Just started reading Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and The World by Malcom Harris and 23 pages in I'm already in love. Like Harris, I too grew up in the South Bay Area and have had a complicated relationship with it's history and current culture. The difference is Harris has done the research and written on that history. It's already fascinating, and specifically I wanted to post a quote I have feelingstm about.
"[T]he "California Model" was so adaptable because it reformatted the relationship between capital, labor, and the environment to a generic formula: Anglos rule; all natives are Indians; all land is just gold waiting to happen. Geopolitics took on the character of the gold rush, as European colonial powers engaged in competitive scrambles for colonial territory in sub-Saharan Africa and China."
I love this quote because it shows that the modern model of silicon valley cultural and economic export goes back to the very beginning of California's participation in global capital. The need to make everything has generic and profitable as possible, the lack of care for human beings and the environment, the encouragement of thinking of progress as something individual (white) men do, it's all here.
The way it's "generic" is really what speaks to me personally though. Growing up this sense of making things "generic" was everywhere I'm Silicon Valley; it created a "generic" culture. Not that there isn't a distinct culture, but that the culture is one that values mass marketability, that worships profit, that looks for opportunities to exploit as a part of daily life. The culture ruled by value as values, everything else is mutable to that end.
I'm going to be curious if I keep feeling this way throughout this book
