Consider a proposal: Stanford should give its more than 8,000 acres to the Muwekma Ohlone, the land’s original people. After all, the university would still have $36 billion in the bank. (U.S. colleges and universities have amassed enormous wealth—more than $800 billion in endowment assets, according to a recent survey of 678 institutions.) Even more outrageously endowed is the surrounding region of Silicon Valley, which is Malcolm Harris’s real target when he makes this suggestion at the end of his new book, Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World. It’s precisely Stanford’s land, Harris explains, that has “nurtured the Silicon Valley extraction machine,” one he believes is wreaking havoc on the planet and immiserating so many of its people.

Deeply researched and richly detailed, Palo Alto is a prehistory of today’s all-too-familiar Valley of oligarchs and Big Brother brogrammers who seem to taint everything they touch, including housing, transportation, and democracy. At the same time, it distills and expresses a stark new techno-pessimism, growing especially fast on the left. Under the Palo Alto System, a term Harris uses to trace the history of Silicon Valley—particularly the obsession with productivity and economic value that he sees as a constant—technology has been hopelessly poisoned by the drive for profit. “Competition and domination, exploitation and exclusion, minority rule and class hate: These aren’t problems capitalist technology will solve,” Harris, who is a self-proclaimed Marxist, writes. “That’s what it’s for. In the proper language, they are features, not bugs.”

Harris wants to wipe the hard drive clean. He makes no calls to protest, divest, or boycott. He is not interested in seizing the means of digital production (and reproduction), organizing tech workers, or “socializing social media.” Harris instead argues that returning the land to the Ohlone could help “draw a new path, away from exhaustion and toward recovery, repair, and renewal.” (The tribe is currently focused on regaining federal recognition, and Harris joined its delegation in D.C. this month.) But he entirely bypasses another way forward: reclaiming Silicon Valley for the public.

A modern Marx in Palo Alto, crashing (of course) at one of Stanford’s seven cooperative houses, wouldn’t give up on such an important site of struggle. Silicon Valley’s mystique may be evaporating fast, but its infrastructure still holds enormous public potential. It is, after all, a collection of utilities (encompassing not just chips, cables, and servers but also digital infrastructure) that should be considered as much a part of the public domain as water and electricity—not least because as Harris, the historian Margaret O’Mara, and others have shown, that infrastructure was built at almost every step with public money.

Besides transforming our daily lives, Silicon Valley infrastructure, especially mobile phones and social media, has been justifiably hailed as helping drive major social movements, including the one that led to Barack Obama’s election, the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, #MeToo, and Black Lives Matter. Rather than dismantling it, as Palo Alto suggests, wouldn’t governing, developing, and harnessing it make more sense? The Valley is more than just a few monopoly platforms; it’s everything we put into them and everything they took from us. When the Valley falters or collapses one day, as happened with the railroads in the 1970s or Wall Street in 2008, there could be a onetime chance to usher in “people’s community control of modern technology,” as the Black Panthers put it. Earlier this month, venture capitalists and start-up founders triggered a run on Silicon Valley Bank, requiring a federal takeover. The rescue should come with terms and conditions.

[Annie Lowrey: Silicon Valley Bank’s failure is now everyone’s problem]

Popular control of technology should be the ultimate goal, through whatever combination of law, code, and direct action may be necessary. Among other things, it would mean people, not companies, controlling their own data. Treating essential technological services like water and electricity would mean regulation and legislation to ensure that they are universally accessible and open source, and subject to democratic deliberation. Technologies built with any substantial public funding—MRI and GPS, the Human Genome Project and self-driving cars, Google and the internet itself—should in turn fund and serve the public. Forget buzzy black-box bots like ChatGPT, Bing, and Bard impersonating human language and behavior for corporate profits. These new forms of text prediction should be developed openly and carefully to improve public services.

