Malcolm Harris

EO

When you were conceptualizing writing Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World, were you initially thinking about addressing the limits of mainstream publishing?

MH

Well, for me, it's a little more material than that because I have to come up with a book that my agent can sell to a publisher that can pay me enough money to live, because this is my job. I’ve been able to do it twice so far, which is not a lot of times, but enough to make it your job [Laughs.]. I only write things that I believe; I’m a communist. I was planning on writing a communist book, so I had to find a way to write a communist book that a publisher who could pay me enough to live on would want to publish.

EO

What are the makings of that kind of book and how do you identify it?

MH

As someone without a graduate degree, the easiest way to write a serious book, or acquire the authority to publish one on a historical topic, is to pick a subject that you have a personal relationship with that you can write your personal history inside. And that’s how I originally sold the book, it was part memoir, part history of Palo Alto, and my childhood interspersed with the history of Palo Alto. It was very Joan Didion, or whatever. [Laughs.] A lot of writers in my cohort do that kind of writing very well and I admire it. But I also think we’ve been channeled into that kind of writing because it’s very strange. I’m in my mid 30s, I’ve been writing professionally for the public for over ten years now, and people still consider me to be very young. I feel like in the past, writers had more cultural authority to just say what they thought or do the work they think. And now it’s become very professionalized within academia in some ways. I tried to bait and switch in the earlier version of the book, and it wasn’t very good.

EO

I was going to ask about what you initially proposed and how it felt when you got into the brass tacks of writing.

MH

Yeah, there was some scaffolding of my childhood writing and reflections on experiences that was originally there, and then I pulled it out. And people who know me will notice those parts. People who grew up with me or know my past will be like, “Oh, wasn’t your first job working for an orange farmer? Didn’t you work at the Score Educational Tutoring Center in high school?" I didn’t like writing it and it wasn’t lining up against the history I was finding very well. But the history I was finding was so great. There was so much more of it than I planned, and I also didn’t originally see the book at 700 pages. I initially sold a much shorter book but there was so much information I was finding.

EO

How many pages?

MH

250, 300 pages. [Laughs.] Yeah, I think I signed it at 80,000 words, and I turned in a quarter million words. I talked to my editor about that as I was doing this process. I was like, “Look, I don’t think these parts are working, but I also have way more of this other stuff than I planned—I think this is going to be much longer than I thought. It’s not going to have this personal element all the way through it. I’m going to do a little bit at the intro and a bit at the end, but this is just going to be straight history.” And my editor, to her credit agreed. And I think the critics have mostly agreed, people have not said, “Oh, we want more of that personal stuff.” They mostly have said, “Yeah, good you kept that out.” [Laughs.] She let me get away with that. I still have a hard time believing that they let me publish the book the way that they did. And so, this is part of your first question, like how do you get away with publishing these kinds of Marxist history books in a mainstream press? I’ve got a good relationship with my editor and agent. I feel very lucky.

EO

What happened when you stepped further into the research phase of the book?

MH

Basically, I sold the book within the first few months of 2020. It was really in the early parts of the pandemic. A lot of my original research plans involved traveling and going to archives which didn’t occur. I would have had trouble accessing those resources in the first place as someone who’s not an academic and doesn’t have good relationships in academia and is an independent scholar. My hopes to do research in that kind of way was overcome by circumstance. I just had stacks of books this high [gestures to the air near shoulder] and would take them to the park and read all day. Along the way, I had developed a very complicated note-taking system in these books with flagging that was based off of American Sign Language, which I started studying, started taking lessons in, etc.

ASL has a thing where if you want to show the weeks in a month, you use your hand and gesture like this because there are four weeks in a month. If I want to say the third week of the month, I’d point to my third finger like that. And that’s what system I used with these books, because I knew I was going to have five chronological sections. And if I had a note that was going to go in one of the sections, I would put it in. I had a sheet of paper that was taller than me that I taped to my door. And I did my whole outline with index cards for each chapter within each section. And I also used little post-it notes on the index cards within each chapter so by the time I was really writing I had a lot of it mapped out.

EO

Can you speak to the parallels you drew between China and California? They are very surprising. As a native of Los Angeles and someone largely concerned with the history of the West Coast, mining, and the history more generally it was really refreshing. Especially as someone who now dwells in New York; people don’t know what to do with or make of me here. I don't think people are intimate with the history of California and its propositions and promises beyond the gold rush. There's a looming cultural amnesia and bends in either direction from those that are natives and those who pass through. Where did you locate a throughline between the two? I don’t think people would associate the historical development of California with the developing history of China. How did you decide to bridge these two histories, and why now?

