 All right. Welcome everyone to the fifth installment of our fall speaker series thus far we've hosted leading social scientists computer scientists and legal scholars who are deep in the weeds on key, but often granular issues and each of their respective fields. We're hoping that this will be a bit of a different sort of conversation. We're lucky to be joined today by Malcolm Harris and Eric Baker. We're two brilliant thinkers and writers. Malcolm is the author of the best selling book Palo Alto, a history of California capitalism in the world. What she's here to discuss today. He's the author of two other books, including kids these days, the making of millennials and is working on a new project titled worth living strategies against disaster and despair. And Eric is a lecturer in the history of science department here at Harvard. He writes widely for magazine such as M plus one the baffler and the drift where he's an associate editor and is also working on a book project titled make your own job the entrepreneurial work ethic in modern America. We'll set aside a portion of the conversation for audience questions. So please feel free to drop them in the zoom Q and a box below. And Eric will be keeping an eye out for anyone that are relevant for follow up to just points of clarification. So please also use the chat function. And with that I'll hand it over to Eric. Thanks so much Nick. And thanks for for having me on. I'm really excited to talk about this. This is a great book. You know, I was thinking that one, the proper place to start might be at the beginning, because one of the things that excites me most about this book and that I think makes it so relevant, you know, not just to discussions of Silicon Valley and, you know, much wider range of political issues is your your decision to begin the narrative of the book with the acceleration of the Anglo settler colonialism 19th century. You know, I think that a lot of people picking up this book, you know, might expect a much more contemporary tale. But, you know, as someone who still holds that hope for the long array style of history and takes the settler colonialism is really useful frame for for understanding so many developments in US history. I'm wondering if you could start by saying a little more about, you know, why, why the book starts there and how you see those, those themes kind of continuing throughout the narrative. Yeah, I. So in some ways, I think I got really lucky with my object because you know I grew up in Palo Alto and I talk about that. And I was it probably able to sell this book as someone who doesn't have any graduate education. Despite being a pretty straight up history book because it's something that I have a personal attachment to. At the same time, Palo Alto is officially history goes from the 1870s to today. And if you look at, you know, American history and the work that's being done in American history right now. A lot of it is focused on this moment in the 1870s where you locate a sort of rebirth of the American project with the end of reconstruction and the post of a war era. And that's often told around the south and the north and the relation between the south and the north and going from slavery to Jim Crow and that this is constitutive of the new country. But it really leaves out the story of the West, which is absolutely part of that same period. And so you have at the same time in the 1870s that you've got the defeat of reconstruction going on in the south. You have genocidal militias conquering all to California to establish California as the other bound of this American coast to coast empire. And people think about this as like a, you know, eastward March or a westward March rather from the east of American colonialism. But when you really read about California at the time, that's not how it operated it was an over it was literally an overseas colony of the United States in the middle of the 19th century, and it behaves like one. And so read this focusing on Palo Alto as the object of this history allowed me to focus on this period of modernity that stretches from the 1870s to today. This is this second birth of the American project. So I feel really lucky that my object allowed me to focus on that period because it is very important and it is not as some people imagine ancient history. It's literally not ancient history. In fact, it's literally modern history that we're talking about. And I go through at the end. Five generations of people, literally five generations of people since the colonization by force of all to California by Anglo Americans. And so thinking about this as modern history and the world as the development of this project from the late 19th century, I think cast the whole our whole present situation in a different light. Yeah, could you say more about that last point, you know, in terms in terms of the, you know, what people like to call it conjunctural analysis or sort of present present moment. How does this sort of reminder, you know, as you said there's great riff at the, at the end about these sort of cycles of forgetting. You know, so how does how to sort of working to overcome the those sort of roll roll back those cycles of forgetting one by one all the way to this sort of original moment of settlement and genocide. In terms of, you know, sort of our understanding our current moment and the political crisis we can find ourselves today. Yeah. So on one level just in terms of the colonization of Turtle Island of North America, it's important for people to understand these as ongoing struggles that are that are contemporary right, whether that's Muwekma land in the Bay Area, where the tribe of over 600 people is still fighting to restore their federal recognition and restore a land base that this is something contemporary and they can count those five generations very very clearly. Or whether you're looking at the black hills right that the colonization of vast amounts of North America happens in this modern period and our disputes that are ongoing that are continue through the 20th century and now into the 21st century. And in some