Transcripts For CSPAN2 Malcolm 20240704

Mitco supports c pan 2 as a public service. Allwe righty. Welcome to powerhouse arena. Thank you for coming. [ applause ] we are excited for tonights e vertebrate. Turnout. For the we are here from malcolm harris. Yes. [ applause ] so, to start off malcolm and patrick who is the audiobook narrater will dohe a reading. He will be joined by malissa. This is for a little discussion and well do a q and a after that. Thank you for masking up. Any way, enjoy. All right, thank you you also much for coming out. This has been a very successful release as you can see from all of the people here. I cant believe it. My heart is bursting withso thanks. Also for wearing masks. I know they are a pain. I appreciate you for doing that. Allowing me to situp here without a mask that makes a huge difference reading. Thank you for everyone else in the room for not getting sick. Ill readho with patrick harrisn who is the book reader. Bowe will read not from my book per se but section from the 1901 novel the octopus from frank norris. This is an occasion to do a e. Dramatic dialog. We will do this pretty quick. We will try to keep this whole thing pretty quick. A bit about the book. The book was written in 1901 conflict over the settlement in california. They were offered land for a certain price. The owner of the land thats leyland stanford. He changed his mind, they changed their mind and said that improved the land. Instead, this triggered an insurrectionary battle with the settlers that wantan to claim te land. Tithe story is fictionalized by frank norris thats a novelistic history. Its also really great and has amazing sections. Therepo is prestly. Hes a naive guy who has written this poem. He goes to see sheldon thats partoa of the Railroad Barrons fictionalized. He talks his way into the back office and not only will he talk to himhe but he read the poem te toiers. He hascata a critical take on te poem and the naive poet finds himself in conversation with the face of capitol. Thats the conversation we will be having right now as soon as i take a sip of water. I supposed you believe im the grand old raskle. I believe, he hesitated searching for his words. Believe this, young man. Explained sheldon laying his forefinger on the table. Try to believe this. To begin with that railroads build themselves. Where there is a demand sooner or later there will be a supply. Mr. Derrick, does he grow his wheat . The wheat grows itself. What does he count for . Does he supply the force . What do i count for . Do i build the railroad . You are dealing with forces young man, when you speak of wheat and the railroads. Not with men. There is the wheat. The supply. It must be carried to feed the people. There is the demand. The wheat is one force, the railroad another, and there is the law that governs them. Supply and demand. Men have only little to do in the whole business. Complicationsli may arise. Conditions that bare hard on the individual crush him maybe. The wheat will be carried to feed the people as inevitably. If you want to force the blame you will make a mistake. Blame conditions not men. But, but, faltered presley. You are the head and control the road. You are a very naive young man. Control the road . Canli i stop it. I can go into bankruptcy. If i run it a business proposition is, i can do nothing. I can not control it. It is a force. Born out of certain conditions. I, no man, can stop it or control it. Can your mr. Derrick stop the wheat growing. He can burn his crop or it awayor or sell it for a synthese ion the bushel. Otherwise, his wheat must grow can anyone stop the wheat, when he will no more can i stop the road. Presley regained the street istupefied. This new idea and conception dumbfounded him. He couldnt deny it. It range with the clear reverberation of truth. Forces, conditions, laws of supply and demand were these the enemies after all. Not enemies. Thereno was no nature. A cyclopian power. With the heart of steel knowing no forgiveness. Crushing out the human adams with calm. The agony of construction never the faintest trimmer through wall of the mechanisms of wheels and cogs. He went and ate his summer alone in gloomy agitation. Thank you. [ applause ] you can see why people make seit to the audiolist. If i dont make its not because i me its because of that guy. Now put your hands up for malissa and ed. Its just gettins opportunity right . Well, first of all, i feel like were first of all i feel like we are haunted by the ghost of stanford. We cant stopt it. Te we cannot stop the train. We literally cant stop the train. Maybe we should start with him. I feel like, there are two roads in the book. I wanted them to converge and perhaps they have converged as metaphors. We have the railroad itself and internet. I feel like there is a whole path like mark zuckerberg. You go into a deeper understanding ofld what that is. Can you talk about leyland stanford. Stanford is not as smart as whstanford. Stanford who is prominent of thi Railroad Building capitalist gets the job because hes not the smartest. Hes the air head out of the fourat of them. At a time of International Class conflict as well as tighter government observation of contractors. These four guys building the railroad agrogated in the man. They were Land Developers and contractors. They didnt want to look too close. They wanted them to find stanford and blame stanford. Most of his life he was a bum. He was a really lucky guy that was born at the right time in the right place. Looking the part and ends up the petty capitollist in california. This is an overseas colony of the united states. He was elevated into the brand and architect we met in the story. Thats the stanford we no. Because hes a goofball he gets the job and has real ideas. Not only supporting coops as like, you know, in the same way we cecil l convalley billionairs have advanced social ideas. The concentrations of forces not men. He foundap to escape the class conflict thatt his bodies have subjected. Hes living on nob hill. A nice place to live and