Unlike related critiques of Silicon Valley, which usually highlight its libertarian and dystopian dimensions, Palo Alto is a takedown grounded in the long-term history of an actual place. That place is really a series of nested dolls, starting with Stanford and the small, adjacent city of Palo Alto, which it dominates. Beyond lies the Valley, itself just one part of the Bay Area, and beyond that California, the fifth-largest economy in the world. The influence of California, of course, can now be felt everywhere.

Obituaries for California are also now everywhere. Banking on conservative Florida and Texas to take its place at the center of the nation’s social, economic, and cultural life, many on the right are gleeful about the deep-blue state’s demographic slowdown and frequently point to its litany of disasters: wildfires, homelessness, inequality. For his part, Harris, though attuned to the Bay’s radical history, skewers Palo Alto as the “belly of the capitalist beast” and impugns the entire state by extension.

Absent in both cases is actually existing California, the glorious stew of contradictions stirred up in Kevin Starr’s encyclopedic eight-volume history of the state. Today’s Golden State is still one of the most diverse societies in human history, and the Bay’s massive Chinese, Vietnamese, Mexican, Mayan, South Asian, Pacific Islander, and other communities are not just pawns on Silicon Valley’s chessboard. Forged by a mass middle class, modern California has been an engine of economic uplift for millions, with a unique if embattled system of public higher education.

California is worth fighting for, and so is Silicon Valley. If not at Stanford and in Palo Alto, the dynamic and destructive love triangle between technology, capitalism, and higher education would surely be happening somewhere else. (An Austin System might be even worse.) California can draw from a broadly liberal, and even radical, inheritance. Among all the different institutions and interests involved, potential reformers have leverage, not least with disenchanted tech workers themselves.

In 1876, the transcontinental railroad chief and first Republican governor of California, Leland Stanford Sr., bought a farm and built a town near a millennium-old sequoia tree, a palo alto (“tall stick”) that still stands. The original Palo Alto System, Harris writes, was a method the governor designed on that farm for breeding and training horses, which identified and quantified talent as early as possible, with brutal efficiency. In 1891, the farm, which had recently become a university to honor Leland Jr., dead at 15 of typhoid, welcomed its first students. “Still a breeding and training project,” as Harris argues, it was now focused on human beings, though nondenominational, coeducational, and channeling a spirit of invention and progressivism.

[Read: Palo Alto’s first tech giant was a horse farm]

As Harris writes, Silicon Valley is home to some of the “most productive workers in the history of the world”—a handful of haves throwing the have-nots deep into the shade—whose “productivity” is destroying (“disrupting”) industry after established industry. Their companies are becoming some of the world’s most valuable, not only by creating jobs or social goods but by attracting enormous global flows of capital that chase unsustainable returns and inflate gigantic bubbles.

Yet as a callow undergrad in the trough between the dotcom bust of 2000 and the ascent of social media around 2005, I found Stanford and the surrounding area genuinely open to outsiders, deluged with money but also weird ideas and alternative currents both cultish and corporate. For every dorm-room start-up and back-of-the-napkin business plan, there were people curing diseases, contending with the origins of the universe, advancing clean energy, and pioneering irrigation techniques, not to mention all the eternally overshadowed artistic, humanistic, and social-scientific work being done on and around campus. Palo Alto misses the core of curiosity and experimentation that still exists there, fuel for a less profit-obsessed future Valley. Realizing it, however, may take a tech crash or a new antitrust movement.

But for Harris, who grew up in Palo Alto, this future is exceedingly unlikely. With the Palo Alto System, he names a revealing but rigid through line in the region’s history, connecting early faculty forays into eugenics to Cold War military research to the venture-backed Valley of today, where it’s “progress by victory, defeat, and ruthless elimination, full speed from day one.” Or as the Stanford sports chant has it: “Give ’em the axe, the axe, the axe! … Right in the neck, the neck, the neck!”

Tracing the system’s genealogy through the most virulent figures—such as Stanford’s founding president, David Starr Jordan, and the semiconductor pioneer William Shockley, both eugenicists—Harris captures crucial continuities but forecloses some difficult questions. How did an industry and a region stocked with liberals and leftists become the bleeding edge of capitalism? And isn’t the future of many potentially liberatory or at least neutral technologies still up for grabs, just as people in the ’90s saw the internet as a commons for freedom and experimentation?