ways are the places where we see sparks right now politically. So when you see the Keystone XL protests and you think like oh you know this is a really where is this coming from there's this strange you know political eruption happening in this place that doesn't seem like a political flashpoint in terms of our understanding of the current array of forces like why why would there be a political clash there. But if you understand this history of modern settler colonialism like of course the course the struggle for the black hills has never ended. Of course the city so co and are still struggling for their territory and will continue to struggle as there are new encroachments. At the same time, I've been thinking a lot about it as we look at Palestine and the war going on right there that it's the exact same history and people. There's been the effort from from some especially on the Zionist side to say that the use of settler colonialism and the models of settler colonialism to talk about Palestine in Israel. Is an imposition of some other archetype or some some other conflict from the North American slash Australian slash New Zealand context. And to put it on to Israel Palestine so that those of us on the left can understand it easier. This is completely false it's historically illiterate anyone who's historian of this modern period will tell you as as much. The colonization projects, not just California and Australia and New Zealand, but also South Africa, also in coastal China that these are all things that are happening at the same time in Peru. And they're doing so with Californian engineering expertise that's forged in the era of gold mining and accumulates in places like Stanford University and Palo Alto. So, one historical link that people might not know about is this guy L would need was one of the leader of the first Bureau of Reclamation. He's the guy who's really responsible as much as anyone in particular for designing the West's water system. Lake Mead which is still the water source for California attached to the Hoover Dam you know they're like this is and that settlement right people need to understand that's 20th century but it's that settlement they're settling the land for more people to be able to live there. L would need in the in the 20s and 30s goes over to Palestine where he's doing the same activity there where they want him for his expertise having done this work in California to go set up a Zionist water system. And it's interesting that that he's credited by some of the early Zionist leaders with leading them away from communal design into individualist capitalist economy. And he comes out there and says like you guys don't trust me like communism like this all like working together living together thing sharing the land like that's never going to help you develop anything. That's what the Arabs have been doing for hundreds of years, it's never going to build anything what you need is capitalism. Okay, and then this becomes the dominant strain within Zionist settlement, as well as the structural building of the literal infrastructure of the colonial project. So these, these connections are not metaphorical. They're not like archetypical they're literal it's literally the same personnel who are involved in this global project of colonialism that again is within 100 years this is our current situation. And it seems to me that it really kind of recasts, you know, the in some ways the the central concept of Silicon Valley technology. You know, that you really sort of draw out, you know, the relationship of technology on the one hand to infrastructure and the physical technical remoulding of places and infrastructural systems that that goes into settlement. Yeah, and not just that when we think about technology, especially when we think about Silicon Valley technology, it's really easy to think about gadgets, because it's a real it's a real place of gadgets and these like gadget commodities really seem to crystallize all the like the historical development that's going on in these places the intellectual development the capital and they seem like you know like all of this came together and we produced the microchip or we produce the computer or we produce the television which also comes out of the same group or the telegraph you know triodes that they were coming up with the radar you know there are a lot of very important like gadgets that they come out that come out of there. What that leaves out is the way that these commodities also crystallize the social relations and in the history and so when we focus on science and technology in terms of the invention. In terms of the like the ideal the concept behind these things it's very easy to think about them as separate from labor as separate from land as separate from class. And so with something like the Apple to there is a I think a recent book about the Apple to the talks about it. A whole book about this object and the importance of this object doesn't talk about who built in practice doesn't mean no almost none of the histories of the tech industry made histories that a lot of people who are watching this might be familiar with industrial histories of the Bay Area. They don't talk about who builds you know Apple to number seven or number eight they talk about who wires the first one. And then they don't worry about the actual production process the actual production process was as much as the design, the important technological step that happens in the Bay Area. So when we think of the Bay Area now. And it was like oh they invented gig work like that was a really important like thing that they came up with but that was just an extension of these the phone or this object or whatever. It just naturally unfolded for that from there. That's not true at all like before Silicon Valley invented gig work Silicon Valley was the world center of temp work. It was a different kind of precariously contracted labor. And so and before that it was the center of different kinds of labor contracts of like transnational labor contractors and stuff so there's these innovations and all of this kind