Ayana Young Hello and welcome to For The Wild Podcast. I'm Ayana Young. Today I'm speaking with Malcolm Harris.

Malcolm Harris Well, just like any workplace, I mean, any place where you're going to have to put people to work under capitalism, any exercise of power, it includes the possibility for resistance.

Ayana Young Malcolm Harris is a freelance writer and the author of Kids These Days, Shit is Fucked Up and Bullshit, and the new book Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World. Well, Malcolm, thank you so much for joining us today on For The Wild. I am really looking forward to this conversation, doing the research for this interview definitely energized me and I felt quite passionate about much of what you talk about and write about. So thanks so much.

Malcolm Harris I'm so excited to hear. Thanks so much for having me.

Ayana Young Well, I'm thinking we could just jump right in to talking about California as place and metaphor and the haunting history, there's so much history that's going into this large strip of land along the Pacific, and I was born and raised there so I definitely have a lot of skin in the game, so to speak, but opening your new book, Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World, you write, "If, as I have been convinced the point of life and the meaning of freedom is to make something with what the world makes view, then it's necessary to locate those places where history reaches through yourself, and sticks you to the board." So to begin, I'm just thinking of the ways that history seems really alive in your work with Palo Alto and I'm wondering how the concept of haunting comes into play, especially in the history so focused on place.

Malcolm Harris Yeah, it's a kind of strange metaphor for someone like me, who's just such a materialist to use, I think, but I think it's worth thinking about how it works, right? Because haunting implies the persistence of something being where it's not, the dead are in the world, or there's something caught between realms and there's a impersonal sort of tension produced by hauntings, or that's what hauntings are, right? Is an impersonal tension of things not being in the right place. And I think that feeling on an effective register really describes so much of Palo Alto and what's going on there. At the same time, it is the premise for an investigative agenda, right? Like, what is in the wrong place? And why, how did it get there? And the history I'm dealing with is on a cosmic scale, you know, so short, right? It's less than two hundred years and we can really go back and see what is haunting where. So I think, for me, it was that kind of possibility that made me want to use the term as opposed to any particular spiritual connection to the idea.

Ayana Young Yeah, this makes me think about the ways California is often used as a metaphor, or an idea of something to which the whole world should aspire, or, you know, on the other hand, as a fear mongering tactic for what California might become, or what we might become, and, you know, just even considering, from what I had heard last, that California was the sixth biggest economy in the world, and it's just the state of California, let alone the entertainment industry, the tech industry, songs written about California, media, I mean, it really does have such a huge presence globally. So I'm wondering, how did you comb through the various representations and characteristics of California in this writing process, in order to focus on the history and material reality of the place itself?

Malcolm Harris Well, having a smaller focus in Palo Alto made that so much easier, while at the same time it's been, like, heavily documented place. I try to make the case that it's an important historic place and there is a certain amount of history written about it, but it's not as densely historicized as, say, San Francisco or Los Angeles. And so it sort of gave me a smaller part to deal with, but it's the premise of my method that the elements of the whole are contained within their parts, right? So by looking at the part of Palo Alto, which I think ends up being a pretty important part, and sort of derive the structure of the larger system itself and why California achieves that special place that you're talking about in the world, despite, and or because of its particular place as the last link in this chain of the establishment of a global capitalist system.

Ayana Young I was noticing that throughout Palo Alto, you mentioned many influential and complicated connected individuals, whose past marked and were marked by Palo Alto, for instance, you discuss Bill Shockley saying, "Shockley became a brilliant engineer and athlete, a war hero without seeing battle, a celebrated inventor, the Stanford professor and Nobel Prize winner, and the man who puts silicon in Silicon Valley, William Shockley, Jr, was also the most infamous American bigot in the 20th century." So I'm wondering, how do people come to reinforce and represent the systems from which they come? And how do we complicate narratives that focus only on personal autonomy when considering wealth and power?