everyone knows where you live. They show up outside his house and yell at him and threaten him all of the time. What you are supposed to do with the city of the rich guys and this is for the suburbs. Accept in the 1870s the suburbs dont exist yet. You have to create the suburb. They made these and thats the foundation of the story. The railroad of the west as we know it and the guy responsible for it. You are ahead of the railroad. Throughout the book. Nt i make the point that frank norris makes very well. You are n dealing with forces, t lamen. The character of standford is the forces that are turned into palo alto. Id like to read one bit thats perfect. It could apply to stanford but all of the other founders we meet in the book. Given the amount of financial things going on behind the scenes. They made the decision to let the big oaf stand in front of the camera so he could take the blame. Also become, the great man. He gets away with it. It wasas a smart move by the otr associates. Hopkins, crocker, and huntington. Whose names you might recognize but not as prominent as stanford ends upas being. He dies before the government starts investigating. This is what the octopus is based on. He tries to negotiate with the confederatear veterans that are settlers and takes off to europe when they shootup the place. For a lot of the book you hone in. They are founders that are held for, you know, creating innovations the made the modern world and made us more prosperous and have better Productive Lives and plugging in how the technologies were extractive or militaristic. Those, you know, those was there a same sort of discussion or argument or discourse we see today where some people push back. It has yielded so many bounties to us as opposed to the missiles or military tech or the poisoning of the land, air, and water. Yeah, all of that stuff. We sees the cycles with loops d spiralals. They used to talk about bubbles unless we talk about the bubble machines. It not a bubble but another mechanism. The tensions between the two, between the false promises of Silicon Valley and whats going on goes all the way back to the conflict we are talking about in frank norris. The problem with seeing the guys as the inventors instead of the forces you think the world is a product of rich guys personalities. We livein the world we livein because steve jobs is the guy that steve jobs is. Thats not true. Steve jobs is the guy that steve jobs was, rip steve jobs. [ laughter ] because of the social situation that called him into being they critiques of the people the whole way through i talk about mike who is a classic historian and columnist. Great writer and underrated in somewaysso compared to his peer. He talks about early appling. He has a great critique of early apple. Behind the howdy duty steve jobs bull there are house weaves wiring boards together in their unventilated kitchens. This is the real apple. The truck that unloads those and picks them up at the end of the day. Not the clean circuits thate someone like steve jobs would have you believe. When people think of steve jobs now l they think of black turtleneck steve jobs and holding the ipod that he didnt invent. I think ofjo. 80s steve jobs. When you google 80s steve jobs. It doesnt just look like tucker carolson. I think he based his whole look on 1980s steve jobs. He was a businessman taking advantage of the efficiencies that globalization allowed code for the new word order established in the postwar situation where america had production enclaves including domestically. Ueit wasnt the best thinkers or technology but we have to the technique because siliconn valley is good at selling forgetfulness. I appreciate how many times you reminded us that steve jobs smelled you do an interesting interplay and the history of the oakland chapter of the black panther party. You run it alongside, sorry about the parallel. Its swept up as part of the Counter Culture. Imaging steve jobs dropping acid and coming out with the apple computer. Yeah, like he did that. In reality. We have people inside the machine that are resisting all ofn that. This was the most exciting part of the research its not like they dont work on the questions. They were digitized and puton line. I look at the history of bomb attacks. u. S. Data processing rather thn theer internet. The student radicals i around the l country, most of them were at universities. They constantly tried to blow up computers. Pretty straight up. The most famous one the new left blew up computers around the country andly especially in california. Bank computers they suffer a bombing every month for two years. Attackss on data processing. This flies in the face in the standard history of the time and place. You get twoth versions of it. I t call them the john markoff ndversion. The second one the hippies invented the computer and thats bad. They can inflate the Counter Culture in the new left with these emerge being technologies and critique of conformism and largeness and the state and if this ends up producing, who you ask, the wonders of the personal computer or the liberal age. Its a mean history. It blames the new left people saying you were too stupid to know whaten you were doing and n accident you did what you were trying to do. When you go through the history thats not what all happened. On the new left they had a very tight understanding of what the gitechnologies did, what they we used for. Were located. And the Important Role they were playing in u. S. State policy and anwhat the u. S. State policy wa. They intervened on the side of the north vietnamise army. They were trying to win the war. Its interesting we talk about the yippies trying to levitate the pentagon. This ise a classic story of new left goofiness and hubris. We dont talk about when sds bombed the pentagon taking out the computers that did air targeting for two weeks. This was the whole ethical act taken during the period. Pdramatically successful. They e evaded prosecution and gt away with it well. One more question from ed and then the audience. Why do you