of non union, non union casual, you know, hyper intensified sort of form that persists even as the exact organizational details of all. Absolutely I mean even look at the the Fremont auto factory, which is going to be in the news soon I imagine there's currently a big Tesla factory but before that was the new me. When I was in high school when I visited it on a auto class field trip. It was the new me new me factory run by Toyota, which was supposed to bring back the like American auto union worker, even if it was sort of working for Japanese companies. It was supposed to bring back the, the union building that collapsed and is now run by Tesla which is a non union automaker, and the w is now threatened threatening to unionize the the Fremont plant. But one thing that's really interesting about the Fremont plant that gets left out of that. Most of the histories of California and of the auto industry is that that plant was one of the big winners of the tax reform proposition that is usually we talk about it in terms of individual home property taxes, and not in terms of the businesses that one huge tax reductions as part of this proposition. But one of those businesses was the Fremont factory that then went to put as part of the evolution of social relations that come out of the destruction of those relations in the first place right if you destroy the state that they with the taxes, then you can't support the auto worker social labor model. I'm glad that you that you pivoted there because one, one piece and again thinking about these these continuities that stretch back to the 19th century. The word that you use again and again to characterize this sort of ballot proposition strategy that a lot of the business class really adopts in the late 20th century in the US is vigilance is these anti initiatives. So I was wondering if you could talk a bit more about, you know, why you characterize these these ballot initiatives as a kind of form of vigilantism and you know how maybe that connects with some of these earlier episodes of vigilantism. Yeah, California has a fantastic history of vigilantism actually Mike Davis it's like somewhere between an essay and a short book. Mike Davis has one called like what is a vigilante man that is about the history of white vigilantism in California and someone really should put that out as like a pamphlet I think it's published in another book as a chapter or something but someone should really put that out as a pamphlet because it's really great history. And you can go back to the 19th century to the like very beginning of the labor movement in California the official labor movement where they decide to attack Chinese workers and the importation of Chinese workers as as their strategy and they look towards vigilantism as a solution. And really you could go back further than that to the idealization of the gold mining camps themselves, which was a formalization of vigilantism, based on the racial exclusion of non white non Anglo people, which at the time was did not just mean non racially white or whatever it also included like French people or whatever was you know get the hell off our camps or you have to pay a special So whiteness is really fused with these vigilante activities. And in the 20th century becomes a labor tactic that the growers use where they're building their own vigilante forces that they can rely on. And the California Highway Patrol really evolves out of these vigilante gangs that are used to attack at those point. I guess you could say mostly Chicano workers, but there's also Filipino workers and Korean and Japanese and Chinese workers who are being attacked by these vigilante groups as well. And so it becomes this like this racial labor tool that then when it be in more in the post war era looks for these legalistic solutions. In addition to I mean you do see a resurgence of the Klan activity in California in the 70s and 80s, especially around the border. So vigilantes and continues, but it is also really built into the California political system and the ways that those propositions. State propositions operate is definitely within that history of white extra democratic democratic domination. It seems that there's an analogy there as well, you know, talking about the evolution of anti labor vigilante some into the Highway Patrol. That one, one important piece to them for thinking about the infrastructural reshaping of California in this period is the growth of the explosive growth prison system, which we discuss a bit drawing on Wilson, and other scholars. And, you know, how, when we when we think about, you know, the Silicon Valley economy, you know, we think we tend to think about, you know, people in sort of open plan offices, you know, chucking coffee on their computers but, you know, a huge fraction of the working class in California are either, you know, incarcerated in prisons or employed in the prison system. Yeah, and something I think that's really and I cite, there's a there's a footnote in the Gilmore book that I think is really important, where she says this is not tainziness that and she differentiates and she says that something had to replace the economic system that include found ways to include, even if on the margins, minority groups within American society, and then that this was the post war Keynesianism and the great society. And some people talked about the prison boom as sort of an extension of that and Gilmore is very, very clear, even though it's in a note that this is not the case and that this is a distinct mode. What does she think sees of population management. And in my research, I think it's pretty much impossible to understand that other than as a distributed revenge plot against black and Chicano people in the United States and in particular in California for the insurrections of the 60s and early 70s. And that you see that this is a that they are intentionally destroying the ability of the state to reproduce itself, particularly targeted around So if you look at California in, you know, the final quarter of the 20th century and the emergence of the knowledge economy