Malcolm Harris Yeah, I mean, that's really one of the messages, I hope of the book. And one of the things that really focused my attention was a real attention on forces rather than people and people as instantiations or characterizations of those forces. And so Bill Shockley, Jr, is a really interesting person, not just because he himself, you know, because of his wacky personality, and his undeniable facility, technically, and is terrible ideas, combined to make an interesting biography, but because those are all products of particular historical forces, and so I trace back his connections to this place, you know, how does he come to live here, and more importantly, to work here and talk about his mother enrolling in Stanford as a mining engineer, and his father becoming a professor at Stanford as mining engineer, and what was the character of mining engineering in the world economy at the time when Stanford was focused on producing mining engineers, and how was Shockley tested and evaluated by Stanford psychologists, as a child, as a potential tool of US Empire, just like mining engineers had been in the previous epoch. And so trying to embed individuals in these trans personal narratives, these historical stories that go so much bigger than them, while at the same time acknowledging that if it hadn't been for them, any particular individual, there would be a different particular individual to characterize the city or similar social forces.

Ayana Young Speaking of Stanford, like so many of the other large Ivy League institutions, I think of Stanford as kind of an Ivy League of the West Coast, and it's interesting because of course, it's this nonprofit inflated as this public entity, and really, so many of these institutions are just clubhouses for organized capital, which part of these ideas I'm taking right from your book, and things that I've thought about before as well. And I think it's interesting to understand how this institution has shaped its place and and I guess I just love to hear more about the planned and unplanned way Stanford was created as an institution of power, and wealth accrual.

Malcolm Harris Yeah, well, if you think about Stanford, Leland Stanford Junior University comes to be, we're talking about characterizing social forces right? It comes to substitute for Leland Stanford, Jr, who is the heir to the Stanford robber baron fortune, who dies unexpectedly as a young teenager and his parents decide that their children are going to be the children of California, they say, and it's this pretty specific idea of what that meant, but they are sort of transferring this curse, right? It's the activities that they've done, what they've done, and been part of the colonization of the West in order to transfer that wealth to this institution that then is going to spread it to the children of not California, per se, but The Anglo American settlers of California, that's the premise of Stanford University. That's what happens and quickly, that spins out of the founding families control as Jane Lathrop Stanford, dies and or is murdered by the president of the University and it becomes an institution that's really obsessed with the eugenic perfection of man in the service of America.

Ayana Young What do we make of the reality that universities like Stanford are often simultaneously hotbeds of student resistance, and the beginnings of technologies of war surveillance and control?

Malcolm Harris Well, just like any workplace is, right, I mean, any place where you're going to have to put people to work under capitalism, and the exercise of power, it includes the possibility for resistance. So I think wherever you have people working, you see resistance to that work, to capital, and you can find it wherever you look. The key question for me, I guess, is what is the importance of the particular resistance that you see in Palo Alto and its character over time?

Ayana Young Yeah. There's so much to say about universities and academia and in your other book, Kids These Days, you right, higher education is just one industry, and it follows, sometimes leads, the same trends as the rest of the labor market" and it's an interesting quote, I guess, it makes me think about, there's so much critique of academia in ways I don't think there were before because of the state of the world, and the future opportunities for people who do graduate. I think at one time, if you graduated from Stanford, for instance, your opportunities were probably more abundant, where now, these institutions are churning out. I don't want to say robots because people are people, but it's almost like, they're just churning out more people and not to say there's not more jobs, but I don't think that there is the same amount of opportunities. And we see that with housing, and you know, maybe before a PhD would have held more weight than it does now, because of the way the world is growing, and resource extraction and materialism, capitalism, disposability culture, and so on and so forth. And so I guess I think about these young adults like myself, who might have these dreams of going into these institutions thinking that it will open up worlds, and for many it does, now, maybe the worlds that it opens up, are sinister, or are not actually the dream of what young, excited people have in mind. And so I guess there's a, maybe even like a dream shattering effect of what these institutions can actually provide for us anymore. And you know, of course, like we can tack that on to some of the boomers, some boomer ideologies, like, "Oh, kids don't work anymore. You know, there was so much more dignity when I was young. And we really, you know, we really showed up" and I'm like, well, it's not the same world. And I have compassion for people who don't want to show up in that way. What are they fighting for? What are they working for? What are they looking forward to? And we can get more into that in terms of how social media plays into that, and the making of millennials. Maybe I'm skipping ahead too far, because that's a whole other topic that I really want to get into with you. But maybe we just stick right now before we jump into the millennial and Gen Z world about how these institutions actually fail young people and shatter the dreams that they may come into these institutions with?