feel this persists. Last year and the year before, you know, when books about the history of nonviolence and save ottage there was argument about Property Damage being a viable tactic and left this organizing and evensu though they showed hw successful it was people insisted the only way to, you know,er achieve the answer we wt is working for its reform. Those come up against sharp limits pretty quickly. What is attractive about the idea of doing nonviolence and attacking property and infrastructure and form of ahviolence as well. Yeah, i just saw a fictional movie coming out. I saw the tag line is like nonviolence is not an option. I was like, on one hand thats really cool to see. I agree. On on the other hand, blowing up a pipeline isnt violent, necessarily. Extracting oil from the ground is just as violent as the pipeline. They were doing bombing targeting. They werebi blowing up computer. Inspired the world. They are watching this stuff happen and looking at the americans running up against the barriers of reform of resistance and what to do next. This is globally important. Activities, there is something appealing, obviously for the powers at be in ruling out any sort of disorderly conduct. This is how they stop this activities in the 60s. Ddraw hard lines, all right, ths democratic participation in which you can riot if you dont kelike whats going on is no longer acceptable. If you step out of the line wellu. Get rid of you. Start pursuing a strategy to separate out radicals. They do it successfully for decades. We are still living in the wake of the counter revolution. I talk about the new left experience of some limited victories and overall defeat. I think the story of the book is the story how the capitol handels things it can no longer handle. When it hits the limits it can no longer work around those limits. This is the name of a strategy thats working around the limits. Its tasked with separating out the new left and building the fences excluding these people from society Going Forward in a way they werent included before. Its funny i talked about on tv and people were upset i didnt credit the counter cultural history more. There is a counter cultural history for sure. Ies was more interested in the w left. They see this historical wrong. Hushai against the counter culte separating it from the new left. At if it needs to be done. It needs to be done. We musthe understand the gratefl dead band wasnt the most important thing happening in the world at the time. They are not mentioned in the book. Sorry if there are fans. The most important thing was the cold war. We wills. Do questions. You do mention the grateful deadth in the book. Do i . You credit them with having the forethought to not go onstage. Thats right. They saw the stones and were like, nah. Ea well, thank you you all for that great conversation. Thank you for theu reading as well. Ah ill do passing around now. Ill just start looking for hands. S. If i see hands in the back it might take a second. Firstly, okay. Maybe ill make my way over here. Ill start over here. Similarly to the way people argue thatce violence is not, sorry. Okay similarly to the way people argue sly lance is not an effective mean bees of decent as we form. Probably 40 years after they bomb data centers in california. People are argue, you know, ougetting around and ahead of wt Technological Capabilities bank ofof america has is no longer possible with the way they advanced. Longer bomb centers because of the cloud. Do you think thats another deflection or do you think there are bigger practical questions . Doesnt live up that thosee just data centers that are connected data centers in our infrastructure like not to get myself in trouble here arent the infrastructure thanks thanks david. Ruin class infrastructure is very fragile and we saw that during the pandemic for and we saw thatur during the pandemic for sure, right click start any number of points where the system can break down here i dont think the left has really cast itself with understanding those points in particular, a lease lisa the left as such, although i think we can drawan a lot of inspiration and lessons from the Water Protection movement and outhouse responded to pipelines here i think we can draw lessons from the 2020 uprising, s vicki does in her book so its not a coincidence that this book that i wrote this book at the time that i do and its definitely in the shadow of those political events. So no, but to answer your question directly, no, i dont think they are any safer than you were in the 60s in fact, they might be less safe now because i think theyve gotten kind of complacent. All right. Who next . So you describe yourself as a marxist and you were described asew a marxist man among other which the New York Times review of the book. I guess im curious as to whether how you situate this work and your approach to history in terms of cash but im not asking you describe yourself asut a maoist or a mill or whatever but is any particular figure you got inspiration from when m when approaching the task of sort of compiling a history like this . Yeah, thats a great question methodologically pick the book starts with marks obviously it starts with a marxist epigraph. Ipa marks i marxist spiy methodological inspiration primarily from works of karl marx, guilty. Which means im also writing this issue of the history of class conflict or thats what it means primarilyhi for me methodologically writing this history. In terms of more specific theoretical lineage i ended up sort of i think finding one in the practice of this book because so many of the people, the thinkers are a light on theoretically are also characters in the story. By the and, by the time i h writing this i had always been just describe myself as a straight up calmness for a long time. By the time i got to the end of it i i came to understand that really im a california communist, that this is a theoretical tradition that i really identify with where the i. W. W. Exploits this whole big role, its internationalist, its probably lingual, its