and like the center of the world knowledge economy. The last thing you would do is totally viscerate your education system like that makes absolutely no sense if you're investing in your future as a place in the world, except that the authorities of California really understand stood what kind of world they were trying to create at the end of the 20th century and it was one that was based on the capital the total capitalist domination of labor. And so that was the you're going to grow not by educating people in the educating the masses into new computer skills, but by hammering people by hammering labor and forcing wages down and exporting jobs that were technically complicated to other places where you could attack those wages or importing technically sophisticated workers who would be dependent on the immigration system and hammer down their wages. But if you look at the descriptions of the California primary and secondary education system from, you know, the 40s 50s to the 70s 80s. Only be read as intentional I think you because you go from people saying like wow this is the best you know like multi racial education we're really learning to all the Americans and like the teachers really value everyone's culture and it's not at like supremacist sort of like Ernesto Galarza who's a great labor figure has this in his book barrio boy, really great account of what it was like to go to school in California for a young Chicano boy in the first half of the 20th century. And then you read about what education looks like for black kids in the Bay Area in the 80s. And they say yeah I go to school every day and it doesn't matter not going to teach me how to read so like what's the point. And it's it's I can only read that as a political attack on people. And this framing of revenge or retaliation as particularly sort of taking its as its object the education system reminds me of how much the, the university infrastructure especially at Stanford, but also just starting to really, in this area was was both the target of uprising and political mobilization in the 60s and 70s but also, you know, to a significant extent became kind of conscripted release was was threatened to be sort of utilized by revolutionary movements and that won the sympathy of least a minority of the whites generation population. You know, maybe people read an article in the, or an excerpt recently from Michael Cason's new memoir, or he talks about being part of SDS at Harvard and being kind of a feckless pseudo radical. And maybe that was the situation at Harvard I did research that campus very well. But I can say, say for sure that that was not the case at Stanford and that the, the movement which was really drawing its inspiration from the black panthers from street movements, and from the community college movement in northern California at the time which was really at the cutting edge of politics and uniting the street and educational politics. And they would they were drawing their inspiration from there and they were really serious people. And I talked about that I do a lot of research in the book talking about the 60s movement and the revolutionary guard and the would be communist revolutionaries the late 60s early 70s, particularly at Stanford. And these were these were uncommonly sophisticated thinkers who put their skills to work researching the relationships between their campus community and the war that they found unacceptable going on in Vietnam. And they found a lot of connections and they found a lot of serious connections. And they found that a lot of the electronics research that was being done on their campus, ostensibly for defensive purposes or whatever or essentially just for like scientific objective scientific purposes were in fact part and parcel of the war machine and that the war was being fought on their right around them at that building over there where they didn't know what they were doing in there. Well, it turns out they were doing calculations that were being used in Vietnam, and what those students decided to do pretty quickly. I mean, was insert themselves into this conflict and they start by trying to, you know, put their bodies between things they go sit outside of the military manufacturers. And it's a very interesting scene where the student left gets a person to person meeting with the CEO of one of the chemical companies that's making the chemicals that's being used in Vietnam. And it's a very interesting scene partly because both the the CEO and the student leaders are both Jewish, and the Holocaust is a really recent memory. And the student leaders are saying like, you know, you're working with the same companies that produce the gas for the gas chambers like this is that you're doing the same thing when you're producing agent orange or you're producing napalm. And the CEO of the weapons company says like look man, I'm just trying to end the war faster and like this is what chemical companies do and if I didn't do it then someone else would do it. And the student radicals pretty quickly realized like okay fuck this like we're not going to get anywhere like negotiating with these guys or appealing to their humanity. They realized that it is indeed an inhuman system they believe the things that they're being told by the CEO because they're true like if he squits someone else is going to do it. And so that they realized that it's not enough to object or to protest, they have to resist. And so what they do is they start bombing and setting fire to and sabotaging these campus systems that we're doing war work. They are effective they target every computer on campus and that's one of the the historiographical points about the book that I think was pretty interesting is a lot of the histories of Silicon Valley say that like oh the hippies were anti war and they created the computers because they were pro technology, and then maybe they accidentally didn't neoliberalism. But the actual anti war movement like literally was trying to blow up every computer in the country, like that was, that was their, their program because they recognize that all these