Malcolm Harris Well, I mean, that's not really their job, right? It's like, yeah, if they sell themselves as ways to help you achieve your dreams, then I don't know, you can use them that way you can. There are resources at every university, even outside of universities that people can use to educate themselves. So I don't think there's like nothing there. But no, people shouldn't go into college expecting that, especially an elite college like Stanford and thinking that the institution itself is going to give them purpose, I think mostly what they think it's going to give them is a strong working credential. And they're mostly right about that or, you know, connections to the kind of people they want to know in their future job, which again, is probably the case. So I think that the value of a Stanford degree has probably only increased. So I don't think the disillusion is necessarily coming from their individual lack of options. I think it's probably coming from their reasoned analysis of the national, global situation, right, they see what's happening in the world, from a capitalist system, whether they personally can benefit or not, you still have to be pretty willfully ignorant, not see what's going on, as well as for that matter, the participation of our leading and elite institutions with what's going on. Right? So the historically student activists have been really intellectual and really like strong researchers about the complicity of their institutions in American imperialism in capitalist violence, and tried to hold those institutions to account. Maybe they have less room to do that now, I think that's possible, because the job market is so competitive, and they individually may want to feel secure and might want to hold on to their options. But no, I don't. I don't see it as people getting disillusioned because they're, they're personally insecure, per se. At least not at Stanford.

Ayana Young Yeah, part of me just thinks intellectualism, which really, maybe has a home and higher academia is failing us to an extent and in young people specifically, because I think we are delusion to think that it's critical thinking or at least that's what we're taking part in, where I think it's actually quite narrow. And I think it really is serving a type of capitalist-dystopian dream that I just tend to think, you know, there's all different types of people, different types of dreams and desires, but I guess, what I see is, most people want to be good people, they want to, "change" the world for the better and they put a lot of time and energy, go into debt, and then come out the other side, actually just being potentially more indoctrinated or less hopeful. And with these institutions having so much money and power, one would hope that they were trying to evolve into something that is more mutually beneficial. I don't know. I mean, I'm definitely in an idealistic thought right now. And maybe this kind of plays into the plight of millennials, and there's just been so much rapid change in this generation, as I'm sure generations before us would feel as well. But there's, you know, it's like, what does it mean to witness late stage capitalism from childhood? And how does that affect millennials, or Gen Z years? And I guess, you know, of course, that plays into like, what it means to even go to college and what that even means to enter the job market, when we're entering, knowing that we are in the throes of late stage capitalism and an extinction crisis, climate change, so on and so forth. It doesn't, I would imagine, it doesn't have the same meaning of what it was, even 20-30 years ago.

Malcolm Harris In some ways, I think that's true, but I think also there are past generations that lived under the shadow of World War, they lived under the shadow of nuclear annihilation, right, like the constant threat of nuclear annihilation. And they weren't wrong to assess that the the anti nuke movement, for example, which I think we can draw a lot of inspiration from, and should draw a lot of inspiration from, in today's climate movement probably wasn't wrong to see that as like an existential threat to humanity, right, just like we're not wrong to see one today, but it's not a unique experience, I guess, in that way, but we do have to, like historicize, the particular coordinates of what's going on right now, right? And what does it mean to struggle over the environment? And what possibilities does that open for future kinds of struggle? Right? And so it's like the acceleration of the Indigenous Movement in North America opens up whole new vistas of future struggle, and that's a product of the current environmental crisis, like directly, right. And this book is partly inspired by that situation. So that's arising from conflicts, out of our particular circumstances that isn't just about the magnitude per se, but about the actual coordinates.