The Palo Alto System today encompasses rampant law-breaking, long-term loss-making, and “big exits” (whether IPOs or departures from Earth’s atmosphere), along with dependence on despots and workers employed by a thousand external contractors. But for now most people are still hooked on the hype and glued to their screens. No sooner were Americans bound thumbs-first to Apple, Google, and Facebook than they started succumbing to Uber, Airbnb, and Zoom. Data and control, backed by big money and scaled to the nth degree, keep yielding results that enchant and entrap, and people keep handing over their money and information, minds and moods, lives and societies.

Updated at 5:30 p.m. ET on March 29, 2023.

Several years ago, astronomers pointed a telescope at another star and discovered something remarkable: seven planets, each one about the same size as Earth. The planets were quite close to their small star—all seven of their orbits would fit inside Mercury’s. And yet, because this star is smaller, cooler, and dimmer than our own, at least three of those rocky worlds are in the habitable zone, at the right temperature for liquid, flowing water. Earthlike size and sunniness don’t guarantee that you’ll find ET, but if you were looking for signs of alien life beyond this solar system, this corner of the universe would be a promising place to start.

The system, which orbits a star known as TRAPPIST-1, is unusual; scientists had never found one like it before, nor have they since. We can’t see the exoplanets, which are named b, c, d, e, f, g, and h; from 40 light-years away, they were just tiny blips in telescope data. Artists at NASA have illustrated them, their imaginations guided by details of the worlds in our system, including Earth’s clouds and oceans, but the exoplanets have fundamentally remained a mystery. So when the James Webb Space Telescope, the newest and most powerful telescope out there, was launched, experts and space enthusiasts alike were anxious to point it toward this cosmic alphabet and get a real glimpse of the worlds within.

Now the first results are out: The Webb telescope has observed b, the innermost planet, and found … nothing. No signs of carbon dioxide, a key component of our atmosphere, and which Webb is designed to detect even from many light-years away. And good evidence that there was no significant atmosphere at all. “We’re surprised,” Tom Greene, an astrophysicist at NASA who led the team behind the new research, told me. “I was a little disappointed.”

The good news is that we still have six other planets to check out, and the worlds that are farther away from their star might be more likely to have a substantial atmosphere. That means we have six more chances to find an atmosphere around a rocky world, and perhaps even detect the presence of compounds associated with life as we know it. More observations would also give us a richer understanding of whether stars like the one in the TRAPPIST-1 system, known as red dwarfs, are promising candidates in the search for habitable planets in the cosmos. This has big implications: Red dwarfs far outnumber sunlike stars in the Milky Way, and they’re likely to have rocky planets too. If even one TRAPPIST-1 planet has the conditions that we know are needed for life, it would suggest that the galaxy could be teeming with habitable worlds—and Earth might not be so special.

[Read: There is a planet with clouds made of sand]

Other astronomers I spoke with shared Greene’s disappointment at TRAPPIST-1b’s lack of an atmosphere, but some aren’t surprised at all. Since the existence of the system was announced to the public in 2017, scientists have developed countless models for the planets, and the predictions were split. “Some people thought that the planet would have no atmosphere at all, and some folks thought that it would have maybe a Venuslike atmosphere that was mostly made of carbon dioxide,” Jonathan Fortney, an astronomer at UC Santa Cruz who worked with Greene on the new research on b, told me.

Before Webb came along, the Hubble Space Telescope observed most of the TRAPPIST planets, including b, and found no evidence of light and puffy atmospheres made of hydrogen. This was just fine with astronomers, because such a Neptunelike atmosphere wouldn’t be conducive to the kind of life that arose here on Earth. Scientists wanted to detect heavier gasses such as carbon dioxide, methane, and oxygen—a trio that, at least on Earth, indicates life respiring beneath the clouds—and for that, they needed the Webb telescope.