computers will war machines. So I think that's something we need to understand a little more clearly. So of course stretches, you know, both forward in time from that moment as well as backwards and you talk a lot about the entanglement. You know, of, I mean, in some ways this goes back to the, the period of settlement. There was well through Herbert Hoover, who was very large in this book this pattern of, you know, association with the, with the state and the military and then you draw that forward at the end. And about talking about Palantir and contemporary Silicon Valley is cooperation with the NSA is revealed by various whistleblowers. And this is a sort of major theme and looking for areas of continuity up to the present day. You know, this, this narrative of, I completely agree that there was a sort of initial kind of utopian element that was that was used conceived of as sort of tools of peace that, you know, eventually sort of fell away and, you know, we're corrupted and it's sort of sort of gets repeated is sort of at each stage of this process, you know, but not just in the Cold War but it's exactly the same sort of narrative beats and people talk about, you know, the, on this, this social media was, you know, supposed to bring about, you know, peace in the Middle East or something and, you know, but it wound up these, there's this sort of element of co-option or, you know, sort of downfall. And I think that one of the things the book does effectively is sort of push back against that, that narrative of sort of initial purity, sort of repeated. Again, in this sort of almost like ritual forgetting way we forget that we've sort of played out the beats of this of the story before. Yeah, when people talk about the early internet, I mean, this is the best example of that kind of self flattering, historical narrativeizing by the industry, which is that when you think about the networks that preceded the internet that connected to the networks or whatever, when you think about early computer networks, you think of like hobbyists and enthusiasts and the like spread of information but also like artists and goofballs and hippies and like Grateful Dead fans losing like super, super large in this story. I had a few people who are mad that the Grateful Dead did not play a larger role in this book, but sort of fewer than I than I worried I might get because they're they play Palo Alto. They're from Palo Alto they are Palo Alto. Oh yeah, like 100%. Yet I sort of left that out of the book because who cares, because it is not actually because the, you know, because that those networks did not actually characterize, I just realized my whole thing's a little tilted here. That's okay. To the left. That there are the early internet networks, you know, for some people might have been characterized by this like sharing of information across distances or whatever. But in terms of their use in terms of like how what was really important historically, it was the use by the defense establishment. And so I talk about that the network one of the early computer networks was a network that Oliver North set up using the first laptops, which did not have a big market but the national security stuff you know this is if you look go back to like movies from the 80s or 90s or whatever you open up the laptop and it's the like orange types command line screen or whatever. Like the really really early, but very high tech at the time. And he used this to set up a shadow government like the Iran Contra scandal would not have been possible except for that they had these new generation of laptops that allowed like eight people to run a government that they didn't have to go through the actual communities like communication systems which would have involved many more people being involved in this plan and said they're able to set up the with plausible deniability for the White House, a different government, and that's done through this network that connect that's going to connect you know Nicaragua to Lebanon to Angola to Afghanistan to the NSC in the White House to Taiwan, you know where they create this anti communist international that's moving around guns and money and transformation in ways that are not under democratic oversight that are against the law, but that were crucially important to creating the world that we end up with at the end of the 20th century and into the 21st century. That for me that like that blows the grateful dead out of the water right like the ability capital's ability at that moment to put together a counter force to the global communist insurgency is absolutely crucial for the survival, especially for the unipolar survival of American led capitalism in the world like it's hard to imagine how that happens without that ability to sort of move resources around the world through its systems unaccountably. And and move messages you know information. I mean it's it's interesting. You know the in, in many ways, the, the, when you were enumerating the gadgets, you know earlier the, there's so much so much that's obviously broadly construed telecommunications is the sort of unifying sector that that these innovations that we all come come to know and are clustered in and, you know, to some extent there's like a sort of fun, you know, consumer facing in element that gadgetry but you know it's, I mean, your sort of description of the North network is a good reminder that, you know, the increasing importance of, you know, telecommunication infrastructure and in coordinating imperial projects and going back to the 19th century, coordinating the expansion of capitalism the creation of a world market, the annihilation of space by time and Marx's phrase. Yeah, you can look at I mean Hewlett Packard is one is one of the signature companies of Palo Alto going back to their radio era. So they precede Silicon in Silicon Valley right they were working with vacuum triodes back in the day. Total like conscious product of Stanford University of that milieu of even that military project to win World War Two. And World War One before it really comes out of the World War One orientation