Ayana Young Yeah, those are good points to mull over for a bit for me. And to move into another topic that I find really fascinating that you speak about is the internet as institution, and I'm wondering how does it change the way we see the internet when we look at it as your most recent book does, as a product of specific capital investments, placements and long standing progressions, rather than just a singular and almost like totalizing invention?

Malcolm Harris Yeah, I think that's a great question, the classic internet boosters story about the internet is that hippies translated their ideas about the world, and oneness and such, into this new electronic medium and produced a new space of freedom with the internet and cyberspace. And that's still a very popular historiography of the early internet and some people view it in a critical way, they're like, and that was bad, you know, those hippies were bad and the internet they made was bad, but still concede that like, that's what happened. But the research that I was doing, which I was mostly concerned with the Cold War, and global struggle over the mode of production, which was the most important thing that was happening at the time in the 70s, and 80s, was not like some guys writing Grateful Dead lyrics. And their computers played and connected computers that internetworking of computers played a very, very specific role, which is that it allowed the United States and like unaccountable wings of the United States security apparatus, to make clandestine operations, really awful violent massacres, basically. As well as the financing and the weapons moving needed for them across distances without being held accountable, and people spying on them. So like, that's what the first laptops were used for, you know, was doing this kind of Cold War network. And that, to me, is a much, much more important history to understand in terms of understanding the internet and the role that plays in our lives, and our world, and society, than the idealistic sort of the Internet is a product of our concepts about our relations to each other.

Ayana Young Yeah, there's a couple quotes from your article "Are We Living Under 'Technofeudalism?'" that I want to unravel with you, but one of them is, "We do technically spend less time working for our bosses than we do informing on ourselves to tech companies, no matter whom we work for, or whether we're employed at all. We're generating value for Bezos and Zuck." Yeah, I just would love to hear you expand on that a bit.

Malcolm Harris That was a concession that I'm then spending most of the article contrasting with, so I don't want to put too much emphasis on it right. That it sometimes seems like these days, that our main relation to capitalism is through these apps that we spend a bunch of time on. But that's not true. Our main relation to capitalism for almost all of us is being exploited through our labor. And so despite, you know, our consciousness, maybe a disproportionate amount of our consciousness, being occupied with these apps or ads, that doesn't mean that that's what constitutes our material relation to the mode of production. Like, just because you can't stop looking at your phone doesn't mean you work for Mark Zuckerberg.

Ayana Young But we are giving the tech companies are information, they're learning about what we want to buy where we are, you know, what is the benefit for them? I mean, I think I know, but like, I guess I would imagine spending so much time on these devices, on these apps, giving data is doing something like it's not, we are selling ourselves on some level, but I don't know what we're receiving and returning.

Malcolm Harris Well, it's more or less the same as when you watch television and I think the industry itself, and there's a phrase I like called crita-hype, where you hype up the technology in the way that you criticize it. And it's pretty common, especially around these sorts of surveillance technologies, where people exaggerate how effective they are, just as the tech companies themselves exaggerate how effective they are, whether you're doing it critically, or to hype it, it's still exaggerating how effective they are. And I think that like, we know that Facebook and these companies misrepresent how useful this data is all the time, right the infamous case is Facebook told everyone that videos were doing super great and so they should all switch to videos. And it turns out that they had sort of made up that data, and everyone had changed their business plan based on what Facebook had said about itself. So I take all those claims with a grain of salt, how the security services have used the backdoors that these companies have offered to surveil individuals and get information on targets is a totally different thing. Because they're actually focused on individuals. And they're targeting people for these purposes, and they're able to do this through the same pseudo impersonal tracking regime that the social media companies have installed. But in terms of like, have social media ads revolutionized society and capitalist production. I do not think so.

Ayana Young Interesting. Well, there's another quote where you say, "If everything the would be cryptocurrency sovereigns and Metaverse real estate developers said was true, we might well be ruled by cyber barons, so it's a good thing that they're totally full of shit. The internet's true landlords aren't even tech companies, as researcher Daniel Green notes in a newspaper. They are the real estate investment trusts that own the vast majority of data centers and the links between them. When you get behind the scenes and down to the cables, Google and Amazon are renters." So yeah, I'd love to hear you expand on that and how does the scale and form of the internet and e-commerce, reflect and refract various entanglements of property and power?