gender integrated in ways that the left isnt in other places in the united states. Racially integrated in the ways the left is not other in the united states. Very like ad hoc and kind of like ultra lefty for the communist party in the u. S. In the 30s and so like some of the brightest points in communist history in the u. S. Come from california and its not a coincidence a lot of our Great American communist thinkers come out of california and not just california but the struggle of california. So paul deleon is a character in the book but hes also a huge theoretical influence. Cedric robinson a character in about huge theoretical influence. Roxanne dunbar tease i know t se was important destroyed what im writing this book and i was reading back her stuff i did know she was working on the line at Fairchild Semiconductor like organizing l labor actions as a light tech worker in the bay area. And so locating the history of that tradition has ended up being a really important part of the project for me. I definitely found myself with ended and reflected in it. I hope to do more with it in the future. I i think we could use the california communist leader that lays out this history. All right. Lets see here. Who else . Any other questions back here . Im trying to figure out how i can get it down here. We will toss a backandforth beer if you can come right over here. I hope its a phenomenal question. Better be good. One of a sort of cycles that comes up is your pretty consistent describe leave in stamford not a super bright guy, leland. At the end of the book you multiple occasions describe the current crop of Silicon Valley overlord as not impressive specifically compared to the earlier two or three generations, right . Like the world war i world war ii immediately after, those guys technically sharp. And just kind of curious what is the significance or ific you thk there significance to that sort of reversion to the mean . Like, why is it that these people are just kind of wideeyed can get too far ahead whereas it seemed like in that sort of middle period they at leastt had to have come for people who are called forth also had some skills behind they just want some guy who happened to be there. Yeah, fdr, right . What you describe it is roosevelt is. So theres this period where this is a period when some of them imagine the 60s at the fairchild guys wearing their suits and these guys were brilliant. These were like extremely sophisticated physicists who are coming up with like new ideas and chemists and very complex scientific thought, and pushinge the bounds of human knowledge. They were selected for their spots not sort of impersonally by the forces of capital but really by state agencies. This, this added timede where i described as shuffling the deck at the countrys white man in terms of, i mean it, a real thing that happened, right . The consequence of the roosevelt years and you see in Fairchild Semiconductor which is a certain Important Company with, led by the state guys eighte recruited by this guy bill shockley from around the country and some of them even in europe, brilliant dudes. And they were selected for the response by a government bureaucracy that was interested in winning world war ii and knew that they had to find the best scientist in order to do that. And they were just the best scientists obviously are they would not ill be right guys. They were the ones who fit this particular mold. Answer these guys were not just smart. They were also really l wellliked. Theyoo were like homecoming king type spirit i think a really example is David Packard who in addition to being the founder of hewlettpackard and an advanced radio engineering student isaac 65 Football Player in handsome dude and e school picked up very intentionally to start this firm, not necessarily because he was the best technical mine, it was probably hubert who packard had to pull along with because he was this golden boy. And something changes in the history Charles Peterson i dont think using the audience but some people might know charles talks about the shift from bureaucratic hindered masculinity that happens. I think its a great line and i put in the book because thats what instead of being picked by professors, or by generals, right, in the military for your job within Theia Scientific industrial complex, its guys who went tome the right private school at the right time and thats bill gates, paul allen in particular, thats how microsoft ended up coming they are not learning to use computers on government machines. They are not going into the military to know what is taking them except for the parent who happened to have the resources to put them into a school that had an unusual amount of access to computer time. Thats how they get picked. You talk about the different kind off guy that gets selected and recognized were talking about guys in the first place and the selection of guys know that this is meritocratic per se. The mode changes that weve seen further farcical position of that change. Select steve jobs isrt not a particularly sophisticated technical guy that was lost react famously. It was a he was a guy wht yelling everybody to work faster which was very important job at the time. And continues to be. But the guys now if you look at someone like, im greasing names on tv or whatever, the technological elon musk, like no one pretends, knowing them to cast a written this guy is a brilliant Tactical Mind for coding. Newline\next line he could win the nobel prize in physics or chemistry or Something Like that might imagine that to consult because hes really rich but no one that not having the schedule and the companies. Thats not how it works never that you get the guys who are third level farcical version of steve jobs if you get the correct dressing up like the way they think steve jobs dressed up his whole life its structure, not just some guy who came along with the book price investigate is whats behind the structural changes. Great but i think with time for one moree question. I also kind of a methodological