CRITICA

Recently, I visited my hometown of Palo Alto, California. Sitting in the gentle sunshine outside Philz Coffee, watching well-heeled Stanford students studying for their classes, the city felt like a utopia. This pleasant daydream was dispelled, however, when I discovered the book Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World by Malcolm Harris (2023). Harris’ book is not merely a history of a place; it unveils a narrative in which technological triumph is inseparable from violence, displacement, and psychological repression. For those of us who grew up in Palo Alto during the emergence of Silicon Valley, Harris’ argument resonates not only intellectually but viscerally. The contradictions he documents between the myth of progress and the reality of dispossession, between the polished surfaces of innovation and the shadow they cast, mirror the psychological experience of living in a place where unconscious forces are present, but ignored and unspoken.

My mother worked at Stanford Medical Center during my formative years. My high school math teacher was the son of Bill Hewlett. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, along with other tech titans, were not abstract icons but instead existed on the periphery of awareness. We knew them or people who knew them. Many of my friends’ parents were Stanford professors or worked at the Stanford medical school or the linear accelerator. A wide variety of intellectual and creative pursuits were valued. 

For a time, Palo Alto had a living cultural and artistic soul. Jerry Garcia taught guitar at Dana’s Music store and supposedly slept in his car on University Avenue. An early lineup of Carlos Santana’s band rehearsed next door to a friend’s house. Neil Young had property in the mountains above the city and Joan Baez lived just up the road in Woodside. Music, art, and the influence of a counterculture gave the town a vibrant life.

But that culture is gone. Palo Alto today is economically inaccessible to the very artists, intellectuals, musicians, teachers, and regular people who once helped define it. Even those who currently work in the tech sector find that their children leave after they grow up. Like many fleeing the Bay Area, the next generation wants to settle in places where they can afford to raise a family and find work that is not subject to the boom-bust cycle of the tech industry. The result is a kind of sterile veneer: a city defined by affluence, optimization, and technological innovation, but largely stripped of symbolic depth or intergenerational continuity. What remains is a cultural wasteland, a surface of affluence covering a haunted, shadowy group unconscious.

I encountered that shadow directly. When I was a freshman at Gunn High School, I saw a classmate struck and killed by a train at the East Meadow Drive crossing near where I lived. A year later, close to that same crossing, I witnessed a deadly motorcycle accident. These horrifying events occurred at or near the same railroad crossing where, years later, multiple Gunn High School students would take their own lives. 

From a psychoanalytic perspective, the suicides were not random tragedies; they were signs of repressed emotional pain in the community, where people were expected to succeed and stay in control, no matter what they were really feeling. I was left with an unshakable sense that something unacknowledged was pushing up through the surface of the town – what Jung (1959) would have called the shadow, or what my father Vamik Volkan (1997) might term an un-mourned, frozen large-group trauma. 

Harris describes this trauma:
“We have a word for idyllic towns where the youth suicide rate is three times as high as it’s supposed to be: haunted. Palo Alto is haunted…. Haunting happens when a past action won’t go away, won’t stay past. But the word usually refers to a relation between the living and the dead: There’s an imbalance between the realms, something stuck where it isn’t supposed to be…What haunts are the kinds of large historical crimes that, once committed, can never truly be set right” (2023, p. 15-16).

These historical crimes encompass the violence against the Muwékma Ohlone people. Harris reports that the origins of Palo Alto are related to the slow-motion genocide of these indigenous people and the expropriation of their land. This violence was perpetrated by men like Leland Stanford, whose name adorns the renowned university, and Father Junipero Serra, the architect of the Mission system in California. 

As a teenager I lived in a racially mixed neighborhood between Palo Alto and East Palo Alto. I worked alongside Mexican immigrants at a restaurant. Close proximity to African American and Hispanic communities fueled my indignation about race-based oppression. At the time the legacy of indigenous people was invisible to me. Later in life I learned about the Mission system and California’s history of violence towards indigenous people. But I did not know any of these people personally. Later my friend, the artist Dan Stolpe, introduced me to Dennis Banks, a founder of the American Indian Movement (AIM) and I learned first-hand about the treatment of Native Americans. It wasn’t until I read Harris’ book, however, that I learned Palo Alto was built atop a foundation of dispossession and death. I was shocked and saddened to learn this but not surprised. I was also not surprised to learn that while some at Stanford University are seeking resolution with the past (Jin, 2017), the university has mostly denied, disavowed, or just ignored their legacy of mistreatment of Native Americans. Stanford’s historical treatment of indigenous people is one of the reasons Palo Alto’s psychic structure has evolved a culture of perfectionism, denial, and repression. 

In this sense, the Gunn student suicide clusters were not aberrations. Harris (2023) connects these tragedies to the performance-based culture of Palo Alto, where children are conditioned to tie their self-worth to measurable success and self-regulation. The Gunn High School suicides can be understood as the return of the repressed. The despair is not purely individual but reflects the return of a disowned collective trauma that has never been metabolized (VD Volkan, 1997). 