Greene and his team used Webb to assess b’s atmosphere in a new way: They measured heat in the form of infrared light radiating from the planet. A cooler result would suggest the presence of an atmosphere, circulating the star’s heat around the globe. A hotter one would mean a bare surface, absorbing the energy and then reflecting it back, like asphalt after a warm day. The Webb data revealed the latter case to be true; with a day-side temperature of about 450 degrees Fahrenheit, TRAPPIST-1b is “just about perfect for baking pizza,” as NASA put it, but it’s also an airless ball of rock.

[Read: We’ve found 5,000 exoplanets, and we’re still alone]

The planet might have had an atmosphere many eons ago, but its star likely took it away, Megan Mansfield, an astronomer at the University of Arizona who also uses Webb to study exoplanets, told me. Red-dwarf stars are cool stars, technically speaking—they are far less luminous than the sun—but they love to flare, blasting radiation out into space. “Those kinds of things can strip the atmosphere off a planet,” Mansfield said, especially one orbiting this close. TRAPPIST-1b might still have a very tenuous atmosphere, too ephemeral for Webb to detect, like the wisp of gas that envelops Mercury—but that’s not the kind of Earthlike environment researchers are hoping to discover in that system.

So astronomers will move down the line of planets to c, d, e, f, g, and h. Greene said he was more optimistic about detecting atmospheres around TRAPPIST-1’s other planets—at least before the disappointing discovery on b. But it’s too early to lose hope. Perhaps conditions are more comfortable farther out, where “there’s more space for that intense radiation and flaring from the star to spread out,” Mansfield said.

The Webb telescope has already observed c, and the results should be out soon, Greene told me. If it also turns out to be an atmospheric dud, that might not be a reason for astronomers to worry. Same with d, even, because it orbits at the edge of the habitable zone. But e? Then they’ll be nervous. Planets e, f, and g stand the best chance of being Earthlike, with not only an atmosphere but also an ocean. “Every data point we get, just like the one we just got now, will help to refine those theories of what habitability means for planets in [red dwarf] systems,” Nikole Lewis, an astrophysicist at Cornell, told me. Poor, barefaced b might even help researchers determine whether the more promising planets have water: Lewis said that the lack of atmosphere means that the Webb telescope can study the surface of the planet, searching for the chemical signature of water molecules in the light it reflects. A strong-enough signal would give astronomers hope that the substance exists elsewhere in the TRAPPIST system under better conditions—hope that, perhaps, one of these worlds could be a home.

Not for us, of course. A trek to the TRAPPIST system remains the stuff of science fiction. For the time being, humanity is tied to our calm, bright star, and to the planets and moons around it. We’ll build our fancy telescopes and train them on other worlds in the galaxy, wondering whether they have silky clouds of their own, and something, or someone, gazing up at them from the ground.

This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.

Question of the Week

This week, five planets are aligning in the night sky: Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, Uranus, and Mars will all be visible just after sunset, alongside the moon. I’d like to take this cosmic occasion to ask: What role has outer space played in your life, your worldview, or your imagination?

Or: How, if at all, should we keep exploring it?

Send your responses to conor@theatlantic.com

Conversations of Note

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Amid news of another mass shooting this week, I found myself returning to Carl Sagan. In Cosmos, the astronomer and astrophysicist did his best to give readers a sense of the unfathomable:

No planet or star or galaxy can be typical, because the Cosmos is mostly empty. The only typical place is within the vast, cold, universal vacuum, the everlasting night of intergalactic space, a place so strange and desolate that, by comparison, planets and stars and galaxies seem achingly rare and lovely. If we were randomly inserted into the Cosmos, the chance that we would find ourselves on or near a planet would be less than one in a billion trillion trillion … Worlds are precious.

In Pale Blue Dot, he writes:

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark.

In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

Maybe we humans ought to spend more time in dark places gazing up at the night sky.

