Not long before his death in 2007, my father told me that he “thought he might have” coined the term information technology. It turns out he was right. In an article titled “Management in the 1980’s,” published in the November, 1958, issue of the Harvard Business Review, Harold J. Leavitt and his co-author, Thomas L. Whisler, identify a “new technology” that “has begun to take hold in American business, one so new that its significance is still difficult to evaluate.” Since this technology “does not yet have a single established name,” the article notes, “we shall call it information technology. It is composed of several related parts”: “techniques for processing large amounts of information rapidly”; “the application of statistical and mathematical methods to decision-making problems”; and “in the offing, though its applications have not yet emerged very clearly . . . the simulation of higher-order thinking through computer programs.” By the end of his life, my father had adopted a far more skeptical attitude toward the organizations he earned his living trying to understand and improve. I am convinced that, if he soft-pedalled his immense if unwitting contribution to twenty-first-century English, it was because, in the deep pessimism of his old age, the last thing he wanted was to be remembered as the progenitor of the I.T. guy.

When my father co-wrote “Management in the 1980’s,” he was thirty-six and a professor at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon), in Pittsburgh. He was married and had two children. I was born in 1961, and in 1966 he accepted a position at the Stanford Graduate School of Business—an upheaval for my mother, who was forced to give up the dream house in Pittsburgh that they had just built, and a trauma for my brother and sister, who had to face the unhappy prospect of changing schools as teen-agers.

For me, on the other hand, the timing couldn’t have been better. At five, I hadn’t had enough of a life in Pittsburgh to register the loss. Instead, from the morning I started kindergarten at Stanford Elementary School (now defunct) to the afternoon I graduated from Henry M. Gunn Senior High School, Palo Alto was my home, its streets my streets, its parks my parks. When I wasn’t at school, I could usually be found biking around the some eighty-thousand-acre Stanford campus, which I regarded as my own personal back yard. The campus opened out directly from our house, a 1917 exemplar of the “California Cottage Style,” situated amid redwoods and sloping lawns in a neighborhood known colloquially as the faculty ghetto. Because Stanford’s charter forbade the sale of any of its some eighty-thousand acres in perpetuity, only professors and administrators could buy houses in the faculty ghetto—and only houses. To the land on which the houses were built—Stanford land—they were given a fifty-one-year lease, a policy that has led to what Theresa Johnston aptly termed the Stanford inheritance quandary, since it effectively bars homeowners from leaving their houses to their children, and that provided the jumping-off point for my novel “The Body of Jonah Boyd.”

My parents were the house’s third owners. We owed to their predecessors the fire pit that had been dug as a swimming pool but repurposed during the Depression, and the koi pond in which the koi kept dying, and the orchard of guava and persimmon trees where, as a small child, I played barefoot, sometimes stepping on bees. All told, it was an idyllic place to grow up, adults kept assuring me, the very threshold of a future that promised to be progressively governed, spiritually fulfilling, and technologically mind-blowing—which may be why, as I hit puberty, my intellectual and emotional compass began to point ever more intently East, or “back East,” as Californians say, since, for us, the East signified regression, retrogression, withdrawal into a stodgy and mildewed past. Yet this was precisely what I wanted. I wanted the stodgy and mildewed past. “Haunted” is the word that Malcolm Harris uses to describe Palo Alto, in “Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World,” his welcome and necessary new book—and it’s exactly right. To grow up in Palo Alto is to grow up amid obsolete visions of the future (“Management in the 1980’s”), unsettling relics of the past, marvellous dead boys. It is to grow up haunted.

Of course, if you keep travelling west to east, you end up back where you started. In 1992, in the wake of my mother’s death and my father’s remarriage, he called to tell me that he had decided to sell the house in which I’d grown up. By then, I was living in Italy, the third stop in an eastward journey that had already taken me to New Haven and New York. My brother was in Montreal. Only my sister remained close enough to home to suffer any real pangs of loss when our father, forbidden by Stanford to leave his own house to his own daughter, sold it instead to Joe Bankman and Barbara Fried, married law professors. That same year, the elder of the Bankman-Frieds’ two sons was born. His name was Sam.

I met the Bankman-Frieds once, in 2015. “Houses have no loyalty,” Geoff Dyer writes, in “Out of Sheer Rage,” a sentiment that echoed in my mind as Joe and Barbara, in shorts and T-shirts, took me on a tour of the rooms in which I had grown up and that, after nearly forty years, I barely recognized. Both of them struck me as intellectually restless and professionally ambitious in a way that reminded me of the adults I had known as a child—my parents’ friends and my friends’ parents. In addition to teaching at the law school, Joe was getting a doctoral degree in psychology, and Barbara had started a second career as a fiction writer. (The previous year, I had published one of her stories in the literary journal that I edit. A few years on, she would help to found the Democratic fund-raising organization Mind the Gap.) My memory of the hour or so that I spent with the Bankman-Frieds is tinged with an unease of which even now I have trouble locating the source. Possibly, it was an intimation of Palo Alto’s hauntedness, but one that seemed to emanate more from the future than the past—as if the multibillion-dollar failure of FTX, which Sam Bankman-Fried would not co-found for another four years, and as a result of which he would be place