Malcolm Harris Yeah, I thought that paper from Dan Green that he'd been working on for a really long time was super informative about what the actual physical structure of the internet is, right? Because you think about who owns the internet, you think it must be like, you know, the government or one of the big tech companies, but it's not really either of those, it's these trusts, right? It's these financialized instruments that own buildings where cables go, and the interlinks between the cables that connect to each other. And then the big tech companies like everybody else, rents some of that for them. And you might read about Facebook, or some of the other big tech companies building their own data centers. But those are a minority of the data centers that we're using, even for a big firm like Google. They like the flexibility of being able to rent space as they need it, as opposed to building the centers themselves, and that definitely reflects the industry and its character.

Ayana Young Yeah, it's really fascinating to learn more about this, like the underbelly, or the details that so many of us have no idea how all of this really works. And I guess part of me wonders, what does this do for the user to understand the way the Internet actually works and the infrastructure? Of course, there's the actual infrastructure of the internet and the resource extraction used to power the internet and servers and all that, there's that infrastructure. And of course, then there's the foundation of ownership and capitalism, and you know, but let's just say for, you know, me or anybody else who's just a user, what does it do for us to understand these things? Would it help us not use it, use it more, use it differently? You know, I'm kind of just in this moment of, I mean, I'm fascinated by this, but I'm like, but why, or what is it doing for me to understand more?

Malcolm Harris Yeah, well, as an individual consumer, right, it could either inform your choices or not, depending on how you want to consume, right? You could be like, oh, I need to set up a VPN, I need to pay for a VPN to use when I'm surfing the web on my devices, which is a thing I advise that people should do, should get a virtual private network they're using to browse the web, that's a smart thing to do. But that's not I guess, the most important thing about insights about how this impersonal system in which you're part of can work sort of goes back to the first quote you read, because it's about how you can interact with it, to change it with other people. And so knowing how it works, is what allows you or hopefully, is a precondition for let's say, organizing a response that might be efficacious, right, might matter. And that's what we're here to do. So an example, in the book is, when anti war militants have an understanding of what the early computers and the computer data systems in their universities are being used for, which is war work in Vietnam, and they sort of understood how they worked. And they use that information to target and attack those computer systems to try and aid the North Vietnamese war effort and that requires some intelligence about, you know, how the system works, and where you can be effective in putting your stick in the spokes of the wheel.

Ayana Young Yeah, I'm trying to figure out what my stick is, because I do see the harm that the internet causes us. I don't think that it's all just a great encyclopedia. I mean, this is a funny example, but I'm trying to build a greenhouse right now and I'm trying to Google or search. And I do use Google. But I also have other things. I'm trying to search for homemade greenhouses, or handbuilt greenhouses, recycled greenhouses, and it's truly the same sponsored ads  for pages and pages and pages. And I'm like, wait why am I still being shown this one pre built greenhouse to buy? Like, I don't want to buy this. I'm literally asking how to build a recycled greenhouse, you know? So of course, there's that which is a very light level of just like, okay, this isn't actually giving me what I want and it's just trying to sell me things. I'm not even trying to buy things. I'm actually trying to inform myself on how to have hard skills. So you know, that felt like a big downer. But it's not even that that I'm concerned with, of course, for me on an ecological level, even the terminology like the cloud, there's no cloud, the cloud is on the ground in factories, being fed by massive power structures, like even you know, cryptocurrency, which again, seems like this thing in the sky is coal plants in Montana, that were shut down to power towns are being reopened just for Bitcoin. So-

Malcolm Harris It's not the Cloud, it's the Matrix.