MH

That’s a great question. I think part of the project was, as I was writing it, and I think still continuing now historians are engaged in a sort of rewriting of American history. They’re trying to understand the arc of now sitting firmly in the 21st century and the full American arc from our current vantage point. A lot of the research centers around the 1870s, and the re-foundation in that period as part of the United States post-Civil War in the 1870s. But California is very rarely thought about as part of that re-foundation in that period as part of the United States that comes out of reconstruction, but it absolutely is, and its shape is very foundational. When I found out and read about the role that California plays in ending reconstruction and that there’s a trade for the Chinese Exclusion Act with the south, but that they form a racialist block in these concluding decades of the 19th century, and that that is the America that’s founded out of that movement, it really brought things together for me.

But one of my projects, in addition to the refounding of American history and putting California back in that 1870 story, is also putting California in the global history context. Because when you read about national history, you have this sort of east-west progression—manifest destiny California—which of course is not actually how it happens. California is an overseas colony, and then you colonize backwards from California, across the Midwest.

EO

What do you mean by “overseas colony”?

MH

California is literally overseas because you’ve got the transcontinental railroad. If you’re unlucky, you have to cross by land. But again, when you’re crossing by land during the 1860s before the railroad or during the 1850s before the transcontinental, you’re crossing other nations, right? You’re crossing indigenous nations to get to California. It’s not overland connected to California territorially. You have to cross illegally. [Laughs.] Whatever claims you’re making, you have to cross other nations or you have to go south on a boat to Central America, cross on foot, and take another boat up the West Coast to get to California because that’s literally overseas.

EO

What does that mean for California, then for the United States?

MH

[Laughs.] Right. That recontextualizes California as a colony of the United States at the time, which allows you to understand the class development in that place differently, I think. It allows you to understand the labor market development in California. Yes, you ask how is Leland Stanford able to become this guy? How are these capitalists able to become the capitalists that they are? Because they were allowed to found themselves anew. They are the representatives of capital in this far off place. And that’s what it represents. And we think of that as frontierism, but it wasn’t, it was colonialism.

EO

California is synonymous with being the new frontier.

MH

Right. But that’s the very east to west narrative, whereas if you think about a boat going to South America, and then you take a boat up around South America, it’s not the frontier. It’s like you’re going somewhere else because there’s stuff there that you want. If you’re to think of immigrants from China, if you’re in the Pearl River Delta or whatever, it’s a short very direct boat trip. [Laughs.] Certainly, you’re way closer in that conceptually and also in terms of the amount of different legs that you’ve got to get to California. There’s no reason at that point that the East Coast has any sort of more direct claim on that territory, except that they’re able to exercise it through settler colonialism very successfully in the 1860s and ’70s.

EO

Can you talk about China in plain terms? I’m thinking of the technological innovation that they brought to the new West. The stability which they brought in terms of constructing the railroad systems? It’s the first and arguably lasting innovation that is still relied on contemporarily. What were the stakes and benefits of involving the Chinese? I’m curious also especially giving their world power now, how is this a through line considering the origins of the California labor market development.

MH

That’s a good question. I think there are a number of through lines. You’ve got this moment where the associates who are building this transcontinental railroad need a very particular labor force. Because they need a labor force that’s not attached, that doesn’t have the same attachment to the land that indigenous people did, who had recourse to self-production via their relationship to the land. But they needed workers who were not white because white people had a settler’s recourse to the land. When they tried getting Irish workers, they had a hard time because if there was a silver strike nearby, they’d just all go to the silver strike because as white immigrants, they were entitled to the land in a way that other people weren’t. And so they, wasn't, who were really struggling and needed a labor force that they could manage, who also isn’t entitled to the land, that were not already employed as settlers.

And that’s how they came up with China. It’s not like there weren’t Chinese people in California as long and before as there were Anglo-Americans, but the idea of importing large amounts of laborers for this particular project was an idea that they had. And there’s this ridiculous discussion of whether the Chinese had the capacity to build the necessary system. And one of the associates said, “I think they did build that pretty big wall.” Which is a joke because the Chinese were very sophisticated construction workers. In fact, probably the most sophisticated construction workers in the world at this point. As far as they faced off off with these famous Cornish miners at one point. And the Chinese railroad workers were able to lay track much faster than these famous Cornish miners.

