2 - The Hauntology of the Future

Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World (2023) by Malcolm Harris

Malcolm Harris starts his hauntology - his study of historical ghosts that linger in our present and refuse to be exorcised, hoping also to suck out the vitality from our future - with a devastatingly simple question.

Given that Palo Alto, California - home to Stanford University, the Silicon Valley, and the internet entrepreneur culture that has gifted us with so many wonderful practical altruists - is so solid, dynamic, vital, and so very prosperous, how come so many of its young people choose to take their own lives rather than live on within its embrace?

He remembers so many of his contemporaries, young people now dead by their own hand, and considers their loss a personal haunting: "When it comes to my classmates, the division feels arbitrary. Some of those who died were depressive, some weren’t - a description of the living as well. Anything you could say about them you could say about us, too... That has haunted me, and I have struggled to find a way to approach it as a writer."

But this enormous book isn't by any means an intimate confessional about childhood trauma; quite the reverse. Harris' story isn't about the agonizing of the individual human soul, or only consequentially, in its very final effects. Instead it's a story about original sins in history and how they linger on, not as phantasms but as real practices.

This is the praxis of domination and exploitation where everything, literally everything - land, animals, tribes, rivers, towns, compatriots, foreigners, especially foreigners - is a resource to be exploited, used up for the monetary value that can be extracted. Haunting is theft. Imperialism is theft. America is theft, but it also robs itself after it's done robbing everyone and everything else.

We have a word for idyllic towns where the youth suicide rate is three times as high as it’s supposed to be: haunted. Palo Alto is haunted. When I say haunted, I don’t mean haunted in the ghost sense... Haunting happens when a past action won’t go away, won’t stay past. But the word usually refers to a relation between the living and the dead: There’s an imbalance between the realms, something stuck where it isn’t supposed to be. Haunting is homologous with theft, which also involves things being where they shouldn’t, but we’re not talking about a stolen wallet; it takes more than that to disturb hell. What haunts are the kinds of large historical crimes that, once committed, can never truly be set right.

Palo Alto is a microcosm for California, and California for the United States. And things being as they are for the present, the US is in the business of making the whole world a California. It's been so ever since the California mining engineer, strip-mining the land with water drained from the common river, went abroad to conquer the world for American enterprise: "The Wild West was the model for a new world, an integrated sphere of value and labor flows arranged according to white power and generic accumulation. If European leaders came to see the rest of the earth as their private juice box, then California’s engineers were on the ground aiming the straw."

Reading Palo Alto put me in mind of two films with their own version of California ghosts. The first, Clint Eastwood's Pale Rider (1985), shows a ghost who returns for vengeance against the entire murderous town who conspired against him during the same California Gold Rush which Harris describes. In that film the miners have mastered the strip-mining power of the hydraulic pump and are busy turning the entire river valley to sludge. The natives are not present, presumably all murdered long before the time Clint’s Pale Avenger rides into town.

Vengeance underway, as the land turns to sludge

The second film is Poltergeist (1982), written by Steven Spielberg and directed by horror master Tobe Hooper. Here we are in the sanitised suburban blandness of central California, the very landscape of Palo Alto, but something very wrong stirs in the subterranean unconsciousness. For of course they have built on the massed bodies of the slaughtered natives, an "Indian burial ground" and now the vengeance of historical genocide is coming to get them, as they both fear and desire, or at any rate as they recognize as an elemental form of justice.

Fears and desires are realized as settler atrocities are avenged

This is the kind of historical haunting that Harris is talking about, as well as another kind. All through the historical narrative about settler colonialism, racial displacement and environmental atrocity that made modern California (as well as US hegemony worldwide), the author places a series of subheadings which ironically riff on the techbros and their litany of go-getting grindset innovation-speak.

So the narrative which tells of how the California Natives were reduced from 150,000 to 30,000 in a state-funded pogrom, and how simultaneously certain areas were gold-mined to devastation, is playfully titled "Move Fast and Break Things". The linkage between this full-bore exploitative rapine and the tech-led dynamic of the post 1990s internet-connected world is beginning to become apparent in little hints like these.

As California grew and developed, so that during the post-war period it achieved a level of technical sophistication unrivalled anywhere else in the world, it also became ripe for a hyper-individualist version of mystical Eastern philosophy, which became known as the Hippy Movement or New Age. When that showed its own grotesquely exploitative side, the way was being prepared for a new libertarian version of hyperindividualism. A guru was required and mega-tedious brick-maker Ayn Rand was chosen. Since then, Rand's so-called objectivism, a very fancy way of saying Me First, has become the truest religion of California and thus the whole world beyond, insofar as that world is touched by the techlords of the Palo Alto heartland or the commercial talons of US investment funds.

