Bifurcation, bifurcation, bifurcation, bifurcation, bifurcation................bifurcation.

Apart from the word bifurcation being used a ridiculous amount of times (maybe I'm just stupid and don't understand the word well enough), Malcolm Harri's Palo Alto is an ambitious and detailed history of Palo Alto (and at times, the Bay Area, California and Global Capital). Harris' main through-line seemed to be that the history of Palo Alto can be distilled into the repeated clashes of Capital and Labor and the multitude of reinventions of Capital that has undergone in order to consolidate itself into a globalized hegemonic force (mostly for not-great outcomes for broader communities).

While Harris' argument is definitely compelling, at times he seems to attribute an outsized role in the evolution of global capital to Palo Alto and Stanford (where many of the ideas he rails against originate). Due to the scope of the book, it's a bit difficult (and fairly so) for additional context for possible parallel developments outside of Palo Alto to be fairly investigated.

Overall Palo Alto is super interesting with a wealth of knowledge that largely comes from a perspective I agree with. However, I think that Harris' commitment to his narrative causes him to frame valuable information in a way that comes across (at times) as not being super objective. Moreover, I definitely was left asking whether there was information that was omitted or overlooked in order to make a cleaner narrative.