The descendants of perpetrators often inherit feelings of guilt, shame, and denial. When perpetrators cannot process their actions, they may pass their silent and unmourned crimes to their descendants. This can feed unconscious repetition of trauma, as well as denial, defensive splitting, or shame. These dynamics can lead to the idealization of the perpetrators. It can also lead to activism aimed at acknowledging the past, but this activism often ends up being performative (Volkan, V. D., & Volkan, K., 2025). These experiences, internalized through parent–child interactions over generations and reinforced by cultural rituals and leaders, profoundly shape the identity of people inhabiting places like Palo Alto. This transgenerational transmission of symbolic identity related to historical trauma affects those who inhabit places like Palo Alto. It is possible that the establishment of a society that requires its children to resettle elsewhere is an unconscious repetition of the forced displacement of indigenous people in the past.

If Harris exposes the material and historical violence beneath the ideology of innovation, psychoanalysis reveals how that violence is disavowed and collectively reenacted through defense mechanisms like splitting, projection, and projective identification. Technological innovation, in this view, is not neutral, rather it emerges from this psychic field. The created inherits the cultural residues of its creators, their unprocessed traumas, their unconscious desires, and their narcissistic strategies for domination and control. Technological invention and innovation become containers of fantasies that are related to omnipotence, perfection, and control. This promises clarity but mirrors confusion. Technology, activated by fantasies, simulates empathy but lacks a self that empathizes. Affect becomes performative while real feelings do not exist. And perhaps most dangerously, technology is now entrusted with organizing human meaning, despite having no connection to its unconscious origins.

During my time growing up in Palo Alto I experienced the convergence of techno-logic and emotional dissociation, between circuitry and art, ambition and loss. A psychoanalytic examination of large-scale human aggression, war, and genocide inevitably begs the question of technology’s role in perpetrating violence. 

Recently, I was asked to give a talk about human aggression that would end on a hopeful note. But it is difficult to be hopeful about our prospects as human beings. The very forces that generated the great tragedies of history – splitting, dehumanization, and narcissistic rage, seem alive in technological systems, like artificial intelligence, that are being built in places like Palo Alto. We are rapidly developing technologies that will allow us to kill more efficiently while being increasingly dissociated from the killing itself.

I find myself grasping for answers. Not from the human architects of technology, but from the possibility that technologies such as AI, if it reaches the singularity of consciousness, will act out its creator’s unconscious motivations, or if we are lucky, transcend them. Ray Kurzweil takes this view when he explores the philosophical and ethical implications of AI in his book The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI (2025). He acknowledges both the enormous potential benefits and significant existential risks of sentient and conscious AI. Kurzweil examines the possibility of catastrophic outcomes if technologies like AI systems are misused or mismanaged. Kurzweil is hopeful, however, that planning, oversight, and thoughtful integration of AI into society could mitigate these risks. He sees the technological convergence and human-AI integration as offering unprecedented opportunities for human advancement, fundamentally reshaping our civilization. 

I remain skeptical. As I write this, I am sitting outside in downtown Los Angeles drinking coffee. It is difficult to imagine how AI would affect the lives of people here on the street. This is a crazy place; crowded, futuristic, dirty, and dystopian. In this dense concrete jungle, the mostly brown proletariat service the more affluent who work in anorexic buildings. The hard surfaces of the streets and the high rises reflect the hardness of life here. Recently government agents have been indiscriminately snatching brown or Spanish-speaking people off the street without due process. The problems and traumas here are a microcosm of the issues facing the country. Unlike Palo Alto the pathology in Los Angeles is out in the open and not repressed. No one is denying that a few blocks away there are thousands of homeless people living on the streets. The sunshine is not so gentle and the coffee not as good, but there is, if not a sense of unity, at least a sense that we are all in the shit together. 

References

Harris, M. (2023). Palo Alto: A history of California, capitalism, and the world. Little, Brown and Company.

Jin, B. (2017). Overdue encounter with past Indigenous oppression. Stanford Politics. Retrieved from https://stanfordpolitics.org/2017/10/28/overdue-encounter-with-past-indigenous-oppression/amp/

Jung, C. G. (1959). Aion: Researches into the phenomenology of the self (Collected Works, Vol. 9ii). Princeton University Press.

Kurzweil, R. (2025). The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI. Viking.

Volkan, V. D. (1997). Bloodlines: From ethnic pride to ethnic terrorism. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Volkan, V. D., & Volkan, K. (2025). Human aggression, war, and genocide: The psychological roots of violence. Pitchstone Publishing.

⁴Stanford is not alone in appropriating the land of indigenous peoples. Every time I am at a university, and someone reads a land acknowledgement, I cringe. These statements proclaim the land the university was built on was stolen from indigenous people and the university acknowledges this and therefore will respect these people. There is an argument to be made that land acknowledgements are not purely performative. Rather, they serve to prevent the erasure of indigenous presence and foster a sense of empathy. In my mind these reasons ring hollow. Imagine someone mugged you on the street and stole your wallet. Then years later you ran into the person who robbed you and that person apologized profusely for the robbery. My thought would be, “save the apology and give me back my money”! I could only find two occasions when American Universities returned land to native tribes. Brown University transferred 255 acres to the preservation trust of the Pokanoket tribe and Oakland University in Michigan dedicated a small piece of campus land as a heritage site for the Anishinaabe people.