Fred and Loathing on The Internet

The Masses Find No Humor In These Pun Blog Titles, Because Some Have Hoarded All The Laughter!

2024-Feb-25

The update to report represents more than what is presented to the user. We’ve got some brand new, unprecedented code involved. Over at the /rp section, which is my shorthand for ‘recently_played’, now has color coded boxes grouping the artist names that are found in my artist database. I was already doing that with some CSS inheritance. What is different today was the use of Jinja2’s group-by function. I did not know it could do that. Well, I had the idea that it would but not so explicitly. Python has one too! Not the Pandas Dataframe method, but one found in the standard library’s itertools. The CSS file where I store my genre colors grew a little bit more awkwardly than I would have liked. For the sake of expediency I kept some redundant divs in there that I think I can eliminate with more careful ordering of my variables in the style sheet.

Clamoring! That’s right, there is ‘clamoring’ among the studio audience here at fredlambuth.com for more robust user features for each user. The team here moved some things around quickly, bringing us some views into all the user generated content. Available only to logged on users though. If you’re not logged in, you’ll have to take our word for it.

The review we have for this blog entry is a book. A big one. A recently published one. Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World by Malcom Harris, published in 2022. Another single volume history of a geographic region. I went with the audiobook, clocking in at 28 hours. Almost four times longer than the single volume history of the English isles I had previously reviewed here, despite the subject covering a much smaller region and a much shorter span of time. Palo Alto’s does have a more narrow time and geographic scope than England, it still offers more than enough fodder to fatten up more than twenty hours of book narration.

Ian Morris, the author of that big history of England, carries through his examination of history with a geopolitical lens, with the title itself telegraphing just what the book is really about, England’s geography defining its history. This book explodes out of the mere geography of the region of California where Palo Alto is located, with also the title of this book telling the reader just what is going to dictate the course of history in this book. Malcolm Harris pushes the bay area of Northern California through a maelstrom of global capital; a force that really did not have a global reach until the late 19th century, when California bloomed after the post-gold rush boom of 1849. Every step of California's relatively short lifespan has the state being the vanguard for historical changes up until the publication date of the book. And more or less, the vanguard of history since 1849 has been dictated by Capital. Big, fat, growing Capital. The real star of this story.

The illustration was rushed and not to my liking. This book mentions so many ideas, people, locations, and inventions. My unofficial 45-90 minute rule for making the illustrations that go with each blog post meant I had to go symbolic. Once again I lament the missing range of tips between fine and thick chisel in my toolbox right now. I think I could have worked quickly to fill in more mechanical details on the locomotive and then used the chisel tips for Hoover’s suit.

Yes, that’s Herbert Hoover. Up until I read this book I had not thought too much of him. Not in judgment of character, but as an assessment of impact on history. I definitely know of him as the president holding the bag when the big 1929 stock market crash began what would be called The Great Depression. The president after him is one I would right away identify as one of the ‘great persons of history’ the old school historians looked for in records. Hoover not so much. I recall him having some minor fame prior to being president as a somebody who made a name as a marvel of modern organizational management during WW1. Hoover gets the cover spot because he is the specter that haunts the pages of this book.

The other three items are a late era steam engine, an early era jet fighter, and the Apple II. I think they symbolize the three eras of California’s history chronicled in this book, the railroad era, the jetset era, and then the end of history with computers. I call it the end of history because that is the final stop for Capitalism, the force that defines this region, this state, country, and era of global history. California was the first place capital around the world could get it on the most wild raw speculation.

I get the sense the author would more likely call himself a commie before he would a conservative. That is fine and dandy, but often his lamentation for the boogey-man of capitalism gets tiresome. This was a complaint I had with American Midnight (mentioned in a blog post here!). They both waste words insulting vile historical figures twice. I don’t find extra satisfaction for calling long dead robber barons a jerk after the first time. They’re still jerks. Repetitiveness of any stripe is something I can endorse. That’s not how I like it. However I did enjoy learning of new unpleasant personal habits of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.