Ayana Young It's a very heavy matrix too, it weighs very heavy ecologically, to have this thing called the internet that a lot of us here in the states have access to 24/7 to get subpar information that takes a ton of our energy away from actually where we live, connecting with people in front of us. And of course, I say all this having a podcast talking to you on zoom from my laptop. So I'm absolutely complicit in the matrix and, you know, I know that every single day when I wake up with my alarm clock on my iPhone, that is on airplane mode, but nonetheless is by my bed. And so I really question this matrix that I think at one point I thought was benefiting us and I know of course the tech industry definitely likes to say that it is, like I know Google has a project called the Next Billion Users, and they believe that getting the next billion people on the internet is evolution, and it's good for people, and it's helpful, and I wonder, what are we lacking as humanity, that the internet is helpful? Like, what is it helping us with?

Malcolm Harris Well, it's helping some people make a lot of money, that's part of it. I don't think it's like a natural product of humanity, right? Like, there's so many different ways we could connect to each other and share data over networks, or like, you know, printing books around and passing them around is a way to share data over networks, right, like libraries or networks. So I don't think there's anything particularly unique about the internet, like capital T capital I that is this connection of computers, and I don't think it's going to last forever. I sure hope not. So I think there's a danger in, like you said about the cloud, naturalizing it as some hyper-object, right? Maybe as Timothy Morton's term, that is just part of the world now and will be forever, as opposed to a particular conjunction of objects at particular time, suitable in relation to each other, that is not that old and will not last forever.

Ayana Young Explain why you think it won't last forever. What does that mean?

Malcolm Harris Well, nothing lasts forever, right? This is a particular connection of a set of cables, right? Like, those cables will break one time or another one way or the other. And, hopefully, in a non-catastrophic future, which is what I hope for, we'll find different ways I think, to network with each other across spaces. I think the internet is based on a particular moment in time, obviously, ARPANET is originally like the backbone for US nuclear response, and goes from there. So I think we probably have a difference and people talked about different kinds of internet and wanting a new kind of internet, and they like to go to mesh net, and lots of different, like, we're still using very centralized technologies that capital built in the 20th century, right. So like phone lines, more or less. So. Yeah, it's important to historicize the internet, both as a proper noun and as a like, connection of all internet enabled computers.

Ayana Young Okay, well, I'm going to move away from talking about the internet, because it's a real wormhole and I want to talk to you about the culture of work, or cultures of work and work outside of capitalism. And I'd love to think for a moment on the difference between work and exploitation. And it seems that in order to work, one must also serve grandiose capitalist ideas and put oneself on the line for someone else's profit. But I want to pay mind to the thought that work itself is not a bad thing. So how might changing the structure of the work reform the ways we understand collectivism and community?

Malcolm Harris I mean, it's important not to get too like individual or personal about it, right? It's not that no one's work can be fulfilling, or even that no one's work evades exploitation, which some people find ways to do. You can still find artisanal producers, even under capitalism, right. And I think there's a reason people like that kind of branding is because they aspire to that kind of unalienated activity. Myself as the writer of books, right, that's a job or role, kind of work, that precedes capitalism. And it's work that I feel really privileged and excited to have. So it's not like every single person's job is awful. And overcoming capitalism means finding a job for yourself. That isn't awful. If that were the case. It would be a little bit easier. But it's about that the structure of the system itself forces the body of working people into a position where they have no choice but to sell their work and their time for less than it's worth. Work and labor, labor in an abstract sense acquires this capitalist character, as capitalism becomes the dominant system for the mode of production and reproduction in society.

Ayana Young Yeah, I'm also thinking about how so called innovation has often rested on increasing productivity without simultaneously lessening the amount of time people are expected to work. And if we go beyond the capitalist assumption that productivity and rapid growth should take precedence, what options are there for alternative innovations and other ways of growth?

Malcolm Harris They're pretty limited, right? I mean, that's the problem of a capitalist system is that if they let you do it otherwise, then we probably would. At the same time, I do think we have a certain amount, there's a difference between that and saying, like, oh, you can't do anything, right. We have a certain range of activities we can take part in, if we're trying to organize alternative metabolisms between ourselves and the world, right, but that's a collective process. It's not just about, I bought the right book, or even I bought the right like coffee beans or I bought the right organic fruit. It's about organizing the kinds of spaces with other people that provide for the possibility of resistance against the dominant system, which I think has to come in a pretty direct and conflictual way. Ultimately.