The Shadow Government

In Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs: A Journey Through the Deep State, the writer Kerry Howley, an exceptional prose stylist, turns her attention to the world of state secrets––and lays bare many of its absurdities. Surely there is an argument for reform in this passage:

John Kiriakou, a CIA analyst based in Virginia, once wrote a paper about Iraqi nuclear weapons and sent it to the Department of Energy, which has its own classification system. As he pressed send, it became illegal for him to access the paper he had written; he did not have the clearance. Kiriakou wanted to tell the president, as the military was preparing to invade Iraq, that someone had had a nervous breakdown. “I knew he had had a nervous breakdown,” he told me at his kitchen table in Clarendon, “because I saw the original data, but I couldn’t tell anybody that he had a nervous breakdown, because it was so highly classified, so highly compartmentalized. I couldn’t put it in writing, because before it gets to the president, it goes through six other people, who wouldn’t be cleared for the information.” The president never found out; the information hit a dead end with Kiriakou.

Once, a report had come in suggesting that a high-placed Iraqi source was unreliable and unstable. Kiriakou thought the president needed to know, and Kiriakou knew the director of the CIA was about to meet with the president. But he couldn’t print out the information—it was too highly classified, there was no print option—or tell the director of the CIA’s assistant, who was not cleared, so he remembered the report as best he could, ran up to the director’s office, and told him. “Give me the report,” the director said. “I’m not going to remember that stuff.” Kiriakou said he couldn’t print it out. He repeated what he knew, from his memory, three times. The director then repeated what he could remember to the president. Anyone who has played telephone can see the problem, though in this case the original information was later revealed to be false. It’s hard to fact-check information when no one can see it.

“I could count on my two hands the times that I used my open telephone in those 15 years,” he told me, “because everything is classified, including the classified email system. So I want to meet my wife for lunch, so I send her an email. ‘You wanna meet for lunch?’ And I classify in secret note form. Why? Because everything is classified. Everything. Like I would have to stop and think, should I really make this unclassified? So eh, fuck it, I’m just gonna say secret note form. That’s what everybody does, for everything.”

The secret state reveals itself in its need for people with security clearance to sift through emails about inviting one’s wife to lunch. On clearedconnections.com, employers based in 47 states try to rustle up cleared candidates; at the time of writing, just one company, Northrop Grumman, had 2,250 job postings. In 2003, two million people had security clearance, approaching 1 percent of the population, which suggests less a security state than a caste system.

Brace Yourself for Change

That advice is implicit in the George Mason University economics professor Tyler Cowen’s recent commentary on the era in which we find ourselves:

In several of my books and many of my talks, I take great care to spell out just how special recent times have been, for most Americans at least. For my entire life, and a bit more, there have been two essential features of the basic landscape: 1. American hegemony over much of the world, and relative physical safety for Americans. 2. An absence of truly radical technological change.

Unless you are very old, old enough to have taken in some of WWII, or were drafted into Korea or Vietnam, probably those features describe your entire life as well.

In other words, virtually all of us have been living in a bubble “outside of history.”

Now, circa 2023, at least one of those assumptions is going to unravel, namely #2.  AI represents a truly major, transformational technological advance. Biomedicine might too, but for this post I’ll stick to the AI topic, as I wish to consider existential risk.

#1 might unravel soon as well, depending how Ukraine and Taiwan fare. It is fair to say we don’t know, nonetheless #1 also is under increasing strain. Hardly anyone you know, including yourself, is prepared to live in actual “moving” history. It will panic many of us, disorient the rest of us, and cause great upheavals in our fortunes, both good and bad. In my view the good will considerably outweigh the bad (at least from losing #2, not #1), but I do understand that the absolute quantity of the bad disruptions will be high.

