A Son of Palo Alto Digs Up Its Skeletons

Harris is a journalist based in Washington, D.C., but for him “Palo Alto” is personal: He grew up here, the son of a lawyer father and a mother who “did a lot of PTA.” As an adult, he had a hard time squaring other histories of the region—ones that focused on the mythology of creative innovators or on the hippie counterculture—with what he saw as Silicon Valley’s obsession with squeezing every last bit of profit out of every last resource. In the book, Harris traces this ethos back to the Palo Alto Stock Farm, where Leland Stanford developed a system for breeding ultrafast, ultradurable horses using genetic engineering. This method—known as the Palo Alto System—enabled Stanford to raise the average value of each horse by $100.

The farm is long gone—Stanford died in 1893, just two years after founding the university—but Harris argues that the philosophy of the Palo Alto System remains in the Palo Alto of today. On our walk, Harris and I ambled alongside the Caltrain tracks, the same railway line Stanford built in the late 1800s. It was also where a cluster of teenagers took their own lives during Harris’ high school years. Palo Alto is one of the wealthiest and most educated places on the planet, but its youth suicide rate is among the highest in the nation. To Harris’ mind, these facts are not unrelated. As he puts it in the book, there is a word for places where the dead exert an undue influence on the living: Palo Alto, he writes, is “haunted.”

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Harris’ written history of Palo Alto begins in the 1840s, a few decades before Leland Stanford named the town after a tall tree. But Harris’ family history there begins in the 1980s when his parents met at Stanford University. (His father was a temp in the computer program and his mother was a research assistant in the psych department.) After living for a time in nearby Santa Cruz, the Harris family moved back to Palo Alto in 1995, where as an eight-year-old at Ohlone Elementary School, Malcolm began to grasp what distinguished his parents’ worldview from that of other locals. His father specialized in antitrust law in the software industry, winning one big case that “basically invalidated the Windows trademark,” according to Harris. In the Harris household, “people like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were not the heroes,” he said. “They were the villains.”

Even still, living in prosperous Palo Alto had its advantages. Harris’ high school was the first to get onboarded to Facebook in 2005, when he was a junior. (At the time, Facebook’s headquarters were located in Palo Alto, not Menlo Park.) His journalism teacher was Esther Wojcicki, mother of YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki and 23andMe co-founder Anne Wojcicki, who was then still married to Google co-founder Sergey Brin. (Harris remembers meeting Brin in the Google cafeteria on a class trip and Esther Wojcicki encouraging them to use Gmail.) His classmates were similarly high-achieving. At the local YMCA, a teenaged Harris sometimes played basketball with Jeremy Lin of NBA “Linsanity” fame, who was a year ahead of him at Palo Alto High School.

In 2007, Harris left Palo Alto to attend the University of Maryland—“the only school that admitted me”—where he started a chapter of Students for a Democratic Society and focused on political organizing. By all accounts, a commitment to political philosophy has always been important to him: One of his childhood friends told me that once, on a trip to Tahoe, Harris stayed inside to write a paper about socialism in Latin America while everyone else went skiing. Perhaps unsurprisingly, after graduating from Maryland and moving to New York, he joined the Occupy Wall Street movement. (During a protest, he was arrested for disorderly conduct. Prosecutors subpoenaed his tweets as evidence, which Twitter refused on the basis of privacy and the right to free speech. Eventually, a federal judge compelled Twitter to comply and Harris pled guilty.)

Harris’ interest in politics, and in Marxism, has underpinned much of his writing. His first book, “Kids These Days,” explores the pressures put on millennials to grind it out at work, creating a generation obsessed with maximizing “human capital.” Besides confronting the mistakes of his cohort, much of that book seems surprisingly personal, as if Harris is untangling his views toward his own generation.

When Harris began researching “Palo Alto” in 2019, he said it was in an “attempt to understand the place where I grew up.” The book was originally meant to splice memoirish bits from his adolescence with history. “Thankfully,” he said, “my editor just let me delete all of that.” Instead, he chose to focus on roughly five periods of history: the early settlers of Alta California, the formation of Stanford University, the suburbanization of Palo Alto, its relation to midcentury social movements, and finally the internet age.

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On Monday, Harris gave his first public reading of “Palo Alto” at Books Inc., a cozy bookstore across the street from Palo Alto High School. Some former classmates and teachers had come to see him, and they crowded shoulder to shoulder, puffy jackets compressed together. Harris’ parents were there too, though they had moved out of Palo Alto shortly after Harris went to college.

Harris was seated near the children’s section, looking at ease among so many familiar faces. Still, I got the sense that most of these people, who were clutching the technicolor hardcover to their chests, had not yet read the back cover, in which Harris describes their community as “a haunted toxic-waste dump built on stolen Indigenous burial grounds.” In truth, much of “Palo Alto” can read like an indictment of the people who live there. In Harris’ telling, they seem at best to have inherited a legacy of colonialism and white supremacy, at worst to be actively advancing it.

Perhaps to avoid the sharpest of these barbs, Harris chose a lighter passage to read in person, one about LSD use in Palo Alto. (At least it started off lightly before veering off into a history of CIA-funded drug studies and some rather unsavory accounts of abuse during psychological experiments at Stanford, including, yes, the famous Stanford Prison Experiment.) There were a number of nodding heads and a few confused looks, as though the people in the audience were expecting a more upbeat retelling of their shared cultural history.

Later, when Harris opened the floor to questions, a woman raised her hand and asked how Harris squared his narrative of Palo Alto with the histories of people like John Gardner, founder of watchdog group Common Cause—a “hometown boy” who had been committed to helping others. Why not include those narratives, too?

“They’re part of the story that is most commonly told about Palo Alto,” Harris told her. “And yet we judge people not by their intentions, but by the world they create.”

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“Palo Alto” is a very long book and the reward for finishing it is somewhat unsatisfying: Harris ends by suggesting that Stanford University return some or all of its 8,000 acres of land to the Muwekma Ohlone people, the tribe of Native Americans who lived there before the arrival of the white settlers.

On our walk through downtown Palo Alto, I confessed to Harris that I’d found the ending disappointing and very implausible. “I was not quite prepared for the set of different reactions I’ve gotten to the ending,” he told me. “But I mean, if you’re holding out any hope for the future, something unlikely has to happen.” (In recent years, Stanford added a land acknowledgment to its website, but the university has yet to cede any of it. As one parody headline in the “Stanford Daily” summed it up: “We acknowledge our occupation of stolen land and our responsibility to honor Indigenous peoples in any way that lets us keep it.”)

Of course, the people who would object to this conclusion on ideological grounds are unlikely to get that far—the book begins with an epigraph from Karl Marx, so you know what you’re getting into before you start. But even those who don’t align themselves with Harris’ political thinking will get a lot out of “Palo Alto” if they commit to making the journey.  That, Harris argues in the book, is the reason for reading history at all: “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?”