into World War Two. Hewlett Packard now has been in the news as one of the targets of the BDS campaign because of their military work on behalf of the government. And people might think like Hewlett Packard like don't they sell they sold those old like you know, tower PCs what do they have to do with like military contracting or whatever. That's not the case like they were a military contractor like way way way before. In fact, like David Packard himself is deputy deputy secretary of Defense under Nixon during the Vietnam War he is one of the like real enemies of the student movement in the 60s and 70s we don't remember that that now because he's done a really good job cleaning up their image. But one of the things that David Packard was really really aggressive about was cutting export restrictions on communications technologies to governments that we were worried about that some people within the government were worried about having these technologies. And so he was the one saying like no no you got to let me sell these, you know, signals monitoring systems to Savak, the Iranian Special Police for the people that were using them to round up and kill people, or you got to let me sell you know sell these systems to Idi Amin you got to let me sell these systems to whatever anti communist dictators wanted them which was all of them, absolutely all of them. And so from from that time from the very beginning HP has been an important element in the like anti communist international. And one of the guys who sort of starts the the private facing firm that really runs the whole Iran Contra scandal is an HP distributor whose work is an Iranian guy who's working for HP out of their office in Switzerland, whose job was like bribing Iranian officials to buy HP technology. And then he gets coopted by North and the intelligence establishment into expanding that operation such that they're, you know, taking heavy artillery that was seized by the Israelis in Lebanon and bringing it to South America to fight Contras, you know, so it becomes a real worldwide scheme, but people don't associate Palo Alto or Silicon Valley or any of those tech companies with this stuff that was going on in the 1980s, which is very interesting because if you go back and watch all those movies like, you know, Cold War type espionage movies. It's very, very, very clear how crucial tech is to the whole thing like there's always some, oh, we got to get this chip like you know the chip is really where it's at you know whatever we got to get this information. And Silicon Valley during the Cold War is this real like global center of spy craft. And the show The Americans, and there's there's a lot of sort of vintage computer stuff that, you know, I mean, I think it was one thing that that show captures well. The, the, you know, we, we've kept talking about, you know, I mean, even in what you just said people don't think about this when they when they think about Palo Alto. This makes me think of one of the questions that's, that's come into us about ideology, you know, we've talked a lot about material infrastructure, the, the, you know, flows of capital of people of technology. But this person is curious about the role of ideology in Silicon Valley. You know, is this just a matter of, you know, deception hype, or is there something more than I could say about the kind of active productive role of, of Silicon Silicon Valley ideology. I would say it's overstated. And so one of the one of the reasons I don't look at ideology very much in the book is because in the official history, I think they really center on ideology. There's a funny essay called the California ideology that people might be surprised not to see referenced anywhere in the book. But that's because I think that essay is really bad and wrong, and gets the history wrong. And if you now look back on if you read interviews with the authors. They like, oh yeah, we weren't really talking about California and what was going on in California, we were talking about like our idea of California from our British media studies MA program that we were trying to recruit from. And that that has been like, describe people have confused that with like, what was actually going on in California. And that's how you end up thinking like, Oh, the hippies invented the computer or whatever and it was about neoliberalism, instead of being like, all over north invented the computer to overthrow the Sandinistas, which is like much more accurate than the first one, even though they're both simplifications or whatever. So as a Marxist, I don't think of the like ideology as the actually determining of history, I think it's a more of a secondary factor. And I think if you review the the actual history of California, you find that as well. And so a lot of people asked like, Oh, why don't you talk about all these cool ideas that Leland Stanford had about how like, everyone should be in workers co ops or whatever. I was like, because they're irrelevant, like some, some like fantasy that some capitalist had, and Silicon Valley of capitalists, you know, have a lot of fantasies, right. And if we focus on the fantasies that they have, we really miss like what they're actually doing all day. And they might not understand what they're actually doing all day, half the time at least half the time they do not understand what they're doing all day in terms of the like historical context. And so I really want to know what's what's going on behind people's backs, you know, like historically, rather than like what they think they're doing, especially because Silicon Valley is really, really good at telling its own story about what it's doing, and sort of bad at remembering its own history. Yeah, absolutely. It makes me think there's a question that just came in about Martin Scorsese's new film killers of the flower moon, which I think one of one of the interesting things that that film does which is also, you know, about the settler colonial genocide in different part of the country is is to kind of take the sort of like the suspense out of it, and to sort of show that, you know, a