A Star is Born - Ayn Rand goes to Hollywood to write some turgid prose

So it is that in Part Five of this monumental tome, now 600 pages in, we enter the present day: the post-Y2K era when the Palo Alto geeks and dweebs have at last become our gods and masters, and now get to rebrand themselves as “alphas”.
By the time we come to the late 2010s and are now "Living in the Thiel-verse",
full-on dystopianism has set in.

Of course Peter Thiel is the one who thought naming an online surveillance and datamining corporation Palantir, after the all-seeing eye of Tolkein's Dark Lord Sauron, was a cool and very normal thing to do. Since then he has brought Cambridge Analytica into the subversion of democracy game, stirred up the 'Accelerationists', such as rogue philosopher Nick Land, to greater feats of apocalyptic racism, and created his own so-called ‘Intellectual Dark Web’, which apparently includes Joe Rogan (so maybe we should just call it the Dark Web and forget about ambitious epithets for now). Back in the early 2000s, Elon Musk dissociated himself from Thiel because he considered him too sinister and creepy - just let that sink in for a moment.

Happy Days for the very cool and normal techlords of the future

This leaves Harris looping back to his own childhood from the 1990s onwards, and into the present day existential vacancy of Palo Alto and the world it has fashioned in its likeness. But there's a lot more than a spiritual anomie going on here. The predatory rhythm of investment capital has run ahead of our fragile flesh and the beaten Earth's capacity to feed its hungry maw:

Capital investment is exhausting; it uses up. We’ve seen that repeatedly during this relatively short historical period: The hydrolickers eroded the landscape to the point of disintegration; the planters drained the aquifers; the bankers and real estate agents carved up the territory; the electronics manufacturers filled the ecosystem with heavy metals and exotic chemicals. Underlying this sequence was the exhaustion of the atmosphere’s ability to absorb carbon without the planet overheating... we’re suffering from success. Climate change yielded California wildfires of new intensity, and in this world historical center of wealth, the air quality has been so bad that Bay Area residents have been urged to stay inside with their windows shut.

So there is a spectre haunting California, and its name is absolute and total exhaustion. Not for nothing are the key players in the local political sphere ghostly presences like Nancy Pelosi and the late Dianne Feinstein, who may have not even been aware that she was still alive as late as a year ago (the boundaries between the living and the dead become particularly blurry when it comes to US politics).

Where to now? If all that can be exploited is already exploited, if markets and human brains are supersaturated, what can the great despoilers of tomorrow look forward to?

One way for capitalism to transcend the limits of the biosphere without transcending the limits of capitalism would be to colonize the rest of the solar system, the galaxy, and beyond... Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are leading the capitalist charge into space with their respective Blue Origin and SpaceX firms. Musk hopes to colonize Mars, and Bezos told a morning news show that “we can move all heavy industry and all polluting industry off of Earth and operate it in space." There is always another frontier, if you know where to look.

This book is a haunting - literally haunting - exploration of how the present word came into being, continually zooming out from the particular place of Palo Alto and its surrounding ‘Silicon Valley’ dreamscape, to the very exceptional state that contains it, to the United States which cries out in its yearning to become a California Writ Large, to the entire suffering world beyond which goes into satisying its untold wants and desires for more, more and more. Then blasting back down from low Earth orbit to zoom back in on little Palo Alto and ask: “What’s wrong with the kids here, who so often choose death to living on in the world which has been wrought for them?”

A spectre is haunting - the exhausted resources of generations before and to come

NOTE - On the centrist perspective of the NYFT

For balance, here’s the New York Times’ ultra-centrist take on Harris’s book by Gary Kamiya, which accuses him of cherrypicking history to make both the U.S.’ legacy and the present-day U.S. look bad, and of critiquing the existing system from a Marxist perspective without proposing a solution.

As for how bad the present day situation of the U.S. really is, I’ll leave that for those who live there. I speak only as an inhabitant of the Imperial outer periphery, made to live with the consequences of American dysfunction but with less-than-zero say about how it plays out.

I especially would be reluctant to speak about how good or bad the present-day really is, given that Palo Alto is written by a younger person. I’m about the same (advanced) age as Mr Kamiya. Older people really shouldn’t flaunt their complacency about their satisfaction over how life has turned out for them, and then turn it into a worldview.

My concern is this reviewer’s blithe hand-wave: “But what should replace this capitalist horror show once it’s been shattered? Harris never tells us.” Disingenuous in the extreme, Mr Kamiya. Centrists really should try harder than simply pretending that socialism, with all those oodles of programmatic pamphleteering, just don’t exist.

Surely it’s a bit rich that poor Harris, who’s correctly identified as a Marxist by the reviewer, is expected to recapitulate the entire debate about Marxist praxis, whether to transform society by agitation and labour organisation, or push for a political revolution. His book is already a 720 page monster, for heaven’s sake. Couldn’t he just leave the entire transformation of our dystopian society for another 700+ page book? Maybe we could call it… what’s a good name?… I know, we could call it Capital.