There are long histories of large construction projects in the coastal areas of China, including work with gunpowder. The other workers just didn’t have experience with scaling cliffs and working through mountains. And so there was reliance on the workers’ skill. And at the same time, Mae Ngai’s The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and Global Politics is really important because it really clarifies that these workers were not coolies, they weren’t slaves—they were wage workers and proletarians, they were wage workers and proletarians whose wages were managed through labor contractors and were not as great as what similarly skilled white workers would've been able to get on the global labor market. And their wages were not as great as what skilled white workers would’ve been able to get on the global labor market. If you look at their consumption which Gordon Chang and other scholars of Chinese real-world workers have, their consumption was pretty good and they were able to import vast quantities of their preferred food goods from China, for example, so they had solid consumer power. And though their labors were managed through Chinese labor contractors, a handful of Chinese labor contractors were responsible for managing large amounts of laborers, and putting down labor unrest. But the latest research suggests that Chinese labor workers or Chinese railroad workers did organize for and achieve wage gains and were able to assert themselves collectively as part of this project. So, the stereotypes about Chinese railroad workers have been undermined by some of the more recent research about their labor position.

If you really want to look at through line, you can look at someone like Herbert Hoover, who is a mining engineer out of the first class at Stanford University and who ends up in China looking for coal—it was his idea to stop looking for gold and start looking for coal. This is the beginning of the 20th century, and the Chinese coal reserves end up playing a very important role in history, as much as anything else discussed in the entire book. And he personally comes face to face with the Boxer Rebellion, which is a reaction to the imperial plunder of resources such as these coal reserves by the comprador class, and their imperialist hirings, including Herbert Hoover in particular. He repeats the same act of sourcing workers from China when he’s a mine supervisor in South Africa, for example. Outsourcing laborers from China is a repeated technique of California capitalist technology, which continues to be regional and international arbitrage up until the present moment, and obviously the wealth source for Apple—which is the largest company in the United States.

EO

But were there indications of China becoming the world power? It’s funny considering that the Chinese played an essential role in developing our necessary infrastructure.

MH

Well, it’s very interesting. You should really check out Thorstein Veblen, who I didn’t include in the book. His writing on China at the beginning of the twentieth century is invaluable and really smart, where he says, “Look, China’s not an aggressive nation, and this is a time of aggressive nations. Either they get their knife and fork out or they’re going to be on the menu.”

And so China, continues to be a victim of colonialism into the twentieth century when it’s subjected to Japanese colonialism, which is what he’s mostly alluding to at that point. He’s talking in terms of the of world powers in Asia at the beginning of the twentieth century, everyone’s looking at Japan. And that’s because Japan has devoted itself to being an imperial power on the model of Germany. And so, they’re got racialist stories they tell themselves about Japan, but one of the way Japan distinguishes itself as a colonial power is by victimizing China.

EO

Let’s bring it back to California. You start the book with this anecdote with symbolism about education. It starts with this visiting teacher who basically tells everyone in the class that you’re all living in a bubble. Can you speak to the parallels between the suicide deaths you encountered in high school in Palo Alto and the suicide of those Apple workers in China? What’s the dichotomy?

MH

Yeah, I didn’t understand it very well growing up. And even though I was very political and what I drew from my political analysis was that I had to move to the East Coast if I wanted to do important politics, because California was a place of frivolity, run by left-wing Republicans and right-wing Democrats that had hegemonic control over state politics and you were never going to get anywhere. I didn’t understand that at the time. Very few people, I think, understood that Silicon Valley was going to be what Silicon Valley became, even in the late 1990s-early 2000s when it was already itself many times over. I still didn’t get it.

EO

[Laughs.] This is a funny analogy, but I recently re-watched Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird. Are you familiar?

MH

Yes, sure. [Laughs.] Sacramento.

EO

Yes, exactly. She’s from Sacramento. There’s this scene where she’s sitting with the nun in her office, and somehow the nun got ahold of her personal statement for college, and she praises her for her love of Sacramento. And Lady Bird says something like, “No, you don’t understand. I need to leave this place. I hate it here.” And the nun’s like, “No you really understand the inner workings of this place—something about deeply resonates with you." I had a similar coming to consciousness of realizing my grasp on California; I couldn’t see or understand how much I knew about it until I moved to the East Coast.

