BOOKS | CALIFORNIA

Palo Alto by Malcolm Harris review — ‘Bill Gates is a jerk’

Tech titans come under attack in a history of the class struggle in California that could have been written by Jeremy Corbyn

The Sunday Times
Power play: the Googleplex in Silicon Valley
Power play: the Googleplex in Silicon Valley
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The city of Palo Alto, in northern California, has a good claim to be one of the most interesting places on Earth. Before the first Europeans landed in the New World, this balmy spot on the shore of San Francisco Bay was home to the Ohlone, a group of Native American hunter-gatherers. Then the Spaniards arrived, building a mission and a small town, and eventually the Ohlone hunting grounds became the Mexican state of Upper California.

In the 1840s the region was conquered by the expansionist United States, and in 1894 the railroad tycoon and Republican governor Leland Stanford founded a new university town a few miles inland. He named it after a redwood tree called the Palo Alto — the “tall stick”.

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