Before Hoover can get on the scene in the very late 1800s, the first old evil guy in the story is Leland Stanford, who was described as incredibly uninspiring. His meteoric rise from such circumstantial attributes was a testament to just how raw and lush with opportunities for getting rich very quickly. Not just because of the minerals in the ground that first made California so appealing. The opportunities to get rich were numerous because Capital all the way in banks in Paris, or London was well informed of the riches to be had in the unspoiled lands in the Americas. California was the right place and the right time for capital to come right in and buy everything. Leland Stanford stumbled into riches and the governor’s office, then created institutions to make sure his story would keep repeating in the state to people like him.

Hoover was one of these ‘Stanford Engineers’ who accommodated all the money back East that wanted to get invested in the obviously lucrative resource found in the West. Hoover became known to be just as uninspiring as Leland Stanford, yet highly renowned in his time for getting the job done. A quality very much in favor by the richest of the rich looking to employ people to help them grow their wealth. Stanford University, named after the deceased child of the first governor of California, Leland Stanford, was to be a Harvard in the east made with precise engineering. Yes, it was to provide training in modern engineering practices to make employees to help capital exploit resources, but it was also to engineer people. Hoover was part of the first graduating class and would eventually leave behind the Hoover Institute.

Instead of going too deep into summarizing the start or middle or end of this very thorough survey of the Palo Alto area and its very outsized impact on the world, I should say this author presents a history that a teenage version of me would have lapped up voraciously. Every step of the story has conspiracy, hidden social costs, government cahooting with bankers, CIA operations, drug smuggling, hackers, cover-ups. The author makes sure that the story always has a layer of grime to remind you that the world sucks and Palo Alto has a lot of unspoken accountability for making that so.

Back to Hoover and his holy ghost presence through California and America. Well after Hoover lost the election bid for the presidency in 1932 he remained a dark horse figure in the intellectual conservative movement. This book has him appearing as maniacally loyal to the wills of the ultra-rich industrialists and felt it was a moral imperative to make sure this New Deal does not spoil just what he thought was so great about the USA, unfettered right of property. California’s post WW2 defense and aerospace industry boom was a product of Hoover’s aims to enrich his adopted home of California. The very idea of a place like Silicon Valley was his inchoate but direct goal. A place where technology and capital can abuse each other in a vicious cycle.

Hoover is dead before the beginning of the third act of the book, when California became the nexus of computers, the invention of its era. Although dead, his dreams had come true. The Stanford Engineer was not just helping capital find new minerals to dig out of the Earth. The concept had graduated into a graduate who could see the next big thing to dig out of thin air and how to find the financing to make it happen. The writing feels even more condemning of the post-hardware era of Silicon Valley than any of the prior era of robber barons. The extra derision comes from not only were the members in the right place and the right time, like most California success stories, but the the right place didn’t even involve their own production. The software era became more and more ethereal. Less and less is made and eventually what it does is scrape the value from other real objects.

The web is scraped for searchability by Google, people’s information are scraped by social media for advertising, user transport needs are scraped to make a ride share market that eventually becomes more expensive than prior to their inception. The innovation of steam engines becoming more powerful, or jet engineers faster, or even semiconductors smaller in the prior sections had some semblance of value creation. The end of the book brings us to Capital growing but not developing anything. Just scraping.

Enjoyed the book immensely. Most of the twenty eight hours seemed worthwhile, especially with the end bringing the themes together tightly. It has made me want to read The Octopus by Frank Norris. The monologue from the evil railroad baron in that novel quoted in this book sounds like the monologue from the evil corporate baron in the 1976 film Network. That’s where I first got the idea to think of the market as forces. Forces that still require an agent, but they’re going to happen.

P.S. I didn't’ find any photos of Herbert Hoover with a cigar, but he sounds like a guy would would smoke one.