MH

Yeah. No, that’s definitely true. There were radical politics obviously in Palo Alto when I was growing up in the Bay, and I was involved. [Laughs.] I ended up hanging out with political radicals not because I was personally one, but because I opposed the war. As a left wing liberal, I opposed the war, as a Democratic socialist at the time, which may be even closer to a social Democrat. But the anarchists were the ones in the street leading the anti-war protests. And my understanding of left-wing liberalism was that you opposed the unjust war and you go to the anti-war protest. But the liberals weren’t the ones going to the anti-war protest, so I ended up hanging out with a lot of anarchists because that was the politics of the place, but it wasn’t clear to me that we were having any effect on the decisions that were being made. In fact, I felt very distant from them and so for me, wanting to affect important decisions that were being made meant going somewhere else. So, I left the West Coast.

EO

How old were you when 9/11 happened?

MH

I was 12.

EO

So you were 20 years old in the heart of the financial crash?

MH

[Laughs.] Yeah.

EO

I want to get into talking about your relationship to education because it’s apparent you read Walter Isaacson’s biography on Steve Jobs. I’ve been thinking a lot about Ron DeSantis and these politicians more generally, it seems like they’re weaponizing and using this innovative structure (language) in politics to strip education and childhood development, on a social and psychosocial scale. It’s unclear what the immediate gains are aside from keeping people poor. We haven’t talked explicitly about the former governor of California, Leland Stanford. Can you talk about Apple, Palo Alto, and how Leland was/is implicated? 

MH

We think about Apple as being a really smart invention, but it wasn’t. The real invention was the way they were constructing their computers. And that was different than a company like IBM was constructing their computers. It was a whole different paradigm. Instead of having “large manufacturing plants with large fixed capital costs and a bunch of trained employees with benefits and families to support,” you had suburban kitchens with immigrant women stuffing the boards and doing the piecework and a whole network.

EO

I really think the “Designed by Apple in California. Assembled in China.” tagline is ingenious.

MH

Right. It’s the designed by Apple in California, made in China, with of course, components that are designed and constructed all over the place. But Apple has very successfully kept other name brand components out of their stuff for a long time. They kept Intel and Microsoft out, which allowed them to survive at a time when a lot of other companies lost their margins. Apple was really a premium product.

While at the time it was really good, they were able to charge premium prices while innovating on low labor costs. And they marketed specifically to this neoliberal growing class of independent small business people who could use this machine as their own IT system for their small business at the same time as they were building a different FLIR model that was also undermining the mid-century union manufacturing model, by first outsourcing those jobs to undocumented or suburban workers and then shipping them overseas.

EO

Can you talk about Leland Stanford and how he’s implicated in the histories of the development of the concept of the suburb and raising class consciousness?

MH

[Laughs.] Again, back to the 1870s at which point Leland, who’d been governor of California, which is the title he keeps forever, represents capital in the west as the head of the front man for the railroad building associates. And they really put him out front because he’s the least competent out of these four capitalists because he’s kind of stupid. They’re like, great, if we get busted for all of our capitalist chicanery; capitalists in the colony spending a lot of money, and people can’t really pay much attention to how they’re using it to make themselves rich. The people consider his personal responsibility for the importation of Chinese workers—which they took to have a deflationary effect on white working wages—show up outside at his window because they know where he lives, which is in a house on the top of a hill in San Francisco. And they’d show up to yell at him. This is the workingmen’s party, which was actually affiliated with the First International. And so, California’s a real hotbed of class conflict at this point, at a time of world class conflict and national class conflict.

Leland Stanford’s solution to all these workers showing up outside his house all the time is to move his family to the suburbs as rich people do, except the suburbs didn’t yet exist. So, he has to build one. And that’s where Palo Alto comes from, it’s the suburb that he builds to escape the class conflict of the city caused by his own labor practices—so it’s a very direct relationship.

EO

I want to segue into talking more about education and childhood development because of the conversations and policies swirling DeSantis in Florida. Educational development is so important in terms of upward mobility. I’m interested in talking to you about this because of your book Bad Education, and how you write extensively about the narrative that we were sold in 2008 on the promise of debt being necessary and essential. Education in California is also very specific in terms of how its scaled across the University of California Schools, the California State Schools, and the public and private institutions throughout the state.

MH

[Laughs.] Yeah, one of the things that surprised me in my research was that immigrants in the early twentieth century, white immigrants in California, sent their children to school for longer and more often than their counterparts on the East Coast.

EO

Wait, what?

