It’s the sunbathed city at the heart of Silicon Valley, where massive tech fortunes are made and innovations are conjured up that influence how billions of people worldwide live their lives.
But, according to best-selling author Malcolm Harris, who grew up in Palo Alto, California, a hotbed of high-tech development for decades, there’s a dark history to the city and the surrounding area, one blotted by the theft of land, violence against the Native American people, and even genocide.
On The Business of Tech this week, I talk to Harris about his epic, 720-page alternative history of Palo Alto and some of its early European settlement parallels with our own colonial era in Aotearoa.
Plus, Google turned 25 this year, a big milestone for the tech company that started with US$100,000 (NZ$169,977) of investment and which is now valued at over $1.7 trillion. There have been great innovations and plenty of missteps. But the key question is whether the search giant that has been such a presence in our lives for decades can stay in the lead in the era of AI.
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