Risk and Reward

The writer Freddie deBoer rages against substitutes for the risky endeavor of human connection:

All across our culture, you’ll find people eager to abandon the fundamental task of our lives, fostering and maintaining human connection, so that they can fall deeper into a pit of hedonistic distraction forever. You send an email a large language model wrote for you to spare yourself a minute of mental activity at the end of a long day working from home driven by Adderall you got via Zoom from a pill-mill doctor, you order dinner through an app (so that you don’t have to talk to an actual person on the phone), masturbate to online porn, watch several dozen videos on YouTube, none of which you’ll remember even three days later, then take two Xanax to put yourself to sleep. That’s progress now, the steady accumulation of various tools to avoid other human beings, leaving people free to consume #content that is by design totally, existentially disposable, throw-away culture that asks nothing of us and which we don’t remember because neither creator nor audience wants to invest enough for remembering to make sense.

Basic dynamic in life: there is nothing meaningful enough to make you happy that could not make you sad if you lost it. This is the paradox of feeling, and it’s inherent and existential. If things inspire real positive emotion in you then they are necessarily things in which you are sufficiently invested that you would feel negative emotions when they’re gone. One of the fundamental choices that you face on Earth is the degree to which you’ll pursue deeper but riskier fulfillment or practice avoidance that exempts you from bad feelings but leaves you bereft of good ones. We all move in one direction or the other, from one day to another, certainly including me, but it feels to me as if our society is decidedly embracing the latter. Depth and intensity of feeling risk too much; Xbox and hard seltzer and HR culture anesthetize. Pop culture soothes and placates with a steady series of uncomplicated morality tales in predigested narratives where nothing ever really changes and so there’s no worry that the storyline will move in a way that hurts your feelings. Crowdsourced “content” is built on ephemerality. Ask a TikTok megafan, someone who’s totally unapologetic and proud about their love of the service: what’s a TikTok that you still come back to, a year later, two years later, three? I think the honest answer is “none.” Because like so many other things in our culture, those videos are designed to be thrown away. They can’t hurt you, but they can’t move you. They’ll never challenge you, and they’ll never inspire you. All they’re meant to do is help you pass the seconds that make up your life, a finite and precious resource.

Provocation of the Week

Writing in Persuasion, Dr. Erica Anderson, a former president of the U.S. Professional Association for Transgender Health and a former board member of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, weighs in on the conversation about recent reporting on transgender healthcare:

In recent months, I was quoted in The New York Times in a number of articles on topics including gender therapy, hormone treatments and parental rights. These articles were condemned in two highly publicized open letters … Having been quoted in the aforementioned pieces, and being steeped in the issues surrounding trans healthcare, I would like to offer my view on both. First, the accusations of bias and transphobia against journalists at the Times are unconvincing. Each of the journalists with whom I spoke (in some cases multiple times) stressed their intention to illuminate the complexities of the issues. Their motivation was to cover the issues with accuracy, clarity and compassion. They were clearly trying to understand all the nuances of the issues and stressed that they were talking to many people representing a diverse range of views. In each case we discussed the precise language to be used in the articles.

… Writing about these topics is extremely difficult. If one seeks to discuss the nuanced aspects of trans medical treatments, it is even more difficult. As recently as two years ago, many journalists admitted to me that they were afraid to cover transgender healthcare at all, let alone weigh in on the substance and particulars of the issues. In America it would seem that one is cast as either pro-trans or transphobic … This unwillingness to deal with nuance is hugely problematic … The truth is that nothing is binary about gender. In particular, a false narrative has emerged about one of the most contentious issues: the status of research on trans youth, and the rigor behind current guidelines.

Major medical organizations agree that gender affirming care for youth is necessary and appropriate. Some people have taken this to mean that all the issues surrounding such care are settled. But this is not the case. A recent British Medical Journal investigation notes that the research evidence for certain forms of care has come under question in several Western European countries—countries known to be progressive and motivated to help gender-questioning youth. A full systematic review by the Swedish health authority, for example, concluded that the evidence for medicines like puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for youth is currently weak, and that the risks currently outweigh the benefits. Sweden’s health authority has updated their recommendations to severely curtail the use of puberty blockers for those under 18, pending further systematic study. They did not do this because they are transphobic: they did it because they are responsible. Meanwhile, a minority of overzealous practitioners in the United States have blurred activism with responsible professional conduct.

That’s all for today––I’ll see you next week.

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