Ayana Young I guess I'm thinking back to Palo Alto and thinking about the importance of history as we consider our future directions. And then that kind of brings me to resolution and land back that you speak to and I guess, you know, one quote from Palo Alto is, "I'm committed to this planet, which means I have to hold on to the possibility of an alternative to capitalist exhaustion. What then would that look like? Palo Alto and California's many Stanford children have been our focus thus far, Herbert Hoover and Bill Shockley, and those who followed. I doubt that these same people will have profitable answers for every problem they cause because we know enough of their history to know they can't fix themselves. What else is Palo Alto to do with itself? How about giving it back?" What would that look like to give it back? Or what does that mean to you?

Malcolm Harris Well, it's pretty simple in this case, and that's why I think one of the reasons I can suggest it as a very, like pragmatic operation, right, is that you have this nonprofit, that because unlike the covenants that Indigenous people have had with their land, the covenant that the Stanford had with their land, which said that it cannot be sold, was maintained. So they've held on to 1000s of acres, 8000 acres in the Bay Area, is pretty amazing territory to hold on to, throughout this period of capitalist exploitation. At the same time, the Muwekma Ohlone are a constituted tribe, they're politically organized, they have, you know, corporate existence or whatever. Even though they're not recognized by the federal government, they're recognized by Stanford as having an ancestral claim to the territory. Stanford has ceded land before to governmental agencies, particularly the Veteran's Agency to build the VA hospital on the land. Stanford has recognized the Muwekma when they've returned remains, choosing to disregard the federal government's refusal to recognize the tribe in order to recognize them and to return the remains that are from the land that confirms their ancestral connection to it. So in terms of how we can do land back, land back seems like an insurmountably complicated thing to figure out, here's a very, very straightforward way in my thinking that some land could be returned. And I think that's like the most historically progressive thing the Stanford project could do at this moment in history rather than say, endow expensive new climate studies schools, right, give some of the land back and they know they should.

Ayana Young It seems like there's a way to do it even with the way you've just explained the structures. I would imagine that somebody is working on this campaign or this is being at least talked about publicly, maybe even?

Malcolm Harris Stanford returning the land? I mean, if you go to the land acknowledgement page of Stanford University where they do their landing management, they have a link to the concept of land back, but no, they're not to my knowledge, the last time I checked, which was pretty recently, no, they're not engaged in any talk to return land to Muwekma.

Ayana Young Well, I would imagine some folks listening to you know, what you just shared with us, we'll get pretty inspired and yeah, that's really interesting news that seems very doable to be able to give the land back. I know sometimes with land back, the legal ownership structures themselves make it really difficult with so many hoops and barriers, but with the way you described it, that doesn't seem to be an issue. And yeah, gosh, well, I guess thinking back to Palo Alto in general, I'm wondering, how does Palo Alto's specific position show the continued importance of place in a supposedly decentralized and globalized world?

Malcolm Harris Well, I really think it's this relation between the part and the whole, right? That the whole is always made up of its parts, and its structure is implicit in them. And so if you drill down, you don't, it's not just Palo Alto. Obviously, I think that Palo Alto in particular, and I tried to make the case that Palo Alto in particular has a lot that you can focus on and plays, I think, a particular role in this history because of its place as this last link in the chain of global capitalism, that California gets incorporated into the system last. But I think you can also draw really important lessons from any place, basically, that you look close enough. So not just you know, San Francisco or Los Angeles, but also, Walter Johnson has got a great book about St. Louis, that covers the same time period that I think is really useful. My friend, David Banks has a book about upstate New York that's coming out soon about how upstate New York has changed. There's even a recent study book about Uber in Washington, DC that's coming out soon. It's sort of a focus case study on how disruption happened in the taxi industry in DC. So you can find a lot about a whole by looking at any individual part. You just got to look close enough.