question. Suite. Something i really admire about the whole project is that you are doing the work of a historian outside of the academy. So i guess im curious if you could reflect on that, and maybe if you could give us some insight into like your process, like how you were doing all this outside the walls, what kind of setting your work is done and, if not institutional, communal, relational, something of else and you have any insight into how the kind of independent scholarship could flourish in the future . Thats a great question. I wish i had your answers for it so i wrote this book started in like march 2020. Select the pandemic it hit and all the plants i had to interview people and go to archives got screwed up immediately, right . But i still had to write this book and the fact i had to write three times as long as i had sold it on the same deadline, because im a smart guy. So i did most of the actual writing action writing between my room locked in philadelphia and like the park down the street where i would sit with a stackthf of bos all day for months at a time, which is great. It was wonderful picked i feel so privileged to have done it because not that many people get to do that kind of work. Traine, not having taken a history class since i was 16 years old, made parts of it kind of challenging. And i relied on historians friends that helped point me towards parts of the california history canon. I was also aided by the fact that the california history canon is like in california history itself is, way shorter than other parts of american history. So i couldnt have written a book boston like this because there hundreds of years more history that youd have to handle and i just didnt have to handle those periods whole centuries that i didnt deal with. This starts in the 1870s, which is not that long ago in terms of the history and also western history itself, people argue People Better informed than i do argue its thin even within american history, its underdiscussed and underwritten. And so i could write this book at a comprehensive history of palo alto and say, no one else has tried to write this book because. No one else has tried to write this book, which is surprising and was surprising me and invited the project. But i think the Real Advantage to me about not being trained and not having like professors in my head i was writing this book for is i could work between disciplines and there are certain periods of history that certain disciplinary techniques are i think more useful for and others. I really couldnt have written this book without the studies that come out of the ethnic studies revolt at San Francisco state i write about in the book. And then put the work of that revolt to work in the book because there have been a lot of really important studies of the bay and of palo alto specifically within chicano studies, native studies, black studies ethnic studies, in a wider sense, and so feeling like i could go into these different and engage with those authors, read that stuff without worrying that i was crossing some boundary or someones going to get mad at me. Made that part easier. I think i didnt get to work as many people as i would have liked when. I was writing it just because i was like quite literally quarantined quarantined. But my dear friend max fox, who is not here but is a brilliant intellectual, the editor of sexual hegemony and that it or pinko magazine was my neighbor and sometimes roommate this process and so he thank you max for listening to me rant after id been reading for 7 hours about Herbert Hoover i i really owe him a lot so thanks max. But yeah, i think thats thats the story i was definitely relying on a lot of recently digitized archival stuff. Palo alto, really good at digitizing stuff, not so good at reading palo alto is really good at digitizing stuff, not so good at reading stuff. So theres a lot of really great material that is digitized and then like left alone and not used for these histories, even though the end of repeating the same historical material from the same five interviews and book after book after book or the vocal interview the guy and asked him to b repeat history fm that of b the book so he can put in this book. Answer finding some of that history, oral histories have been recorded that like now has a really great stock of oral histories from the tech industry. So i really got to like play around with sources, and this s the product i hope you all like it. Grade. Lets have a round of applause. [applause] thank you, guys. And a second ground for the conversation from the audience. [applause] this year booktv celebrates 25 years of presenting nonfiction books and authors. For the 22nd your interval booktv is live with the library of Congress National book festival. And since 2001 booktv in partnership with the library of congress has provided signature indepth uninterrupted coverage of the National Book festival featuring hundreds of nonfiction authors and guests. Watch saturday as booktv once again brings you live all day coverage of the National Book festival. Desk and office include librarian of congress carla hayden, just in btigieg on his book i have something to tell you for young adults, and former nfl player r. K. Russell offer of the yards between the spirit see our complete National Book festival schedule online booktv. Org. The library of Congress National book festival Live Saturday beginning at 90 a. M. Eastern on cspan2. Saturday night on cspans q a day newsmax chief White House Correspondent james rose and author of scalia rise to greatness making 361986 talks about the first of this twopart biography of the Late Supreme Court associate justice antonin scalia. Scalia i think recruited from the excesses of the student Antiwar Movement of the late 60s, the unrest, the taking of the law into their own hands, and all that shaped him in ways that made him a better judge under that adjuster so you really cant understand how he got to be just a story without understanding the elements of his academic career. James rosen with his book