MH

Yes, and so I thought that was very surprising, right? Because you’d think like development happens more on the East Coast because it’s more developed rather than on the periphery in California. But it’s because the work at the canneries was seasonal and productive enough that they could afford to take many more months off. Families could afford for their children to take many more months off from labor than they could on the East Coast and spend more time in school. And so, kids were more educated in California than they were on the East Coast in the early twentieth century. From the beginning capitalist education is really key to what’s going on in California. For example, where does the first community college come from? I think it’s California or at least it’s one of the firsts in the country, I believe, which is in Fresno. They created it because they needed to train people in advanced agricultural techniques because California, in terms of agricultural technology was really advanced. And to loop in the banks, the Bank of Italy which becomes the Bank of America, was financing huge amounts of agricultural land, and had tons and tons of money tied up in agriculture and the agricultural cartels.

It was very interested in producing agricultural research and producing agriculturalists with the latest technology, because that would allow them to make the most money out of the land. So, the Gianni Foundation, which they set up, is still doing agricultural research out of the UCs and is still one of the most advanced agricultural research institutes in the world.

EO

Can you talk about the layoffs signaling control of the market to investors?

MH

Well, there’s a whole history of this, but the current round, I think people are demonstrating a level of political sophistication that I haven’t seen in a long time because they were very quick to understand that these tech layoffs were about signals to the market rather than actual operating costs.

EO

Yes.

MH

And so these companies were showing the market, look, we know we’ve been driving up labor costs for a little while now, and that we’ve been treating these coders like golden geese. But don’t worry, we can still fire thousands of people whenever we want, whenever you tell us to, right? If you ever give us the signal, we’ll fire a thousand people. Don’t worry about it. We are still operating under the same labor market model that Apple devised decades ago that allowed them advantages over IBM and Xerox and these others that have established themselves.

EO

I think these theories have everything to do with the Hollywoodification of California, Silicon Valley, and tech more broadly. I remember doing research in graduate school while I was taking a class on the Archives of Toxicity, and I started thinking about the energy system in California, specifically the utility poles that live above ground in Los Angeles. The architecture of them is so integral to their function that they’ll never be able to reimagine or integrate a new system aesthetically. It’s a city forever grounded in architectural inception.

MH

Yeah, and the water infrastructure. But it’s also recent, and that’s the thing, my prior project is that I was trying to show people that this is all relatively recent. The California we know is a handful of generations; it’s like five at most.

EO

The fact that these social and infrastructural interventions can’t be realized is a serious issue. We can’t develop systems to address climate, pollution, or divesting from fossil feuls. People aren’t concerned enough about energy pollution as well.

MH

You can even look at something like the highspeed rail, which we should have already had built in California by now a million times over. If this place is so rich, how come the trains suck so bad? How come there is no efficient train model? How come you can’t take a train from San Francisco to L.A.?

EO

I feel like we knew we were never going to get an integral train system because of redlining. [Laughs.] After they dissolved the streetcars that zipped throughout the city, it seems it was only ever going downhill…

MH

[Laughs.] Yeah, we could have electric streetcars throughout the whole state, you know? The futurist California never happened—it was never tried.

EO

We’ve talked about Apple, Stanford, the Chinese, and California in broad strokes but how is the rest of the world implicated in what’s happening in California? What does this mean for innovation in standards, the economy, and climate?

MH

Well, showing that capitalism as a global system is really young. It’s under 200 years old which is about the same age as California, as Americans know it. And that it’s both exhausting and uncontrollable, which we are currently seeing. So, I conclude with the environment and the biosphere because I think California is a great example of just how destructive capitalism could be. Which also echoes the Marx quote that I open with, I don’t think anyone believes we have another 200 years left, so we need to learn from the struggles that have characterized those first 200 years because we’re not going to make it out alive unless we find ways to improve on what they were able to accomplish.

EO

[Laughs.] I know, we haven’t even built upon or further developed railroad technology since inception.

MH

Barely. Where’s our highspeed rail?

EO

I know you research was primarily concerned with California, but were there any sort of inklings of what was happening elsewhere in the world that we could adapt more generally as a model?

MH

Well, that doesn’t seem to be the American strategy. When I was looking at US-China relations going forward, I was really glad I did this research because I think it characterizes our present moment, which is American aggression over technological supremacy. I don’t think Americans get how aggressive these export controls are and what America is really doing with this trade war stuff on China, or I mean it’s really a “chip” war, is the term that they’re using.