Ayana Young Yeah. In Palo Alto you write, "America's post-war suburban culture wasn't white, patriarchal and conservative by coincidence. It was a careful design." I guess I'm wondering how does alteration to the environment or to specific neighborhoods, etc. , reflect particular ideologies?

Malcolm Harris Well, you see that in Palo Alto Absolutely, that zoning and zoning control has been heavily politicized recently, but so much of it comes out of Palo Alto. Palo Alto is the inspiration for zoning prohibitive, zoning around the country, and Herbert Hoover, who was Stanford's first son, really pulls together the real estate industry folks who come up with sort of the first zoning, the models zoning law, and come up with the legal rationale for zoning, which is police power, which I think is pretty interesting. But Palo Alto itself is very strange in the way that it's laid out in that it feels like the industry is constantly hiding like they have these huge setbacks, and these low slung offices that are kind of like behind bushes, and it's like you wouldn't be putting something sinister in a place where people are living and that's sort of what they did. Right? That they had to hide something sinister in a place where they also wanted to live.

Ayana Young That's interesting. I guess I'm thinking about how to say this. But like, how does historical distance reinforce ideas of disposability culture? There's a quote, I could read from Palo Alto that kind of made me think of that, but I could read it or if that kind of tapped into something-

Malcolm Harris No go for it. I'd love to hear.

Ayana Young You write “The Palo Alto System isn’t old from a world-historical perspective – only 150 years or so, as of this writing – but it’s not nearly as new as Palop Altans believe… That forgetfulness is an advantageous adaptation: the past is a distraction when you’re creating the future. To the new round of capital-drenched rocketboys, the Earth is but a launchpad for interstellar capitalism.”  

Malcolm Harris Ignorance and forgetfulness about the specificity of a place has really been the mode of accumulation in Palo Alto in the system that I talked about, and that contrasts so heavily with Indigenous people who lived in the same space for so long, which is that their societies were based on a real density of knowledge about the place where they actually live, right? It's like, ignorance was the last thing that their society could afford. Whereas in this capitalist society, ignorance is what leads to disruption, right ignorance, not remembering what a bus is so you can invent a bus for the first time is what makes millionaires and billionaires and so we have this society of ignorance of forgetting, of not knowing where you live. That's really been, I think, globalized, right? They've pushed that on the world very intentionally.

Ayana Young Yeah, when we focus so much on the ideals and myths of capital, we often forget that we are living on a finite Earth, and that all of the things we have, all of our websites, our inventions, and war machines have to come from something somewhere., and your book does such a good job of pointing out these complicated material ties and as we started to come to a close, I would love to hear about the ways we can continue to uncover these connections and make meaningful change to the material structures of the world.

Malcolm Harris That's the struggle, right, constantly. And so I think, for me, drawing out this history that, in some ways, I guess we're all in some ways a part of, it's a global history, part of the goal is to orient in terms of what's possible, and what's impossible for the future, and how can we think about it. And I pose this sort of land back as a challenge to the system at the end, where this seems like the smallest reasonable step the system could take towards addressing the actual scale of the problem. But if that's met with, you know, people think that's ridiculous, right? People still treat that as an unreasonable demand and like it's not even within the realm of political possibility. And if that's true for the system, as it exists, right, if that's impossible, if a restoration of the land to forces and modes of reproduction, and a social metabolism that could responsibly care for it and restore it to a way where it could care for life, then we're not dealing with a situation of like negotiation or convincing right, and that's important for understanding what our options are going forward.

Ayana Young Well, Malcolm, thank you so much for taking us into the matrix and beyond. It's been a really expansive conversation and I appreciate all your research and thought process behind these very large and looming topics.

Malcolm Harris Thank you so much for having me and I can't wait to listen.

Francesca Glaspell Thank you for listening to For The Wild Podcast. The music you heard today was by Harry Foster, Harrison Basch, and Ian George. For The Wild is created by Ayana Young, Erica Ekrem, Francesca Glaspell, and Julia Jackson.