lot of this, which was, you know, the book, a lot of people were expecting a sort of very kind of style presentation of this material but it's, it's out in the open it's it's not a, it doesn't, it doesn't, you know, it requires to a certain extent, you know, less sort of detective work with all the kind of carceral baggage of the phrase and more just a kind of willingness to actually look in the face, the historical record. Yeah, I haven't I haven't watched it yet I have read the book. I'll be, I'll be curious. One movie I did see recently is a documentary called the Lakota nation versus United States, I believe that's what it's called, which is a really great history of the colonization of the black hills in through today, and it's exactly parallel to the show Deadwood, which I just also just seen some of for the first time, which takes place in the same in the same place exact same history but from the the colonizer perspective, and putting those two in conversation I thought was really, really, really interesting, because you really see how much work goes in even contemporarily into just not seeing native people and not understanding their history and not recognizing their perspective as a human one period, because once once you crack that open once you recognize the humanity of native people, then it's really hard to see the humanity of settlers like someone's humanity gets thrown into question because of what actually happened, because it's hard to imagine two groups of human people treating each other that way right. And so, from what I've read of the movie, I think that it sort of struggles with that right like how do you show both groups as human at the same time when the settlers have behaved. What we think of as with a lack of humanity. So, hopefully, it represents a step forward in that thinking and a step forward in terms of understanding the history of settler colonialism as a modern, thoroughly modern, constitutively modern history. Which is a good segue to another question about what is to be done which is which is where the book ends with the sort of modest modest proposal I think it's modest in the grand scheme of things of giving the Stanford land back. This question asks, what would you suggest to address the complexities and consequences of settler movements and settlements in the present. There's another related question about sort of more theoretical academic ideas about refusal and ideas of indigenous data sovereignty. You know, what kind of approaches do you do you find promising for kind of envisioning a path forward in our moment. Yeah, I think native leadership is clearly the path forward so I think people has been sort of pathetic conversations about how settlers in North America should relate to indigenous movements and this sort of like, if you believe in anti colonialism, then why don't you like, cut your own throat at the doors of the Bureau of Indian Affairs or whatever you know like why don't why don't you like sacrifice your own settler being to the native movement. Or like why don't you like let them murder you or something, which is like a really like totally insane thing to say, especially because again, these are contemporary political movements that you can become involved in. No one's going to say like oh no we don't want your help because you're a settler or whatever it doesn't mean that like you're not going to lead the movement for land back in the place that you're from or whatever. But there are absolutely 110% plenty of opportunities from people of all backgrounds to contribute to the native cause, wherever they are when they're from. So if you're watching this from the San Francisco Bay Area from Muwekma Land go to Muwekma.org M-U-W-E-K-M-A.org and learn about the campaign to restore recognition to the tribe, you know, like learn about what the actual campaigns are in the place that you're from or in the place that you're living and build up actual relationships to the people doing that work. And then there are a lot of answers right there are like as many answers as there are campaigns and as many answers as there are places that these are like place based campaigns and we need to understand them as place based campaigns as land defense as water defense as earth care. And that's that's a lot of what my next book is going to be about. So hopefully I'll have some answers for people about where I see leadership coming from in this moment and going on to the future. But yeah, like learn about what's actually going on where you are in as opposed to like thinking about these things in terms of like really abstract rights because that's not how this question in particular functions it doesn't work that way. And not just not just politically but in some ways also the kind of what the book shows the kind of embedding of or the very material dependence of current, you know, regimes of capitalist exploitation within the metropole of, you know, exploitation of some of the workers itself depends on this longer history of settler colonialism ongoing processes of dispossession and exploitation in the global south. And there's a question that alludes to the theme of bifurcation in the book and in the labor market. It seems that the, you know, not only is it is it possible not only is it a good idea on on political grounds but, you know, the, the idea that it's, it's that it's even possible to sort of address, you know, the exploitation of the labor aristocracy, so to speak, without engaging, you know, broader questions of imperialism and ongoing presence of settler colonialism seems to me to be quite naive. And this well it's I think it goes to this question of class abstractionism versus class dynamism and his class class membership and class interests something that just exists and we need to like ignore all the confounding elements of our work that we might suggest that we join some other kind of political collectivity and just focus on our existence as members of the proletariat as non capitalists as workers. Or is it is it a activity that we have to do do we have to build class forces by bringing those common interests