But I talk about it a little bit in the book, even though this part hasn’t quite happened yet. There had already been sanctions on Huawei, for example, where the U.S. said, basically we’re going to hold you a generation behind our companies forever. Even though it’s your proletarians who are building the actual technology that are in our, “electronics” will have to remain a generation behind ours regardless who actually makes them. Americans don’t understand just how belligerent this is in terms of export controls on chips being made in Taiwan from China, saying like, those are American exports. Chinese firms can’t buy chips from another Chinese firm that’s being produced in China because they are technically American exports. That’s an aggressive posture based on a new understanding of technology and who gets credit for it. And it’s one that’s about constraining the overall development, which is very bad at a time of world crisis. It’s not a sustainable posture, which freaks me out.

EO

Can you speak to Apple’s relationship with real estate?

MH

I mean, you can think about what is the role of Apple’s employees to real estate in the 1980s in California, the way stock options for a specific company are an investment in the hyper-growth economy. Those same engineers buying houses in California was sort of like a stock option on the whole regional economy and turned out really well for those people as well. It’s important to me and for the book to see that as a wave of settlement because they benefit as settlers, not just as workers. And you can see that in the increase in value of those California properties. If you’re a first-generation Apple employee who bought a house in Cupertino or in the South Bay somewhere in the ’80s, your house has done as much work as you have, right? [Laughs.] Like your house has been gaining a full salary every year for the past 50 years. That’s some real money right there—literally millions of dollars.

EO

I was interested in who brought in the Black Panthers and demystifying the migration flows of African Americans to California. Also, the points you made about the Roosevelt era, when he was confronting the singular manpower of Hewlett Packard.

MH

Yes, they've been around the whole time.

EO

You were talking about corporations acting as entities as opposed to collections of people. And I thought it was really apt because of what we are experiencing now which is the inverse of the priority at the time. Corporations don’t want to be a collection of people; they want to be of a singular body with particular views.

MH

[Laughs.] Yeah, right down at zero employees.

EO

Yeah, it just got me thinking about the recent policies that have passed where corporations can now deny people healthcare if you’re gay or trans on the grounds of religious beliefs. It was encoded in the law in different ways during the Roosevelt era, but it was fun to read about because the terms hadn’t yet been defined in the court system.

MH

Yes, exactly that’s the railroad era. It’s the Santa Clara v. the Southern Pacific Railroad, which was the first legal ruling that established corporate personhood which comes out of the South Bay and is about the railroad. And it’s because they didn’t want to pay their taxes and wanted a tax break that was for people—“we’re people, give it to us!”

It’s interesting, I think capitalists have this great dialectical move they can do, where if they get so big that they come under Democratic control, they can split up into little pieces and start exercising personal control again. And then if that personal control undermines itself, then they can combine into a conglomerate again, and they go back and forth depending on the moment or the needs of the moment. And I think now we have a situation where there are fractions of capital that feel like big capital is subject to Democratic demands, which is an incorrect assessment. They’re like, “Oh, the gays are controlling Disney!” [Laughs.] And it’s just not true.

EO

[Laughs.] The straights are controlling Disney. Let’s be real about that.

MH

[Laughs.] It’s really like, do you know what Disney is? As a ’90s kid, you’re like excuse me, Disney what? No, you’re confused. They only want the girl to marry a prince; that’s the whole premise.

EO

[Laughs.] Speaking of, I wanted you to kind of define collective interests, collective memory, and collective amnesia.

MH

I don’t know about definitions, but I know that a forgetfulness is really one of California’s main exports. And I think California relies on an ignorance about its past in order to sell new products. Because if you look to the past, you can learn about the future, right? And the whole argument that they’re making often is that the future is unbounded, infinite, and even selling the narrative of the past being infinite. You can even see this playing out with AI [artificial intelligence] right now. And so that means that people have to forget that these programs have existed for a long time. And no one’s ever figured out how to do anything with them that’s particularly useful.

EO

Right, to your point about the weaponization of dialectics. The formation of this technology has always existed in different places, but because this new configuration is coming together in a new form. Were you actually engaging the politics of AI throughout your book, or were you even thinking about the implications of the development of that technology?

MH

No because there are large language models. We should call them what they are, which is predictive language software. It’s not AI. It’s not magic. I don’t think it’s very useful for many things.

EO

How do you think it's being presented to us versus your understanding of what's actually happening?

MH

It’s being presented like magic, as the newest kind of technology, just as crypto was, and other things have been. As you’ve seen, Coca-Cola is like, “We’re going to team up with OpenAI.” And I’m like, to do what? How does that relate to making and selling sugar water? How are these two things related? It’s the same with when we were talking about the layoffs, it’s not about actually operating business. These are just appeals to the stock market.