was also, still as a Wikipedia, impressed with the quality and number of citations used for the book − and as a Terry Pratchett enthusiast, occasionally very amused by a footnote.
All three of my highlights are from the final part, on the 21st century, which may explain why I struggled so much with the pre-war period: it sometimes felt like very long exposition, but really wasn’t!
On the glitches of achievement society:
Instead of the madmen and criminals that emerge from glitches in the twentieth century’s disciplinary society—think Bonnie and Clyde and their New Left fans—Han writes that the achievement society produces “depressives and losers” as its human exhaust. Even the killers are nerds.
On Travis’s law:
Named by Stone after Kalanick, Travis’s law holds that if you offer a service that consumers love, they will prevent regulators from stopping you. Once users got hooked on Uber’s one-click cabs, municipal regulators didn’t have the stomach to take it away, even though it tossed the intricately organized industry into chaos.
And finally on premium mediocre:
The tech-industry concept consultant Venkatesh Rao labeled this rent-a-servant lifestyle “premium mediocre,” and it describes the users of the services courted by the Twitter tax break well: “Premium mediocrity is a pattern of consumption that publicly signals upward mobile aspirations, with consciously insincere pretensions to refined taste, while navigating the realities of inexorable downward mobility with sincere anxiety,” Rao writes.
This is a good bedside table book: chapters are extremely long, so I can’t recommend it as a toilet book (yes, I have a very precise classification), but it still falls under « read a little bit every day » rather than « binge time!».
💬
Alex