to the fore. Maria Barker has a really interesting way of thinking about it where she talks about the common interest in the preservation of the earth that unites both industrial and what she calls meta industrial workers. Other people call care workers or other kinds of workers, non productive or however you want to do it. But that that interest in the preservation of the earth has to be created that it doesn't just it's not self evident to people. And clarification in the chat was Stephanie Barker happened to have her book right here, The Forces of reproduction by Stephanie Barker. Where she talks about that question very directly and I think does a really good job of of talking about how we need to build class belonging as a working element within society, not just sort of say, Okay, all all workers have worker class interest and therefore the things that workers do are the things that are in their worker class interest, which I think is leads people into some cul-de-sacs which we've seen where like, you know, if you say that the IBEW is the revolutionary subject that's going to build itself and build public power at the same time. And then the IBEW some comes out and says like, we think there should be more fossil fuel powered crypto mines. Those people should probably not be in charge of like planning the entire society right and so if you're like, if your model is question begging and it's not actually attached to what's going on in the real dynamics. Then that shows that we need to like be intervening in this that it needs to be a political process not something that we can just assume. I think that's one thing that the, again, the kind of laundry historical perspective of the book is really useful for for illuminating because class can look like this static abstraction, you know, from the perspective of of one can juncture. So when you zoom out and, you know, you take a look at these dynamic processes and unfolding in history becomes, I think, a bit clearer the possibility of sort of pinning pinning it down and saying, you know, there, there is is the kind of the real, the real class that sort of, you know, recognize strip away all the sort of, you know, whatever identity based baggage that sort of presents us from seeing this sort of essence. Yeah, I think it's not a coincidence that Mike Davis is both the great historian of class dynamism within the American context, as well as the great historical historian of California. That California just has so many examples of how that project can succeed and fail and the just the way that class is so totally variegated from the very, very, very, very beginning. And not just by gender though certainly by gender and not not just by race though certainly by race but also by language by immigration status by country of origin by like by region of origin by race slash ethnicity right like the first restrictive immigration law was the page act, which didn't just before Chinese exclusion banned Asian women in particular. Like from the very, very beginning like the formation of the working class in California. In this Anglo American history is so totally dynamic across all these other tons of variables that it's impossible to think of classes just something that you can extract from the labor capital relation. So that that leads me to my, my final question and we can wrap up the subtitle of this book is a history of California capitalism and the world. I'm wondering if you know thinking about, again thinking about our understanding of our current injunction, what's to be done as well as the history the sort of relative priority of these of these concepts. You know, is California the the the fulcrum, or is California a useful collection of examples, or is it a secret third thing. Yeah, so I originally I think that the original title was, I just had California capitalism in the world, you know, very much more like academic or whatever. The publisher was like not quite feeling it and I looked through a bunch of other like books that so I've sold a bunch of copies or whatever and I said what if we put in the word history right there and nailed it history of California capitalism world like you got it. It's a it's a like expanding right so California capitalism the world you get bigger and bigger it's a little like intentionally funny or whatever. California is this puzzle piece that completes the capitalist world as a world system for the first time. It really is this hinge that it allows the world capitalist system to exist and California goes from being the furthest hinterland as far as the world is considered California is the end of the world. As far as the world system is concerned and it goes very very very quickly from being one of the least developed places to being the center of this new system. And so, in some ways, capitalism and the world itself the world as a as a place that understand itself as such proceed from California. Partly just sounds nice. But I think it really does it does describe my my object. And people people have been interested in it seeing California in terms of world history rather than America notice that America is not in the subhead. A good good reminder of the possibility of everything to change very quickly. Well, thank you. I think that we're going to wrap up here. All right. Well, thank you Eric. Thank you Malcolm. As we sort of prefaced at the beginning we were hoping this would be a different sort of conversation. Look at the long delay help us take better grasp of the present moment and the fields that we study so closely so thank you both for the wine ranging the insightful the enlightening conversation. We will not have a speaker series event next week but we will finish up with three last events after Thanksgiving, focused on intimate privacy policies on platforms. The future of social media research with all the changing API policies, and then also a deep dive into the Facebook election studies as well. So thank you once again Malcolm and Eric and we hope to see you all on zoom or in person in Cambridge for our last couple events. Thank you guys. Thank you all. Thanks.